The Great Geek Manual

While I don’t normally list births in “This Day in Geek History,” today’s births are so amazingly coincidental that they deserve a mention. December 16th is the birthday of renowned science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke (1917) and Philip K. Dick (1928). Peter Dickinson (1927) and Randall Garrett (1927) also share this birthday.

1897
The first US submarine with an internal combustion engine, the Argonaut, is demonstrated on the Patapsco River. During the demonstration, twenty-two members of the press made descents up to four hours long. It was built in 1897 at the Columbian Iron Works and Dry Dock Company of Baltimore, Maryland for its inventor, Simon Lake. The submarine is thirty-six feet (11m) long and nine feet (2.7m) in diameter with wheels to travel on the sea floor. Lake was issued patents for the submarine on April 7, 1896 (US No. 557,835) and on April 20, 1897 (US No. 581,213).

1907
The first radio broadcast of a singer in the US, featuring Eugenia H. Farrar, is transmitted by Lee De Forest from the Brooklyn Naval Yard in Brooklyn, New York to mark the departure of Admiral Robley Dunglison Evans (”Fighting Bob Evans”), commanded the US Navy’s “Great White Fleet,” on its world-wide cruise.

1915
Albert Einstein publishes the definitive form of the General Theory of Relativity.

1925
The silent film Wolf Blood, also known as Wolfblood: A Tale of the Forest, is released in the US. It is one of the earliest werewolf films. In it, a grievously injured logger must accept a blood transfusion from a Wolf, and after his recovery, he and his fellow lumberjacks believe that he is transforming into a werewolf. IMDB profile Running time: 1 hr 8 mins

1935
The use of eye prints, the pattern of retina capillaries, photographed through the pupil with a Zeiss retinal camera for identification is published in an article in Time magazine by Dr. Carleton Simon, a psychiatrist and criminologist, upon the suggestion of Dr. Isadore Goldstein, an ophthalmologist at Mount Sinai Hospital. Simon and Goldstein published a paper on the method in the September 1935 issue of the New York State Journal of Medicine.

1947
William B. Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain of Bell Laboratories patent the point-contact transistor, the first solid-state electronic transistor, and demonstrate it to a small audience.

1954
The first synthetic diamonds are produced at General Electric Research Laboratories by Professor H. Tracy Hall.

1959
Twentieth Century Fox releases the science fiction film Journey to the Center of the Earth, directed by Henry Levin and starring Pat Boone, James Mason, Arlene Dahl, Diane Baker, Peter Ronson, and Thayer David, to US theaters. It is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Jules Verne. IMDB listing Running time: 2 hrs 12 mins

1962
Explorer 16, the first satellite to be used exclusively to study meteorites, is launched from Cape Canaveral.

1969
The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) announces MATLAN, a computer application to aid scientists and engineers in solving large matrix problems.

1975
IMS Associates of San Leandro, California begins shipping IMSAI 8080 computer kits, one of the first consumer computers, to customers. Approximately twenty thousand units will be sold at a price of US$931 assembled or US$599 as a kit. The system features a 2.0 MHz Intel 8080A chipset, a maximum of 64K of RAM, and an optional cassette or floppy drive.

1982
The ABC television network airs the half-hour animated special Christmas Comes to Pac-Land.

1986
Microsoft agrees to buy back seven licensing agreements from Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for US $925,000, in an out-of-court settlement. SCP has sought US$60 million in damages.

1988
Kevin Mitnick, age 25, is charged with stealing US$1 million in software from DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), including VMS and XSafe source code, causing US$4 million in damages to the system, and gaining unauthorized access to MCI long-distance codes through university computers in Los Angeles and England. The Magistrate takes the unusual step of ordering Mitnic held without bail. The prosecutor says in a statement to the press that, “This thing is so massive, we’re just running around trying to figure out what he did. [...] This person, we believe, is very, very dangerous, and he needs to be detained and kept away from a computer.” Federal prosecutors also obtain a court order restricting Mitnick’s telephone calls from jail, fearing he might gain access to a computer over the phone. The case is the first in the nation to be prosecuted under a federal law that makes it a crime to gain access to an interstate computer network for criminal purposes.

1993
Hewlett-Packard released version 9.03 of the HP-UX Unix operating system was released.

In the United States, F.A.O. Schwarz and Toys ‘R’ Us stops selling the Digital Pictures game The Night Trap video game for personal computers and the Sega Genesis game system, in response to public complaints about violence contained in the game and a December 9, 1993 joint Senate Judiciary and Government Affairs Committee hearing on video game violence that prominently and infamously examined both Mortal Kombat and Night Trap. In particular, the game contains a highly controversial full-motion scene in which of a young girl in a nightgown is murdered. During the hearings, the game was described as “disgusting,” “shameful,” “sick,” and “ultra-violent.”

1994
CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) receives funding for the Large Hadron Collider and the CERN Council unanimously approves its construction. Due to budgetary constraints, CERN also decides to discontinue the development of the World Wide Web in favor of particle physics. CERN consequently transfers the WebCore project to the French organization INRIA (the Institut National pour la Recherche en Informatique et Automatique.)

1995
Microsoft releases Visual FoxPro 3 for Windows. Visit the application’s official website.

1996
Adobe Systems releases PageMaker 6.5 for Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. Visit the application’s official website. Price: US$895 (New) or US$99 (Upgrade)

International Business Machines (IBM) and Motorola announce that they will cease the development and sales of Windows NT-based PowerPC systems.

Intel announces the development of a supercomputer that can attain computing speeds of up to one trillion operations per second with 9,624 integrated Pentium processors operating in parallel. Commissioned by the US Department of Energy at a cost of US$50 million, the supercomputer will be used at the Sandia National Laboratories to simulate nuclear weapons’ performance and to predict weather patterns and other natural phenomena. Department officials compare one trillion operations to the entire population of the United States working with hand held calculators non-stop for one hundred twenty five years.

1997
Microsoft files an appeal of the preliminary injunction issued by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson on Thursday, December 11. The injunction requires the company to unbundle the Internet Explorer web browser from Windows operating systems.

US President Bill Clinton signs the “No Electronic Theft Act” into law (Public Law 105-147), making it a criminal act to trade a copyrighted work with a friend or to reproduce or distribute copyrighted works with a total retail value of more than US$1,000 inside any 180-day period. The statue of limitations for prosecuting copyright violations is extended to five years. Senator Orrin Hatch publicly declares that “this bill plugs the ‘LaMacchia Loophole‘ in criminal copyright enforcement.” The “LaMacchia Loophole” refers to the failed prosecution of MIT student David LaMacchia due to LaMacchia’s lack of commercial motive.

The website of the Huntington National Bank is hacked and defaced by “so1o”, “helix”, “xFli “, and “modeX”, who call themselves “Team CodeZero”. The same site had been hacked the day prior by “k3rm1t”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

1998
Iomega begins shipping Clik removable storage drives.

The United States missile defense system, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), completes the first phase of extensive computer upgrades at the Cheyenne Mountain underground bunker. The improvements cost nearly two billion dollars, about twice the original budget of the system.

1999
Konami releases the Dance Dance Revolution Solo 2000 arcade game.

2003
Pepper Computer, Inc. releases the Pepper Pad, a mobile computer with Internet capability that doubles as a handheld game console, in the US. It features a 533MHz AMD Geode LX800 CPU, 256MB RAM, a 20 or 30GB hard disk, a SD/MMC Flash memory slot, a WVGA 7 inch LCD touchscreen, and both Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi connectivity. Visit the company’s official website.

US President George W. Bush“>George W. Bush signs the CAN-SPAM Act into law. The Act makes sender of unsolicited commercial e-mails (”spam”) liable for penalties of up to US$250 per individual e-mail. Penalties can also be incurred under the Act by falsifying e-mail header data or failing to provide opt-out instructions in legitimate commercial e-mails.

Version 0.5 of Desktop Light Linux (DeLi Linux) is released. DeLi is particularly optimized to run on older personal computers. DeLi Linux requires only a 386 processor with 8MB RAM. However, it works best with a 486 and 16MB RAM. A full installation with the full package installed requires nearly 400MB of hard disk space. Visit the system’s official website.

2004
Apple sells its two hundred millionth song on the iTunes Music Store to Ryan Alekman of Belchertown, Massachusetts. The download is a part of The Complete U2 album.

Microsoft acquires GIANT Company Software, Inc., the developer of GIANT AntiSpyware.

Symantec and Veritas Software announce plans for a merger. The US$13.5 billion purchase of Veritas will be the largest acquisition in the software industry in history.

2005
Google released a version of Gmail for mobile devices.

James Risen and Eric Lichtblau publish an article in the The New York Times entitled “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.” The article alleges that, in response to 9/11, “President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying” as part of the War on Terrorism. The article alleges that, “Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.” The revelation evokes an immediate and widespread debate over the legality of such actions. Many legal experts and politicians conclude that the actions violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), while others contend that the FISA only applies to calls made and received domestically.