The Great Geek Manual

1831
Charles Darwin replies to the letter from Reverend Henslow, telling him of the offer to sail on the HMS Beagle. Darwin had learned natural history from Henslow, who had recommended him for the unpaid position as a naturalist. Darwin told Henslow that his father would not permit him to leave on such a the voyage. Meanwhile, his father had written to his brother-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood II, about his concerns regarding the proposed two-year voyage.

Michael Faraday demonstrates the first electrical transformer.

1963
A new telephone hotline connecting the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and the Kremlin in Moscow is first activated and tested. It will provide a direct two-way communications channel between the American and Soviet governments in the event of an international crisis. The hotline is installed in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, one year earlier. During the incident, messages sent between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev required five or six hours each way for transcription, transmission, translation, and delivery. This new hotline could cut down the delays in sending messages from hours to minutes, but it will only be used for emergencies. It is modeled after an emergency command system used to connect seventy US Air Force bases around the world. It consists of one full-time duplex wire telegraph circuit, routed through Washington, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Moscow, for the transmission of messages and one full-time duplex radiotelegraph circuit routed through Washington, Tangier, and Moscow used for service communications and for coordination of operations between the two terminal points. Teletype machines are used at each end of the ten thousand mile circuit, not telephones. A tape encryption system is used to keep messages secure. The hotline will be active twenty-four hours a day.

1969
The first prototype Interface Message Processor (IMP), sent by BBN , arrives at UCLA, and, within hours of its arrival, it and the Sigma 7 computer begin passing data back and forth. On September 2nd, it will be connected to the first host. BBN signed a one-year contract with ARPA to develop and deliver a backbone network of four IMP units, which were the first packet routers.

1974
The Astronomische Nederlandse Satelliet (”Astronomical Netherlands Satellite”), the first Dutch satellite, is launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, in the United States. ANS is an orbital X-ray and ultraviolet telescope.

1979
The Comet Howard-Koomen-Michels (SOLWIND I) becomes the first comet in recorded history to collide with the Sun. The event is recorded by coronographs taken on August 30th and 31st by satellite P78-1, which is monitoring solar corona activity, and it will be discovered in Septemebr 1981 by Russ Howard, who examines the coronographs. The impact produces the equivalent energy of one million hydrogen bombs.

1981
According to Twin Galaxies, John Bismuti scores a record-setting 4,111,000 points on Atari’s BattleZone after playing the game for four hours and fifty minutes at 4 Quarters arcade in Tumwater, Washington. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

1982
According to Twin Galaxies, Mike Baird scores a record-setting 12,311,126 points playing the Atari arcade game Centipede at the Phil’s Family Center arcade in Lakewood, California. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

According to Twin Galaxies, Mark Robichek scores a record-setting 442,330 points playing the Konami arcade game Frogger at the Phil’s Family Center arcade in Lakewood, California. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

According to Twin Galaxies, Sterling Ouchi scores a record-setting 3,195,329 points playing the Bally Midway arcade game Tron at the Phil’s Family Center arcade in Lakewood, California. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

1983
In the case of Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit overturns a United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruling and determines that computer software, specifically the Apple Computer Apple II operating system, can be protected by copyright under the Copyright Act of 1976 and that such protection does not depend on whether the software in question is object code or source code or on whether the software is an application or operating systems. The case was initially brought by Apple, after the company discovered that the Franklin Ace 100 clone of the Apple II contained a substantial amount of Apple’s original code, even to the point that it included a number of embedded comments, such as a Apple programmer’s name and the Applesoft branding. Franklin freely admitted using the code but argued that, because the software only existed in a machine-readable format rather than in print and did not contain copyright notices, it wasn’t protected by US copyright laws.

NASA Astronaut Guion S. Bluford Jr. becomes the first African American to go into space, aboard the third flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger on the eighth Space Shuttle Mission. This is also the first mission to launch and land at night. During ninety-eight orbits of the Earth over 145 hours, the crew will deploy the Indian National Satellite (INSAT-1B, operate the Canadian-built Remote Manipulator System with the Payload Flight Test Article, operated the Continuous Flow Electrophoresis System with live cell samples, and conduct medical measurements to better understand the biophysiological effects of space flight. The mission will land on September 5, 1983.

1984
The Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on its first mission. (STS-41-D) It will launch two communications satellites, including LEASAT F2 during the course of its mission. Visit the Shuttle’s official NASA website.

1992
Microsoft releases version 3.0 of Microsoft Office, including: Word 2.0c, Excel 4.0a, PowerPoint 3.0, and Mail. It will later be repackaged as “Office 92.” Visit the software’s official website.

1994
International Business Machines (IBM) announces that it won’t oppose Microsoft’s attempt to trademark the name “Windows” for its operating system.

TSR Inc. releases the AD&D 2nd Edition Rules Supplement The Complete Druid’s Handbook by David Pulver. (ISBN-10: 156076886X) Length: 128 pages

1995
Microsoft releases version 7.0 of Microsoft Office as “Microsoft Office 95.” The suite includes the first appearance of Word 7.0. It also includes Excel 5.0, PowerPoint 4.0, and Mail 3.2 from the Office 4.3. The suite coincides with the release of Windows 95, and it is the first 32-bit version of the suite. This suite is available in Standard and Professional versions. The Professional version includes Access in addition to the suite’s other applications. Visit the software’s official website.

1999
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the 500 MHz K6-2 processor. Visit the AMD K6-2 processors’ official website. Price: US$167 in 1000-unit quantities

Apple Computer unveils a new personal computer (PC) called the Power Mac G4 at the Seybold conference in San Francisco. It uses the PowerPC G4 (PPC74xx) series of microprocessors, and it has the ability to perform one billion operations per second and is up to twice as fast as the fastest Intel Pentium III computer.

Microsoft shuts down its Hotmail free email service for approximately two hours. The shut down comes after receiving confirmed reports that hackers have breached some of the service’s servers by entering Hotmail accounts through third-party Internet providers without using passwords.

“The United Loan Gunman” hacking group breaks into an ABC newscast.

2000
Swedish programmer Lars Aronsson founds Elektrosmog, a Stockholm-based discussion group on public wireless LANs. Around the same time, similar grassroots wireless networking groups pop up in London, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. Browse a list of wireless community networks by region.

2001
The Gen Con UK 2001 game fair is held August 30 – September 2 at the Olympia 2 in London, England. Visit the event’s official website.

2002
The documentary film Lost in La Mancha, directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe and starring Jeff Bridges as the film’s narrator, Terry Gilliam, Johnny Depp, and Jean Rochefort, is released. The film documents director Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt to create the independent film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a movie adaptation of the novel Don Quixote. Visit the film’s official website.

University Of Chicago Press publishes Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds by Gary Alan Fine, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, as a paperback. (ISBN-10: 0226249441) It is a republication of a classic study that still provides one of the most acute descriptions available of an often misunderstood subculture: that of fantasy role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Gary Alan Fine immerses himself in several different gaming systems, offering insightful details on the nature of the games and the patterns of interaction among players—as well as their reasons for playing. Read the book online at Google Books. Length: 298 pages

Version 4.5 of the Job Access With Speech (JAWS) screen reader program for visually impaired users is released for Windows. This version adds quick navigation keys to Internet Explorer, for navigating between HTML elements on a website. The software is produced by the Blind and Low Vision Group at Freedom Scientific of St. Petersburg, Florida. Its purpose is to make personal computers with Windows installed accessible to blind and visually impaired users. It accomplishes this by providing the user with access to the information displayed on the screen via text-to-speech or by means of a braille display and allows for more comprehensive keyboard interaction with the computer. Visit Freedom Scientific’s official website.

Warner Bros. releases the horror film FeardotCom, directed by William Malone and starring Stephen Dorff, Natascha McElhone, and Stephen Rea, to 2,550 US theaters. In the film, four people die mysteriously in New York City and the only connection is the fact that all of them died within forty-eight hours of logging on to “feardotcom.com”, a website depicting voyeuristic murders. Detective Mike Reilly teams up with Terry Huston, a Department of Health researcher, to uncover the cause behind the unexplained deaths. What they discover, though, may cost their own lives. Produced on a budget of US$40 million, the film will gross US$5,710,128 in its opening weekend. Visit the film’s official website. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: R) Running Time: 1 hr 38 mins

2003
The MiMail email worm, written in the C programming language, first emerges. Read more at Symantec.

2004
Acclaim Entertainment, a leading American video game developer, files for Chapter 7 bankuptcy, with debt over US$100 million.

Steve Jackson Games publishes GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns (4th Edition) by Steve Jackson, Sean Punch, and David Pulver as a hardcover. (ISBN-10: 1556347308) GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns combines information from the Third Edition GURPS Basic Set and GURPS Compendium II, plus the new core setting, with infinite possibilities for timeline-hopping adventure! It contains everything a GM needs to create and run a GURPS Fourth Edition campaign. Length: 240 pages

2005
Scientists led by Natalia Dubrovinskaia, at the University of Bayreuth in Germany publish research on the process by with they have created a material harder than diamond, long known to be the world’s hardest substance, by compressing carbon-60 molecules in the journal Applied Physics Letters. They dub the new form of carbon “aggregated diamond nanorods.” A material’s hardness is measured in terms of its isothermal bulk modulus, which is a measure of how a solid substance’s volume changes as pressure is applied to it at a constant temperature. Diamond has a modulus of 442 gigapascals, while is even less compressible with a modulus of 491 gigapascals.

2006
Version 2006.1 of the Gentoo Linux operating system is released. Gentoo is a Linux distribution named after the Gentoo penguin and designed to be modular, portable, easy to maintain, flexible, and optimized for the user’s machine. All of the sytem’s tools and utilities are built from source cod, with the exception of a few large software packages available as precompiled binaries. Visit the system’s official website.

2007
The 65th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) and the 46th Annual Nihon SF Taikai, is held August 30 – September 3 at the Pacifico Yokohama Convention Center in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. It is the first Worldcon held in Asia. Guests of honor include: Sakyo Komatsu, David Brin, Yoshitaka Amano, and Michael Whelan. Visit the event’s official English website.

SymbiosiS releases version 2.0 of the SymbOS operating system for Z80-based 8-bit systems.

2009
Version 2.7a0 of the Python programming language is released. Visit the official Python website.