The Great Geek Manual

1858
Queen Victoria sends the first official telegraph message across the Atlantic Ocean from London to United States President James Buchanan, in Washington D.C. Transmission of the congratulatory message begins at 10:50am and won’t be completed until 4:30am the next day, taking nearly eighteen hours to reach Newfoundland, Canada. Ninety-nine words, containing five hundred nine letters, is transmitted at a rate of about two minutes per letter. The message is forwarded from Newfoundland via above ground wires, across the Cabot Strait by submarine cable to Aspy Bay in Cape Breton, and across eastern Canada and Maine, via Boston to New York by an overhead wire. A test messages were exchanged for ten days before this inaugural. Due to the weak signal strength of the connection, the service will be shutdown within a few weeks.

1890
The United States Census Bureau announces the results from the latest census, which have been tabulated using the new mechanical punch card Tabulator invented by Herman Hollerith. The machine is capable of processing ten time as much data as a human clerk, drastically reducing the amount of time it required to compile the results of the census.

1898
The loop-de-loop Roller Coaster is patented by Edwin Prescott. Read more about the history of roller coasters.

1922
Radio station WEAF, set up by American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), begins broadcasts from the top of the Western Electric building in New York.

1930
The first color cartoon with sound, a short film called Fiddlesticks, created by Ub Iwerks, is released. The film debuts the character Flip the Frog, who will become a recurring character in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) films.

1934
American explorer William Beebe descends 3,028 feet in his bathysphere into the ocean near Bermuda.

1935
At Funkausstellung, the Fernseh television company demonstrates an apparatus for recording television images to film directly from a cathode ray tube.

1944
John Logie Baird demonstrates his Telechrome color all-electronic television receiver, with a 600-line three-gun tube comprising a fluorescent two-sided mosaic screen in a glass envelope, one side blue-green, the other side orange-red. Images of 600-line definition are triple-interlaced, requiring six scans (fields) to form one frame.

1973
The San Diego Comic-Con International is held August 16-19. It’s the first time the even it officially called the “San Diego Comic-Con.” In 1970 and 1971, the even had been called the “Golden State Comic Con,” and in 1972, the event was called “San Diego’s West Coast Comic Convention.”

; first five-day Comic-Con; first celebrity brunch

1979
Gen Con XII is held from August 16 – 19 at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Visit the event’s official website.

1988
Sierra Entertainment releases the adventure game King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella for personal computers running GS/OS or MS-DOS. It is the first major graphical computer adventure game with a female protagonist. It is also the first commercial entertainment product to support sound cards and synthesizers such as the AdLib and Roland MT-32. This allowed the developers to include realistic sound effects and an orchestrated score which were previously impossible with the standard one-channel PC speaker. The game includes over seventy-five short pieces of music by William Goldstein, a composer known for writing Hollywood soundtracks, including the 1982 television series Fame.

1989
A solar flare causes a severe geomagnetic storm that affects micro chips on Earth and bringing trading on Toronto’s stock market to a halt.

1993
Ian Murdock, a student at Purdue University first announces the Debian operating system, which he initially calls the “Debian Linux Release,” as the term “Linux Distribution” is still new. The name comes from a combination of the first name of Murdock and his wife, Debra. Debian is notable for being composed entirely of free or open source software and strictly following the open source philosophy. As Linux becomes enters the mainstream, it will remain the only major non-commercial distributions for over a decade. Visit the official Debian website.

1995
French student Damien Doligez wins the Hal’s SSL challenge, set by Hal Finney of Shell.Portal.com, by cracking a “secure” Netscape session protected by the default exportable mode, a 40-bit RC4 encryption. The SSL protocol was designed to protect confidential data sent by web browsers, but it has an option for weak encryption, to comply with the requirements of the US government for exportable software. Doligez broke the RC4-128-EXPORT-40 algorithm in eight days by networking 112 workstations and using a brute force search. He is the first individual to do so at 12:23 after a team of three (Adam Back of the UK, Eric Young of Australia, and David Byers of Sweden) returned the correct key at 10:43, less than two hours earlier. The challenge was issued on July 14th. Read more about the event at Damien Doligez’s website.

ONE BBSCON ’95, the last “BBSCON”, is held from August 16 – 20 in Tampa, Florida. The following year, the event will be renamed “ISPCON” to reflect the widening scope of the event.

1998
Apple Computer Inc. kicks off their largest ever advertising campaign, with a budget of US$100 million, for the new iMac computer that was launched on Saturday, August 15. Jeff Goldblum performs the voiceovers in the first set of commercials.

1999
Apple Inc. releases version 0.3 of the Darwin operating system.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) releases version 5.2.1 of the Fermi Linux operation system, “Charm.” Fermi Linux is a catch all designation for Linux distributions used by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), which are based on Scientific Linux. Visit the application’s official website.

The Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA) announces that they have joined a six-company lawsuit brought by Acclaim Entertainment, Accolade/Infogrames Entertainment, Bethesda Softworks, Interplay Productions, Lucas Arts Entertainment Company, and The 3DO Company against the alleged leaders of the Class, Paradigm, and Razore 1911 hacking groups. The groups have allegedly played a major role in online software piracy.

Microsoft releases version 3.0 of ActiveSync, a synchronization program for mobile devices, for Windows CE.

Panic releases the Audion audio player for Mac computers as a standalone application. The computer was designed to play compact disks (CDs) on computers. The most notable of its features is its interface which mimics the alpha channel transparency of more advanced graphic design software. Upon the popularization of Apple’s iTunes, the application’s development will be halted, and it will be released as freeware. Visit the application official website.

2001
Palm announces that it is acquiring the technology assets and intellectual property of software maker Be for US$11 million in stock.

2003
The Chemists of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) convene in Ottawa to vote and officially name element 110 Darmstadtium and designate its symbol as “DS.” The element was first identified in 1994 in at the Laboratory for Heavy Ion Research, known as GSI, in Darmstadt, Germany. The scientists created the element for a fraction of a thousandth of a second and proposed its name to commemorate the town of Darmstadt. The IUPAC is an organization of chemists from more than eighty countries responsible for selecting official names, symbols, and terms used in chemistry.

2005
Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev breaks the world record for most days spent in space during his stay aboard the International space station.

The Zotob worm and several variations of malware exploiting the vulnerability described in Microsoft security bulletin MS05-039 are discovered. The worm is vastly over-publicized after several United States media outlets’ computer systems were infected.

2006
Sony announces the first shipment of 50GB dual-layer Blu-ray Disc recordable discs. Price: US$48