The Great Geek Manual

1898
Scientists Pierre and Marie Curie discover Radium.

1913
Arthur Wynne published the first crossword puzzle, which he called a “word-cross”, in the New York World.

1937
Walt Disney premieres the first full-length, animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles, California. The film is notable for its length, its pioneering use of the multi-plane camera to achieve the illusion of depth, its introduction of human characters modeled on live actors, and its use of larger painted cels. These advances are all the more astonishing for the fact that Snow White is released just twelve years after Walt Disney released the first animation with sound, Steamboat Willie. The film was produced by 750 artists working for three years at the unheard-of cost of US$1.499 million. The cost was so exorbitant that Disney had to mortgage his house to pay for the film’s production. The artists produced one million individual drawings, only a quarter of which were actually used in the final print of the film. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: G Running Time: 1 hr 23 mins

1965
United Artists releases Thunderball, directed by Terence Young and starring Sean Connery as James Bond, Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celi, and Luciana Paluzzi, to US theaters. It is the fourth film in the James Bond series. In it, James Bond heads to The Bahamas to recover two nuclear warheads stolen by SPECTRE agent Emilio Largo in an international extortion scheme. The film was produced on a budget of US$5.6 million. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: PG Running Time: 2 hrs 9 mins

1968
Apollo 8, crewed by Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders, is launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Time magazine will name the crew of Apollo 8 as their Men of the Year for 1968, recognizing them as the people that most influenced events in the preceding year They are the first people to ever leave the gravitational influence of the Earth and orbit another celestial body, and they will survive the mission that even the crew themselves rate as only having a fifty-fifty chance of fully succeeding. The effect of Apollo 8 can be summed up by a telegram from a stranger, received by Borman after the mission, that simply stated, “Thank you Apollo 8. You saved 1968.”

1981
The final episode of the science fiction television series Blake’s 7, “Blake” airs in Britain on BBC 1. (No. D13) The series had run for four season and a total of fifty-two episodes. Despite its brief run, the series had a lasting and far-reaching influence on television science fiction that would be seen in such series as: Babylon 5, Lexx, Andromeda, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Farscape, the new Battlestar Galactica, and Firefly.

1984
Release 56 of the Infocom interactive fiction game The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is published for personal computers. It is Infocom’s fourteenth game.

1987
Release 57 of the Infocom interactive fiction game Beyond Zork is published for personal computers. The game is notable for introducing several new features to the Infocom line of interactive fiction, including a crude on-screen map, the use of character statistics and levels, and roleplaying game (RPG) combat elements. It is Infocom’s twenty-ninth game.

1991
Hewlett-Packard released version 8.07
(S300/S700) of its proprietary HP-UX operating system.

1992
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Chain of Command (Part 2)” first airs. (No. 611) In it, Picard, having been captured on a covert mission into Cardassian territory, is tortured by a sadistic Cardassian interrogator. Memory Alpha entry

1993
Freelance journalist Julian Dibbell publishes an article in The Village Voice (Vol. 38 No. 51) entitled “Rape in Cyberspace or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society”. The article will later be included in Dibbell’s book about his experiences in the LambdaMOO community entitled, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. The leading scholar of cyberlaw, Lawrence Lessig, will later state that his chance reading of Dibbell’s article was a key influence on his interest in the field. Sociologist David Trend will call it, “one of the most frequently cited essays about cloaked identity in cyberspace”. Visit the author’s official website. You can read the full text of the article at Eff.org

1994
In Japan, Nintendo and St. Giga television service company announces the upcoming launch of Satellaview service, which allows Super Famicom users to download games via cable service in April. Price: ¥14,000 (about US$150)

1997
The frontpage of the Sierra On-Line games website is anonymously hacked and taken down for three hours. The company will be quick to reassure the press that the hacker did not gain access to either credit card data or other internal databases.

The UK website of Netstar is hacked by “KAOS 97″.

The website of ATEC software and Ingmar.com are hacked by “KAOS 97″.

The website of Netalia Internet is hacked by “Kaos97″. View an archived screenshot of the hacked website.

The website of Progressive Woman is hacked by “Properstuff”. View an archived screenshot of the hacked website.

The website of the Frank Leta Acura car dealership is hacked by “Properstuff”. View an archived screenshot of the hacked website.

1998
Best Buy Inc. announces that they have dropped the price of Apple Computer’s iMac from US$1,299 to US$1,099. Reuter’s News Service reports that representatives from CompUSA Inc. and CompuTown have declared a maintained price of US$1,299.

1999
John Carmack of id Software released the Quake engine source code on the Internet under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The release will allow programmers to modify the engine.

2000
United States President Bill Clinton signs the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) into law. The law is an attempts to limit children’s exposure to pornography and other sexual content online. It is the third such attempt to regulate Internet content, following the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act, both of which were declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court. On June 23, 2003, the law will be upheld following a challenge from the American Library Association (ALA).

2001
The full source code of Quake II version 3.19 was released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Version 2.2 of the Python programming language is released. Visit the language’s official website.

2005
US District Judge Ronald Whyte rules that a California law restricting minors from buying a “violent video game” unconstitutionally restricts minors’ right to information. The judge grants a request made by the Entertainment Software Association for a preliminary injunction.