The Great Geek Manual

1869
Dmitri Mendeleev begins his work on the periodic table of elements.

1879
The National Bell Telephone Company is formed to organize the first New England Telephone Company and the Bell Telephone Company into a nationwide licensing company to accelerate the establishment of telephone service to cities throughout the country. On December 8, 1903, the company will be dissolved by court decree.

1907
Bell & Howell is founded in Chicago, Illinois as a manufacturer of motion picture cameras and projectors by projectionist Daniel H Bell and engineer Albert S Howell. The company’s first product will be the Kinedrome projector. Visit the official Bell & Howell website.

1913
A new version of Thomas Edison’s Kinetophone sound film system is premiered in thirteen cinemas in Chicago, New York City, and St Louis. The system will be used for approximately two years, and two hundred sixty films will be produced for the system.

1936
The world’s first costumed superhero, The Phantom, makes his first appearance in a daily newspaper strip. Previous fictional crime fighters, such as Zorro and Doc Savage, weren’t designed specifically for newspaper comic strips or comic books.

1938
The first public experimental demonstration of John Logie Baird’s color television is transmitted from Crystal Palace to the Dominion Theatre in London, England.

1947
The Voice of America begins to transmit radio broadcasts into the Soviet Union.

1952
Winston Churchill announces to the world that Britain has developed its own atomic bomb.

1959
Vanguard 2, the first weather satellite, is launched to measure cloud-cover distribution.

1965
The US launches the Ranger 8 space probe on a mission to the Moon. Before it impacts the surface, it will have successfully transmitted 7,137 photos.

1972
Sales of the Volkswagen Beetle exceed the total sales of the Ford Model-T.

1983
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominates the film Tron for an Academy Award for both Costume Design and Sound.

1984
The Amusement Showcase International show is held February 17 – 19, at the Expo center in Chicago, Illinois. At the event Atari demonstrates the coin-operated arcade game, Firefox, based on the 1982 Clint Eastwood film of the same name.

1986
Version 3.0 of the SunOS operating system is released.

1992
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Conundrum” first airs. (No. 514) In it, the crew all suffer from amnesia, but they slowly come to believe that the Enterprise is to play a pivotal role in a war. Memory Alpha entry

1994
Apple Computer releases the QuickTake 100 camera. It’s the first digital cameras released for the consumer-level market that connects to a personal computer via a serial cable. The camera will be discontinued January 1, 1995.

1996
Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, wins the last of six games against the IBM computer Deep Blue, a computer capable of “seeing” between fifty to one hundred billion chess positions in a mere three minute period. By winning a second game, Kasparov wins the regulation-style match held in Philadelphia, as part of the ACM Computer Science Conference. Deep Blue is an improved version of the older Deep Thought.

NASA launches its Discovery Program with the launch of the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft on its first mission, to orbit and land on asteroid 433 Eros.

1997
Apple Computer introduces a number of updated Macintosh computers, including the PowerBook 3400 and 4400, and the Power Macintosh 7300, 8600, and 9600. Apple Computer also introduces the eMate handheld computer and the Newton MessagePad 2000, featuring a 32-bit 162MHz StrongARM processor and 5MB RAM. Visit the official website of Apple Computer.

1998
The website of Alis Technologies is hacked by “Magica de Bin”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

New World Computing releases the turn-based strategy game Chaos Overlords for personal computers in Europe.

The website of Top 50 Mp3 is hacked by “Prizm”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

1999
The website of Goddard Space Flight Center Laboratory is hacked by “Chaos Hackerz Crew”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

2000
Computers with the Windows 2000 operating system are first sold to consumer. The company marketed Windows 2000 as its most secure operating system yet.

In San Francisco, California, Microsoft unveils the new Windows 2000 operating system. In an interview on CNBC television, Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, reports that the software cost more than a billion dollars to develop and involved over one thousand partners. The San Francisco launch ceremony featuring entertainment by Carlos Santa and Patrick Stewart. Microsoft claims that the new system is faster and more reliable than previous versions. It is based on the Windows NT series, however, the reliability comes at the loss of backward compatibility for some DOS-based games. Price: US$189 (Windows 95/98 upgrade) or US$129 (Windows NT upgrade) Visit the official Windows 2000 website.

2005
Microsoft issues a recall of power cords on 14.1 million Xbox video game consoles worldwide, following thirty reports of defective electrical components, some of which caused minor injuries and property damage. The recall includes units manufactured before January 13, 2004 in Europe and before October 23, 2003 anywhere else.

2006
Ubisoft releases the tactical shooter Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Lockdown for Windows in Europe. It is the fourth game in the Rainbow Six series.

2007
According to comScore Networks Inc., the open source encyclopedia Wikipedia becomes the ninth most popular website in the U.S., breaking into the top ten for the first time in history with 42.9 million unique visitors for the month of January.