The Great Geek Manual

1831
At age 22, Charles Darwin embarks from Plymouth harbor aboard the British Naval ship HMS Beagle on what will become a groundbreaking voyage of scientific discovery. The Captain, Robert FitzRoy will sail to the southern coast of South America to conduct an official government survey. Just out of university, Darwin took an unpaid position as the ship’s naturalist. He plans to be at sea for two years, but the voyage will last five years, making stops in Brazil, the Galapogos Islands, and New Zealand. From the observations he will make during the voyage, Darwin will develop his theory of evolution through natural selection, which he will publish twenty-eight years after the Beagle leaves Plymouth.

1932
The world’s largest cinema Radio City Music Hall, which boasts 6,200 seats, is opened by NBC in New York. Over a hundred thousand people wait outside the cinema, waiting for admission.

1940
Universal Pictures releases the science fiction comedy The Invisible Woman, directed by A. Edward Sutherland and starring Virginia Bruce, John Barrymore, and John Howard, to US theaters. In it, an attractive model with an ulterior motive volunteers as guinea pig to test an invisibility machine. IMDB listing

1968
The Apollo 8 returns to Earth after becoming first crewed mission to reach the Moon. Astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell Jr., and William Anders made ten orbits of the Moon on Christmas Eve before their return.

1982
According to Twin Galaxies, Chris O’Brien scores a record-setting 347,400 points playing Ms. Pac-Man at the Fun Time Game Center in San Diego, California. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

1988
Microsoft announces that Jon Shirley will step down from his position as CEO and President of the company on June 30, 1990, but Shirley, who had been President since 1983, would continue to be involved with the company as a member of its Board of Directors.

1995
Atari releases Baldies for the Atari Jaguar.

France concludes a series of nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific after French President Jacques Chirac lifted its moratorium on nuclear weapons testing. While most nations restrain themselves to nuclear weapon computer simulations rather than physical detonations, France claims that the tests that had been suspended several years earlier left scientists without sufficient data to conduct meaningful simulations.

1997
Excelsior.arc.nasa.gov is hacked by “Claire Danes”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

1998
The 4.3BSD-Quasijarus0 Unix operating system is released.

Sun Microsystems discontinues versions 4.1.3 and 4.1.4 of the SunOS operating system.

Version 1.3.1 of PhpMyAdmin, an open source tool written in PHP for the administration of MySQL over the Internet, is released. It is the first version of the application to feature multi-lingual support. Visit the application’s official website.

1999
Joshua Quittner publishes an article in in Time magazine entitled, “An eye on the future: Jeff Bezos merely wants Amazon.com to be Earth’s biggest seller of everything.” The article is the magazine’s cover feature, and Jeff Bezos is named the magazine’s “Person of the Year.” You can read the full text of the article at Time magazine’s Internet archives.

The stock market value of Microsoft peaks at US$600 million.

2001
The People’s Republic of China is granted permanent normal trade status with the United States.

Yahoo! and HotJobs announce an agreement in which Yahoo! will acquire 98.6 percent of all HotJobs outstanding stock for US$10.50 per share (which will ultimately be paid with 0.3045 shares of Yahoo stock and US$5.25 in cash), or a total of US$436 million. When the acquistion is complete, the online job search engine will be known as Yahoo! HotJobs. Read the original press release. Visit the official Hotjobs website.

2002
Version 4.3.0 of the PHP programming language is released. Visit the language’s official website.

2004
America Online (AOL) announces that it’s customers have experienced a significant reduction in the amount of spam received. The average number of daily spam messages the company blocks dropped from 2.4 billion in 2003 to 1.2 billion in late 2004. In November 2004, the company reports receiving 2.2 million complaints regarding spam, down from 11 million in November 2003. AOL attributes the reduction to a combination of recent anti-spam legislation and the effectiveness of its own spam filtering tools. Other Internet service providers (ISPs) have not reported a similar decrease. Visit the official AOL website.

CERNET 2, the first backbone IPv6 network in China, is launched by the China Education and Research Network (CERN) to connect twenty-five universities in twenty cities at speeds of 1 – 10Gbps.

2005
Del Rey published the Star Wars novel Dark Nest III: The Swarm War by Troy Denning as a paperback. (ISBN-13: 978-0345463050) It’s the third novel of the Dark Nest Trilogy, in which Luke Skywalker confronts the mysterious new insectoid race known as the Killiks, who are intent on conquering the galaxy.

The parents of a boy who committed suicide by jumping out of a twenty-fourth story window December 27, 2004 file a lawsuit against Blizzard Entertainment, alleging that their son had been addicted to World of Warcraft and had died reenacting a scene from the game. Before committing suicide, the boy left four letters and one hand-written note to his parents. He also logged onto World of Warcraft and told other players goodbye. According to his final communications the boy was laboring under the delusion that he could meet his favorite Night Elf hero by jumping.

Pioneer Electronics announced its first Blu-ray Disc drive Tuesday, the BDR-101A, which will store as much as 25 GB of data. The unit will go on sale in the first quarter of 2006.