The Great Geek Manual

1609
Galileo Galilei first demonstrates his telescope to government officials of Venice.

1835
Richard Adams Locke blurs the line between science and science fiction when he publishes his week-long serial “Moon Hoax: Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made” in the New York Sun newspaper under in the name of Sir John Herschel, the real-life astronomer who discovered of Uranus.

1900
Constantin Perskyi presents a paper at the first International Electricity Congress in Paris, France in which he describes an device he refers to as a “television” which makes use of the specific magnetic properties of Selenium. It is the first recorded use of the term “television” in history.

1960
The opening ceremony of the seventeenth Olympic Games in Rome is transmitted live via the Eurovision link. CBS shows video recordings that have been flown to the US, at a cost of US$700,000 for the US television rights. This is the first time that the Olympic Games have been shown so extensively in the US, thanks to the advent of the videotape since the previous Olympics.

1973
The first Computer Assisted Tomography (CAT) scan is taken.

1978
LEGO releases its first minifigure. It has yellow skin and a pleasant expression on its face, which is how it will continue to be produced until 1989 when the company releases its first pirate minifigures. Read more at the official LEGO website.

1980
Microsoft announces that it will be making the Xenix Version 7 Unix operating system available for the 16-bit microcomputer market. Microsoft purchased a license for the system from AT&T in 1979. Xenix varies from its 7th Edition origins by incorporating elements from BSD, and soon possessed the most widely installed base of any Unix variety due to the popularity of the inexpensive x86 processor.

1981
Sony reveals a prototype of its first still video camera, the Mavica. The device’s name is an amalgam of “Magnetic video camera.” It records images for playback on television monitors on two-inch floppy disks with less than a megabyte of capacity. The release of the Mavica marks the beginning of a new era in photography. Still video cameras will be the forerunners of digital cameras – their analog equivalents. In time, development of technologies behind such cameras will allow Sony to seize an early lead to the digital camera market that will emerge in the nineties.

The US District Court, District of Massachusetts begins hearing a suit brought by Atari, Inc. against the General Computer Corporation. The suit alleges trademark and copyright infringement of Atari’s Missile Command by General Computer’s game Super Missile Attack.

The US spacecraft Voyager 2 passes within sixty-three thousand miles (100,000km) of Saturn, successfully returning photographs of the ringed planet during its closest approach, revealing thousands of rings and six new moons. It will then use Saturn’s gravity to slingshot it onto a course to Uranus, where it will arrive in five years. The space probe was launched on August 20, 1977, and it visited Jupiter on July 9, 1979, before passing Uranus on January 24, 1986.

1983
Bally Manufacturing agrees to acquire the American coin-operated assets of Sega Enterprises.

1988
Fidocon ’88, the fifth International FidoNet Conference, is held at the Drawbridge Inn in Cincinnati, Ohio.

1989
20th Century Fox releases the sci-fi film Millennium, directed by Michael Anderson and starring Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd, to 486 US theaters. It is based on the 1977 short story “Air Raid” by John Varley. Varley started work on a screenplay based on that short story in 1979, which will later be released the story in an extended book-length format title Millennium in 1983. In the film, an investigator seeking the cause of an airline disaster discovers the involvement of an organization of time travelers from a future Earth irreparably polluted who seek to rejuvenate the human race from those about to die in the past. The film will gross US$1,614,692 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 1 hr 48 mins

Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Neptune, the outermost planet in the solar system.

1991
Linus Torvalds, a second year computer science student at the University of Helsinki, posts a message to comp.os.minix with the subject line “What would you like to see most in minix?” in which he first announces that he is “doing a (free) operating system.” The operating system he mentions will one day become the Linux operating system. The Usenet newsgroup posting reads, in part: “Hello everybody out there using minix – I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).” He’ll receive several ideas in reply and even some promises for help testing the program. The operating system’s first version will be released on a Finnish server nic.funet.fi as source code free to all as version 0.01 in mid-September. The system will receive the name “Linux” from the server’s administrator, Ari Lemmke. Linus chose the name “Freix,” a combination of “freak” and “Unix,” for the system but won’t mention it publicly before Lemmke labels it with Linux, in honor of its creator. Read the original post along with a brief history of Linux.

1993
ONE BBSCON ’93 is held at the Broadmoor Hotel August 25 – 29 in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

1994
Aftonbladet becomes the first Swedish newspaper to be published on the internet, perhaps even the first major newspaper anywhere to be published online.

1995
Apple Computer releases the PowerBook 5300 series, the first generation of PowerBook laptops to use the PowerPC processor. The system features a PowerPC 603e processor operating at 100MHz, 8 MB of RAM, a 640×480 pixel passive matrix greyscale LCD screen, and the System 7.5.2 operating system. This is also the first system to feature hot-swappable expansion modules for a variety of different units, including: ZIP drives, PC card slots, and infrared communication ports. However, the PowerPC 603e lacks a Level 2 cache, so, while the processor is on the high end of the processor market, it’s actual performance will largely prove a disappointment. Price: US$2,300 – US$6,800

Garry Tramiel leaves the Atari Corporation after serving the company long and hard in high ranking capacities within Atari and the Federated Group of Electronics Stores.

1996
The Netscape Communications Corp. announces that it has created the Navio company in order to develop software in cooperation with IBM, Oracle, and four Japanese electronics manufacturers that will compete with Microsoft in general and the Windows operating system in specific.

1997
Novell, Inc. releases the first version of the BorderManager multi purpose network security application. BorderManager is a proxy server, firewall, and VPN access point. Visit Novell’s official website.

Sony announces that global shipments of PlayStation video game consoles has reached 135 million units and that total game sales have exceed 135 million units.

1999
At the Dell DirectConnect conference for Dell Computer Corporation customers, William Gates, chairman of the Microsoft Corporation, states publicly that the recently aired movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley isn’t historically correct. The made-for-television movie, which depicts the rise of the computer industry was produced for Turner Network Television. “They didn’t get the facts quite right,” Gates insists. IMDB listing

At the Sumida Triphony Hall in Tokyo, Japan, Capcom stages a concert featuring music from Biohazard performed by the New Japan Philharmonic symphony orchestra.

Version 2.0.38 of the Linux operating system is released.

2002
Intel releases the Pentium 4 2.5 operating at 2500MHz, featuring a 512KB Level-2 cache and a 400MT/s front side bus.

Intel releases the Pentium 4 2.6 operating at 2600MHz, featuring a 512KB Level-2 cache and a 400MT/s front side bus.

Intel releases the Pentium 4 2.66 operating at 2667MHz, featuring a 512KB Level-2 cache and a 533MT/s front side bus.

Intel releases the Pentium 4 2.8 operating at 2800MHz, featuring a 512KB Level-2 cache and a 533MT/s front side bus.

The Nickelodeon cable channel begins airing the television game show Nickelodeon Robot Wars. The show is Nickelodeon’s take on the popular robot-fighting game show Robot Wars. The show will be canceled after one season, and it’s last episode will air on October 6th. The series, which will consist of only six episodes was filmed at Shepperton Studios in England in January of 2002 at the same time as the second season of the Robot Wars Extreme Warriors. Both shows feature American teams and robots flown in for the filming.

2003
Cupid, an inner moon of Uranus, is discovered by Mark R. Showalter and Jack J. Lissauer in 2003 using the Hubble Space Telescope. It is named after a character in William Shakespeare’s play Timon of Athens. It is the smallest of the inner Uranian satellites and is estimated to be only about 18km in diameter. Its size and the dark surface made it too dim to be detected by the Voyager 2 cameras during the probe’s Uranus flyby in 1986.

Hewlett-Packard introduces the iPaq h1935 handheld computer, featuring the Windows Mobile 2003 operating system, a Samsung 203MHz processor, and a secure digital slot. Price: US$249

Mab, an inner moon of Uranus, is discovered by Mark R. Showalter and Jack J. Lissauer in 2003 using the Hubble Space Telescope. It was named after Queen Mab, a fairy queen from English folklore who is mentioned in William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. Because the moon is small and dark, it was not seen in the heavily scrutinized images taken by Voyager 2 during its Uranus flyby in 1986. However, it is brighter than another moon, Perdita, which was discovered from Voyager’s photos in 1997. This led scientists to re-examine the old photos again, and the satellite was finally found in the images.

Version 4.3.3 of the PHP programming language is released.

Version 5.1 of the Kerio WinRoutel gateway firewall software is released. This version features improved online user monitoring, support for internet connection failover, an SIP protocol inspector, advanced logging options, customizable DNS forwarding, customizable redirect page for denying HTTP rules, detection of clients using P2P networks, and the ability to use DNS names instead of an IP in traffic policy. Visit the application’s official website.

Yahoo! and Entertainment Tonight (ET) announced a long-term relationship to launch “ET on Yahoo!” The exclusive cross-platform entertainment experience allows users to delve deeper into breaking entertainment and celebrity news. The alliance represents the increasing dependence of traditional media on new media outlets to engage audiences. Read the official press release.

2004
Version 6.0 SP2 of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is released as part of Windows XP SP2. This version includes a vulnerability patch, a popup/ActiveX blocker, and a built-in add-on manager.

2005
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) begin investigating the possibility that Chinese hackers have been hacking into US government computers.

Scientists publish the full genome of Pelagibacter ubique, a bacterium with only 1,354 genes (compared to the approximately thirty thousand genes possessed by humans), in the journal Science. Pelagibacter is thought to be the most numerous bacteria in the world, constituting a full quarter of the ocean’s total number of organisms. Read more at the BBC.

2008
Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany announce that an analysis of 8,510 Google Earth images has revealed that herds of cattle and deer align themselves along the North-South axis of the Earth’s magnetic field while grazing and sleeping, indicating an innate ability to detect magnetic fields.