The Great Geek Manual

1922
All thirteen million telephones in North America go silent for the space of one minute at sunset during the funeral services of Alexander Graham Bell. Bell is buried in a coffin built by his lab staff in a tomb carved into the solid rock of Beinn Bhreagh Mountain on his estate in Nova Scotia, Canada. To commemorate his pioneering contributions to telecommunications technology, AT&T and the Bell System suspends service at their switchboards and switching stations across Canada and the United States. Bell passed away on August 2, 1922.

1971
The US launches a satellite into lunar orbit from a manned spacecraft for the first time.

1987
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rescinds the Fairness Doctrine which had once required media outlets to present controversial issues “fairly.”

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) introduces the PS/2 Model 25, with an 8MHz Intel 8086 CPU, a combined system unit complete with monitor, dual floppy drives (no hard drive), and reduced-size keyboard. Price: US$1,350

1988
The first shuttle mission since the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster is delayed when a computer cancels the ignition of the Space Shuttle Discovery during an engine test after determining that a valve was failing to close fast enough. Both the test and the computer system were instituted since the Challenger’s launch to ensure the mission’s safety.

1991
Aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis (mission STS-43), an AppleLink, running on a Macintosh Portable is used to send the first email from space. Astronauts Shannon Lucid and James C. Adamson send the message, “Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first AppleLink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here,…send cryo and RCS! Hasta la vista, baby,…we’ll be back!” to Marcia Ivins, a shuttle communicator at the Johnson Space Center. AppleLink was interfaced to NASA’s communication system to allow the Shuttle to call up GEIS’ network from space. The Shuttle’s e-mail address is a secret, but exposed to GEIS’ email network as any other AppleLink address would be. To avoid a deluge of incoming mail generated by the media publicity surrounding the event, Apple set up a number of obvious “honeypot” addresses, such as STS43@AppleLink, to draw unwanted mail.

1995
Hackers crack the NY Times Internet service and crash it.

Paramount Pictures releases the sci-fi film Virtuosity, directed by Brett Leonard and starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, to 2,012 US theaters. In the film, a virtual serial killer, SID 6.7, escapes from the virtual world when he’s transferred into an android body and a reinstated police officer must race to put an end to SID’s killing spree. Produced a budget of US$30 million, the film will gross US$8,309,869 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: R) Running Time: 1 hr 45 mins

1997
Motorola and International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) introduce the PowerPC 740 and 750 processors, available in 233 and 266MHz speeds. Price: US$550-570 in 1000-unit quantities

1999
Nuance Communications releases version 4.0 of the Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software package for Windows in several editions, including: Essentials,Standard, Preferred, Professional, Legal, Medical, and Mobile.

2000
America Online, Inc.’s (AOL) Netscape Communications announces plans to remove a SmartDownload product feature that passes information about the downloads to Netscape without the user’s knowledge. The change comes following a class-action lawsuit filed by a New Jersey photographer in July seeking a minimum of US$10,000 in damages per person.

The Brazilian website of Brasoftware Informatica Ltda is hacked by “TankDS”. The website is hosted on a server running Windows NT. View an archived version of the defaced website.

The first version of TortoiseCVS a CVS tool for Microsoft Windows released under the General Public License (GNU). Visit the application’s official website.

An unidentified sixteen year old Montreal, Canada-area hacker named Mike Calce, known by the webhandle “Mafiaboy,” pleads not guilty to criminal mischief charges related to denial-of-service attacks against CNN, eBay, and Yahoo!, in February. Meanwhile, the prosecution levies an additional sixty-four new charges against him based on evidence discovered by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police linking him to substantial attacks on five other websites.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. reveals plans to create approximately 275 new engineering jobs over the next three years to double its size in the software development center located in Dublin, Ireland.

2001
A complete re-write of the Code Red worm, Code Red II, begins spreading across the Internet. China is especially hard hit. The worm is designed to exploit a security hole in the indexing software included as part of Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) web server software. Read an analysis of Code Red II.

Wyoming Governor Jim Geringer urges the United States Congress to permit his state and others to institute taxes on e-commerce, which under a bill passed by former president Bill Clinton, are under a moratorium.

2002
eMule is first released as a binary as version 0.05a. Hendrik Breitkreuz (also known by the handle “Merkur”) began developing the eMule project on May 13, 2002 after becoming dissatisfied with the original eDonkey2000 client. The source was first released as version 0.02 and published on SourceForge on July 6, 2002.

2003
Germany’s Berlin-Brandenburg region completes the conversion from analogue to digital terrestrial television and becomes the first location in the world to switch off all analogue television transmitters.

Version 1.8 of the Ruby programming language is released. Visit the official Ruby website.

2006
AOL Research releases a compressed text file containing twenty million search keywords for over 650,000 users over a three month period for research purposes. While none of the records on the file are personally identifiable, certain keywords contain personally identifiable information, such as users who searched for their own name, address, or social security number. Although the searchers are only identified by a numeric ID, the New York Times will successfully discover the identity of several searchers, and with her permission, exposed search number 4417749 as Thelma Arnold, a sixty-two year old Georgian widow. This breach in privacy will lead to the resignation of AOL’s chief technical officer (CTO), Maureen Govern on August 21, 2006 along with the researcher who released the data and his immediate supervisor, who reported to Govern. AOL will pull the records on August 7th, acknowledging that it was a mistake to release it, but the files have been mirrored on websites across the Internet.

2007
NASA launches the robotic Mars Phoenix lander aboard a Delta II rocket on a mission to explore the northern hemisphere of Mars for microbial life.

2008
Thai video game distributor New Era Interactive Media stops selling Grand Theft Auto following an incident in which an obsessed eighteen year-old gamer, enraged that he couldn’t afford to play the game, stabbed a taxi driver to death during a robbery he later claimed was an attempt to recreate a scene from the game. Amid a global uproar over the incident, the distributor urges retail stores and arcades to pull from the game from circulation. Thailand’s Culture Ministry issues a public response to the incident warning that the murder should serve as a wake-up call for the country to pay more attention to violent video games and calling for national video game ratings and restrictions. Read more at Reuters.