The Great Geek Manual

1974
Jack St. Clair Kilby of Texas Instruments presents the world’s first miniature electronic calculator to the Smithsonian Institution for their collection.

1978
The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) division reports the doubling of the information storage capacity of the IBM 3033 processor to sixteen million characters of storage.

1982
According to Twin Galaxies, Raymond Mueller, age 21, scores a record-setting 4,722,200 points on Atari’s Gravitar after playing the game for twelve hours and twenty-one minutes at Chuck E. Cheese in Boulder, Colorado. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

1984
Tom Jennings, founder of FidoNet, a non-commercial network of Bulletin board Systems using his own Fido BBS software, publishes FidoNews issue number one, an electronic newsletter with information and news about Fido and FidoNet. It will continue to be publish once a week for five and a half years. At its peak, FidoNews has a readship of several thousand. In his first issue, Jennings explains the format of the newsletter, indicates he would like to make some FidoNet bumper stickers and asks that someone else immediately steps into his position as editor.

1985
The Cray X-MP/48 supercomputer goes into operation at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, a research unit of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The X-MP is the first parallel vector processor produced by Cray Research, and it was popular for generating computer graphics, particularly for creating special effects for films. The processors deliver a maximum of 200 megaflops per processor for a a total of 400 megaflops. Price: US$15 million

1987
International Business Machines (IBM) ships the first copies of the OS/2 Standard Edition 1.0 operating system.

1989
FidoNewsFidoNet to the International FidoNet Association (IFNA) has closed. He calls for everyone involved on both sides of the issue to bury the hatchet. The referendum resulted from network-wide rumblings that the IFNA, which was founded at the urging of Ken Kaplan to deal with the day to day drudgery of running the network, was “stealing FidoNet.” Jennings himself refuted the notion, but many Sysops were left with hard feelings over the new policies cropping up. On January 1, 1990 the results of the referendum will be announces. The motion fails, 480 (Yes) to 1417 (No).

1995
At the Personal Computer Outlook conference in California, Apple Computer demonstrates the Pippin multimedia platform. Bandai has the license to manufacture and sell the systems, initially in Japan.

International Business Machines (IBM) licenses Java from Sun Microsystems for use in hardware and software systems.

Netscape, Silicon Graphics, and Sun Microsystems announce plans to develop Javascript, a cross-platform object scripting language for enterprise networks and the Internet designed to be accessible to non-programmers. Borland, Mitsubishi Electronics, Sybase, and Symantec announce plans to license Java.

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) holds a marketing meeting to kick off the first PlayStation sports titles. Sony’s own Jim Whims demonstrates the game in an exhibition match against San Francisco 49er player, William Floyd.

The United States Department of Justice launches an investigation of Microsoft. The investigations cites allegations that installation of Microsoft Windows 95 purposely disables and overwrites competing Internet browsers without the user’s consent.

1996
At the Handheld PDA Expo in San Mateo, California, Microsoft announces that the Windows CE operating system will support Motorola MPC 821 and 823 PowerPC processors, as well as ARM processors from Cirrus Logic and Digital Equipment.

General Motors (GM) releases the first electric car to be mass-produced, the EV1. While GM had developed previous electric cars, such as the “Impact,” they were mostly prototypes, where the EV1 is the first intended for the general market. However, it will never be offered to the public. It was only ever available to consumers under a lease program that didn’t allow consumers to purchase the vehicle. Visit an archive of the vehicle’s official website.

Shares of GT Interactive drop 37.6% on the Nasdaq, after the company reported that its games for the Nintendo 64 will be delayed.

1997
A bomb threat is e-mailed to a Goodyear Tire store in Wisconsin by Chad Newman.

1998
The Space Shuttle Endeavour is launched on the first mission to begin assembling the International Space Station (ISS) after delivering the station’s second module, the Unity Module.

2001
The Pentagone or “Goner” e-mail worm is identified by anti-virus experts at McAfee. Goner spreads primarily through Microsoft Outlook, by sending itself to all the entries contained in the Outlook address book, via an e-mail message, with the subject, “Hi.” In the body of the e-mail is the message, “How are you? When I saw this screen saver, I immediately thought about you I am in a harry, I promise you will love it!” and the attachment “GONE.SCR.” Once the attachment is opened, the hybrid virus attempts seeks out and terminates processes involved in the operation of popular anti-virus and firewall software, then the worm proceeds to deletes all the files in the directory and all subdirectories where the file from which the task was killed is located. If deletions fail, the worm creates a Windows registry key that reactivates the virus upon the startup of the infected computer. The virus can also be spread via ICQ file transfers. Despite it’s relatively unsophisticated approach, the Goner virus will prove to be incredibly effective, causing an estimated US$80 million dollars of damage in western nations. In August of 2002, five young Israeli boys will be accused of writing and disseminating the virus. Four of the boys are in the tenth and eleventh grade, while the fifth is an eighth grader. Officials finally track down the four of the five youths by comparing the handles that the virus had been tagged with to IP addresses which had been registered on DALnet (the IRC network.) The fifth teen will be arrested only after questioning the first five.

2003
Version 2.7.0 of PhpMyAdmin, an open source tool written in PHP to handle the administration of MySQL over the Internet. This version features improved importing capabilities, a simplified configuration, and some UI cleanup. Visit the application’s official website.