The Great Geek Manual

1831
Charles Darwin visits his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood II, to discuss his father’s opposition to his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. Darwin is enthusiastic about the opportunity, but his father considers it a waste of time that would only delay his son’s anticipated career in the clergy. Darwins uncle will write a letter to Robert Darwin, reassuring him of the value of such a trip, and ultimately changing his mind.

1842
The US Naval Observatory, one of the oldest scientific agencies in the US, is authorized by an act of Congress. Its primary task is to act as a depot for the Navy’s charts, navigational instruments, and chronometers, which are calibrated by timing the transit of stars across the meridian. Visit the agency’s official website.

1880
Thomas Edison is granted a patent for an “Electro-Chemical Receiving-Telephone.” (US No. 231,704)

1895
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin patents the rigid airship, known as the Zeppelin.

1897
Thomas Edison receives a patent for the Kinetoscope, a device for producing moving pictures. (US No.589,168) In the patent, he described it as a device “to produce pictures representing objects in motion throughout an extended period of time which may be utilized to exhibit the scene including such moving objects in a perfect and natural manner by means of a suitable exhibiting apparatus.” Edison determined that a speed of thirty pictures per second is sufficient to produce the persistence of vision effect that creates smooth motion from the subject of a film’s individual frames.

1900
Coca-Cola is first sold in Britain in the basement restaurant of Spence’s department store, a silk merchant and general goods store at 76-79, St Paul’s Churchyard, London EC4.

1910
The first US airplane flight over water is made by Glenn Hammond Curtiss in his biplane over Lake Erie from Euclid Beach Park in Cleveland, Ohio, to Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. At an altitude between four hundred and five hundred feet, the seventy mile trip takes seventy-eight minutes nonstop.

1920
The first news radio program in history is broadcast by radio station 8MK from Detroit, Michigan.

1936
Elizabeth Cowell becomes the first female television announcer during BBC transmissions from Radiolympia.

1955
The first solar-powered car is publicly demonstrated by General Motors Corporation. The Sunmobile was designed by William G. Cobb. Light energy falling on twelve selenium photoelectric cells created electric current sufficient to power a tiny electric motor that turns a driveshaft connected to the car’s rear axle by a pulley. It was one of the 253 exhibits at the General Motors Powerama in Chicago, Illinois, which will be seen by over 2,500,000 visitors during the course of the twenty-eight day, seven million dollar event spread over one million square feet on the shore of Lake Michigan.

1962
President Kennedy signs the Satellite Act, which states that it is to be the policy of the US, “to establish, in conjunction and in cooperation with other countries, as expeditiously as practicable a commercial communications satellite system, as part of an improved global communications network, which will be responsive to public needs and national objectives, which will serve the communication needs of the United States and other countries, and which will contribute to world peace and understanding.” Control of international satellite communications is given to a new private corporation called the Communications Satellite Corporation or Comsat.

1968
Dr. Michael E. DeBakey of Houston leads the first simultaneous multi-organ transplant from one donor to four recipients. Two kidneys, one lobe of a lung and the heart are removed from a twenty year old woman who died of a gunshot and transplanted into four men at Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. The surgery is performed by five teams and a total of sixty physicians, nurses, and support personal.

1971
Astronaut Dave Scott becomes the first person to drive a vehicle on the Moon, during the Apollo 15 mission in the mountainous Hadley-Apennine region. The battery-powered Lunar Rover (LRV) is the first such vehicle to used on an Apollo mission. Built by Boeing, it weighs only 460lb (209kg) in Earth’s gravity and folds down to approximately 5 foot by 20 inches. Each of its four wheels is independently driven by a quarter horsepower (200W) electric motor. Using it, astronauts are able to travel further from the module’s landing site in order to sample a wider variety of lunar materials than on any previous mission. Read more at the official NASA website.

1992
Midway Amusement Games releases Mortal Kombat Version 3.0 to arcades in the US.

1994
The merger of Aldus Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. is finalized. The two companies hope to create a powerful desktop publishing software application. Aldus was founded by Paul Brainerd, who established desktop publishing in 1985 with his ground-breaking application, PageMaker. Adobe, founded by Thomas Knoll, is best known for Photoshop, which has come to dominate the graphics market since is Windows port was released in November 1992.

Two years after the hardware from which he operated his Bulletin Board System (BBS) was seized in a raid, Richard D. Kenadek, the administrator (sysop) of the Davy Jones Locker BBS, is arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and criminal copyright infringement.

1995
The first Ukrainian satellite, Sich 1, and first Chilean satellite, Fasat Alfa, are launched.

1998
The American Psychologist, the monthly journal of the American Psychological Association, publishes the results of a US$1.5 million study conducted by the Carnegie Mellon University that determines that time spent on the Internet breeds depression and loneliness.

The Itex Corporation of Portland, Oregon files a suit against one hundred users of Yahoo! Bulletin boards for making defamatory statements against the firm. One such user known as “Orangemuscat” posted a message in May stating that Itex’s current management “is blind, stupid, and incompetent.” An Itex spokesperson states that Itex hopes that the suit will provide a legal path toward the discovery of who is behind the one hundred Yahoo! aliases.

North Korea allegedly launches its first satellite Kwangmyongsong. The government later announces that it has successfully entered a stable orbit, but NORAD cannot confirm the claim.

Version 5.0.2 of the Fermi Linux operation system is released. 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.

1999
Apple Computer announces that two million iMac computers have been sold to date.

Apple Computer unveils the PowerMac G4. It’s powered by either a single or dual PowerPC G4 chip, which was produced by a collaboration of Apple, Motorola, and IBM. Available at speeds of 400MHz, 450MHz and 500MHz, Apple claims that it is the first personal computer to be capable of over one billion floating-point operations per second. The systems feature 64MB RAM, a CD-ROM drive, and a 10GB hard disk. Prices start at US$1599. The system is introduces by Steve Jobs at the Seybold conference in San Francisco, California.

Apple Computer unveils the 22-inch Apple Cinema Display at the Seybold conference in San Francisco. Price: US$3,999

Intel announces that they have begun shipping engineering samples of their next-generation processor, code-named Merced. It is the first in a new family of processors designed around a 64-bit architecture. Intel has been co-developing the architecture with Hewlett-Packard since 1994.

The Intel Developer’s Forum is held August 31 – September 2 in Palm Springs, California.

Japan’s Trade Ministry announces an offer of 100 million yen (about $900 US) to each of up to one hundred software engineers in an effort to attract entrepreneurs of the likes of Bill Gates.

LucasArts releases Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace for the PlayStation in the US. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: T (Teen)

Nintendo announces that year to date sales of the Game Boy and Game Boy Color handheld game systems have topped 2.68 million in the US.

SOZO Design, LLC, a design firm founded by ex-Atari engineer Ira Velinsky, unveils the world’s first computer/ottoman combination at the Intel Developer’s Forum in Palm Springs, California. The functional “Ottoman PC” features an Intel Pentium 3 processor-based personal computer (PC), a 15″ monitor, a wireless keyboard, a DVD-ROM, video camera, and more.

Sun Microsystems announces plans to acquire the Star Division Corporation, the developer of an office application suite called StarOffice. Visit the application’s official website.

Tor Books publishes the science fiction novel Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card as a hardcover. (ISBN-10: 031286860X) It is the fourth book in the Ender’s game series. It’s set during the events of the first book in the series, Ender’s Game, but the events of the book center around another character named Bean. In interviews, Card explains that he feel that introducing a second character retroactively to his classic story will make it easier to adapt the story for the big screen. Visit this author’s official website. Length: 384 pages

Version 1.11 of the HydraBBS Software is released.

2000
Mark Jakob, age 23, is arrested and charged with staging one of the most elaborate financial hoaxes ever seen on the Internet. According to the United States Attorney’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Jakob sent fraudulent information in the form of a press release to Internet Wire alleging that the Emulex Corporation, a California-based manufacturer of storage networking infrastructure solutions, was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and that their Chief Executive Officer (CEO) had resigned. The ensuing report, which was picked up by Bloomberg Television and other news outlets, caused Emulex’s stock price to drop from US$103.94 to US$43.00 (a 62% drop) in sixteen minutes of morning trading, allegedly earning Jakob nearly a quarter million dollars.

Sega of America reduces the price of its 128-bit Dreamcast game system from US$199 to US$149. Additionally, SegaNet sign-up deadlines to earn a US$150 rebate check and a free keyboard are reduced to eighteen months after a system’s purchase.

Seven ex-UbiSoft Entertainment developers announce the formation of the Yeti Interactive game development firm with the mission to focus on the development of “real-time interactive entertainment titles.”

Yahoo! completes the acquisition of the eGroups.com email list management website, which will become a part of Yahoo! Groups.

2001
The first stable release of PhpMyAdmin, version 2.2.0, is released. PhpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Internet. Visit the application’s official website.

Intel launches new Celeron processors, at speeds of 950MHz, 1GHz, and 1.1GHz. Each features a 100MHz system bus, and a 128KB Level-2 cache. Price: US$74, US$89, and US$103 respectively

2002
The Gen Con UK 2000 game fair is held August 31 – September 3 at the Manchester Conference Centre in Manchester, England. Visit the event’s official website.

2004
At the Apple Expo in Paris, Apple Computer announces the Apple iMac G5 computer, featuring a 1.6 or 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5 processor, 256MB RAM, a 512KB L2-cache, an 80 or 160GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW or DVD-R SuperDrive, a seventeen or twenty inch LCD display, a 64MB NVidia GeForce 5200 graphics card, 10/100 BaseT Ethernet, three USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire 400 ports, and AirPort. The entire system is contained within the two-inch thick monitor, eliminating the need for a seperate tower. It’s the last iMac computer to use a PowerPC chip. Price: US$1,299 – $1,899

Apple Computer announces that it has achieved a fifty-eight percent market share in digital music players in the US.

Lindows changes its company name and the the name of its Linux distribution to Linspire. Visit the official Linspire website.

Version 5.5.0 of Apache Tomcat, a popular application server, is released. Visit the application’s official website.

2005
Version 2.0 of the Asianux Linux distribution is released. It is a joint development between Linux vendors Red Flag Software Co., Ltd. of China, Miracle Linux Corporation of Japan, of which a majority is owned by Oracle Corporation, and Haansoft of South Korea. As with most operating systems, it attempts to provide high stability and scalability, while retaining diverse compatibility. It is based upon Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Asianux 2.0 provides a basis for a server operating system as well as a desktop system or as a powerful workstation. This distribution applies a server operating system that is being developed. Visit the system’s official website.

2006
Google launches the Google Image Labeler service, as a beta. The service, which is formatted as a game, allows users to label images to improve the quality of Google’s image search results. Visit the official Google Image Labeler website.

Microsoft estimates that 2.4 million units of the Xbox 360 gaming system have been sold in the US.

Sun Microsystems joined the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), an industry consortium that develops and licenses Blu-ray Disc technology.

2007
Version 3.0a1 of the Python programming language is released. Version 3.0 is the first in a new series of releases that will no long be backward compatible with previous versions of Python. The guiding principle behind its development was to “reduce feature duplication by removing old ways of doing things.” In version 3, there is one and only one way to perform common programming tasks. A final release of the version is set planned for October 1, 2008. Visit the official Python website.