The Great Geek Manual

1609
Galileo Galilei first demonstrates his telescope.

1889
The first ship-to-shore wireless message received in the US is, “Sherman is sighted.” The message, sent from Lightship No. 70, announces the arrival of the US Army troopship Sherman from the battlefields of the Spanish-American War to a crowd assembled at the Cliff House in San Francisco. This is the first nineteenth century use of wireless telegraphy, which will later be known as radio, outside of England.

1956
Bell Laboratories announces their experiment with a “picture phone” transmission that sends pictures along with sound over regular telephone lines.

1962
First live television connection between the United States and Europe, via the Telstar satellite.

1966
The robotic Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft takes the first photograph of Earth from orbit around the Moon.

1973
The Intelsat communication satellite is launched.

1977
Bryan Allen becomes the first pilot to make a human-powered flight over a distance of a mile, winning the Kremer Prize. He accomplishes the feat in the pedal-operated Gossamer Condor in Schafter, California. Read more about the Condor at the Smithsonian website.

1985
Atlantic releases the comedy film Teen Wolf, directed by Rod Daniel and starring Michael J. Fox, James Hampton, Scott Paulin, Susan Ursitti, Jerry Levine, and Jay Tarses, to 1,416 US theaters. The film follows Scott Howard, a high school student who discovers that his family has an unusual heritage when he finds himself transforming into a werewolf. The film is loosely based on the 1957 cult film I Was a Teenage Werewolf, starring Michael Landon. The film will gross US$6,120,348 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG) Running Time: 1 hr 31 mins

The sci-fi monster movie The Return of Godzilla, directed by Koji Hashimoto and starring Ken Tanaka, Yasuko Sawaguchi, Yosuke Natsuki, Keiju Kobayashi, Shin Takuma, to 235 US theaters. Godzilla returns for the first time in many years to demolish Tokyo, but things have changed. The buildings are now taller than he is, and the humans have developed an attack jet called Super X. The film will gross US$509,502 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing

1990
Universal Pictures releases the comic book film Darkman, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Liam Neeson, to 1,786 US theaters. Unable to secure the rights to either The Shadow or Batman, Raimi created his own superhero and struck a deal with Universal Studios to make his first Hollywood studio movie. Marvel Comics will later produce a series based on the film character. The film follows Peyton Westlake, a scientist who has discovered a way to produce synthetic skin, who is horribly burned after a gangster attempts to recover legal documents from his laboratory. Once the world believes Westlake is dead, he uses his powers of disguise to take revenge on those who wanted him dead. Produced on a budget of US$16 million, the film will gross US$8,054,860 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: R) Running Time: 1 hr 36 mins

1993
Nintendo announces that it has agreed to use Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) technology in a video game platform it’s developing with the 64-bit MIPS R4000 processor. The news instantly knocks the price of 3DO shares down by $4.50. The move comes as SGI enters a struggle with decreasing revenues and leadership changes that partnerships such as the one with Nintendo won’t stop. Nintendo anticipates that the system will have an operating speed greater than 100MHz and the ability to support High-Definition Television (HDTV). Ultimately the system will be repeatedly delayed and renamed. On September 30, 1996, Nintendo will finally release the Nintendo 64 in North America. Code-named: Project Reality Price: US$250

Version 0.9 of the NetBSD operating system is released. NetBSD is an open source version of the Unix-derivative Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It is frequently used in embedded systems due to its portability. Visit the official NetBSD website.

1995
New Line Cinema releases the sci-fi horror film The Island of Dr. Moreau, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer, and Ron Perlman, to 2,035 US theaters. It is based on the classic novel The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells. It is the third major adaptation of the novel. In the film, Dr. Moreau has successfully “perfected” the use of human DNA in animals to make them more human, in an attempt produce a divine human, free of malice and hatred. He controls his creations with implants, however, when one of the creatures finds a way to remove its implant, the animal hybrids go on a rampage. Produced on a budget of US$40 million, the film will gross US$9,101,987 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 1 hr 36 mins

1997
Nolan Bushnell hosts a twenty year celebration of the debut of the Atari 2600 at his home.

The Oasis album Be Here Now has sold 696,000 copies in its first two days of release, making it the fastest selling album in the UK ever.

1998
The Brazilian website of Web Elite is hacked by the hacking group “HackPHR”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

The Paramount website is hacked by “Zyklon”, a member of the Seattle hacking group “Legions of the Underground” (LoU). As part of the hack, the official webpages of eight different films are defaced, including those for Dead Man on Campus, Deep Impact, Free Truman, A Night at the Roxbury, Payback, Snake Eyes, Titanic, and The Truman Show. Visit the official Legions of the Underground website.

The website of Webelite is hacked by “HackPHR Group”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

1999
Pyra Labs launches the Blogger personal website publishing system. As one of the first dedicated blog publishing services, it will be credited with popularizing the blog format. Visit the official website.

Sony reduces the price of the PlayStation in the US from US$129 to US$99.

2000
The BattleBots television series begins running on the Comedy Central cable network in the US. It will run for thirteen weeks with reruns twice every Saturday.

Intel announces the XScale processor for future handheld computers, and demonstrates a processor running at 1GHz.

2001
International Business Machines (IBM) launches a new marketing campaign that includes a new logo of their traditional blue-and-white stripes graphically pealed back to reveal the words: “IBM Technology.” The effort is reminiscent of when Intel Corporation launched its “Intel Inside” campaign several years earlier.

2002
Apple Computer launches Mac OS X 10.2 operating system. This version includes several few features, including the instant-messaging client iChat and handwriting recognition technology Inkwell. For the first time since the original Macintosh launch in January 1984, the “Happy Mac” icon is not part of the system’s start-up sequence. It has been replaced by a silver-gray Apple icon. Code-name: Jaguar Price: US$129 for a single user or US$199 for a five-user package

New Line Cinema releases the sci-fi film S1m0ne, directed by Andrew Niccol and starring Al Pacino, Catherine Keener, and Rachel Roberts, to 1,920 US theaters. In the film, a disillusioned producer is forced to think fast when his star walks off the film set. To save his film, he decides to digitally create an actress. The “actress,” Simone, becomes an overnight sensation, but everyone thinks she’s a real person. Many of the film’s characters’ names are allusions to famous computers. For instance, Viktor Taransky is named after the Victor 9000 while Hal Sinclair is named after the computer HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film will be a financial failure, grossing only US$3,813,463 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 1 hr 57 mins

2003
Jesus Oquendo “sil” of AntiOffline releases the Border Router Attack Tool (BRAT) as part of “Theories in Denials of Service” in an effort to make administrators aware of the possibility of a worm attack tool capable of breaking backbone routes on the Internet.

2005
Astronaut wings are presented to retired NASA pilot William H. Dana and to the family of deceased pilots Joseph A. Walker, who was the first person to enter space twice, and John B. McKay.

Yahoo! acquires forty percent of the Alibaba.com online auction site for US$1 billion US, and Alibaba will take over operation of Yahoo! China.

2006
The 2006 Games Convention is held August 23 – 27 in Leipzig, Germany. Visit the event’s official website.

2008
Edson Smith of the UCLA Mathematics Department announce the discovery of the 45th Mersenne prime number, 2^43,112,609-1, which is 12,978,189 digits long. The number was discovered as a part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) using the 100,000 computers networked by GIMPS PrimeNet, which perform roughly 29 trillion calculations per second.