The Great Geek Manual

1455
This is the traditionally accepted anniversary date for the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed using movable type. View pictures of the Gutenberg Bible.

1893
Rudolf Diesel receives a German patent for the diesel engine. He will have produced an actual prototype of the engine for testing by July 1893. The engine is designed to be fueled by powdered coal injected with compressed air. Read more about diesel engines at How Stuff Works.
Read more about the history of diesel engines at Powerpedia. See Rudolph Diesel’s first engine on display at the Deutches Museum, Munich.

1896
The Tootsie Roll is introduced to the US by Austrian immigrant Leo Hirshfield at a small store in New York City. He names the chewy chocolate candy after his five-year-old daughter, Clara, whose nickname is “Tootsie.” The Tootsie Roll is America’s first individually wrapped penny candy. By 1905, production will be moved to a four-story factory. During World War II, Tootsie Rolls will be added to the rations of American soldiers because of their ability to withstand severe weather conditions and give quick energy. Tootsie Rolls are made from a base of sugar, corn syrup, soy-bean oil, skim milk and cocoa. Read more about the history of the Tootsie Roll at the official Tootsie Roll website.

1910
The first radio contest is held in Philadelphia, Philadelphia.

1927
The sixty-ninth US Congress approves Public Law Number 632, “An Act for the regulation of radio communications, and for other purposes”, otherwise known as the Radio Act of 1927. The Act recognizes broadcasters’ right to free speech and creates the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), which will later be renamed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The Federal Radio Commission is responsible for the allocation of frequencies, transmitter power, and broadcasting hours.

1936
The first successful rocket mail delivery in the US is made in Greenwood Lake, New York from New Jersey, over a distance of three hundred meters. The rocket, dubbed the “Gloria,” is eleven feet long with a fifteen foot wing span, and it is fueled by an alcohol and liquid oxygen mixture. It carries 4,323 letters and 1,826 postcards, each of which carry a special rocket stamp in addition to its regular postage. The rocket was built by Willey Ley, Louis Goodman and Hugh Franklin Pierce with the sponsorship of Frido W. Kessler.

1941
Plutonium is first produced and isolated by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg. Historical records of the incident do not record whether or not Seaborg subsequently manifested superpowers.

1954
The first mass vaccination of children against polio with the vaccine developed by Jonas Salk begins in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

1956
In a cosmic event known as the great flare, the Earth is bombarded with a burst of protons and other nuclei from a solar flare.

1967
The Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon” first airs. (No. 23) In it, the Enterprise visits a planet fighting a war with its neighboring planet via computers. Memory Alpha entry

1968
The Star Trek episode “By Any Other Name” first airs. (No. 51) In it, the Enterprise is hijacked by aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy who attempt to use the ship to return home. Memory Alpha entry

1975
In response to the energy crisis, daylight saving time begins nearly two months early in the United States.

1983
Texas Instruments (TI) recalls TI-99/4a computers to repair a “short” found in the system’s transformers.

1987
Supernova 1987A is seen in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) in the constellation Dorado. It is the brightest supernova of the twentieth century and the first supernova to be visible to the naked eye since 1604.

1994
A US District Court rules that Microsoft’s DoubleSpace for DOS 6 violates data compression patents held by Stac Electronics. Microsoft is ordered to remove or replace the technology and to pay US$120 million in damages; however, the court also finds that Stac had illegally used access to Microsoft’s trade secrets to make Stacker compatible with DOS 6. Microsoft is awarded US$13.6 million in damages.

1997
A large fire occurs aboard the Russian Space station, Mir. The fire spreads from the lithium perchlorate candles used to supply Oxygen to the station. According to a later account by American astronaut Jerry Linenger, the fire nearly forced the crew to abandon the station.

1998
The Jugi Tandon Storage (JTS) Corporation sells its Atari Division to HIACXI Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hasbro Interactive, Inc., which is a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc., for US$5 million in cash.

Tens of thousands of computers linked across the Internet, under the co-ordination of Distributed.net, decrypt a message encoded in the government’s 56-bit DES encryption algorithm as part of the DES-II-1 challenge posed by RSA Data Security, in what some have called the largest distributed-computing effort ever. The participants collectively attempted 6.3 x 10^16 (63 quadrillion) keys, or about eighty-eight percent of the entire keyspace, by the fortieth day. The correct key, 76 9E 8C D9 F2 2F 5D EA, is discovered and submitted to RSA Labs at 02:26 GMT. The final decrypted message read, “The secret message is: Many hands make light work.” The winning key is discovered by an Alpha-based computer running DEC Unix. Of the US$5000 prize from RSA Labs, the winner, who wishes to remain anonymous, will receive US$1000, the Free Software Foundation will receive US$3000, and distributed.net will receive US$1000. Read more about the DES-II-1 challenge in the Distributed.net press release.

The website of All Wrestling is hacked. View an archived version of the defaced website.

The website of Sistematix is hacked. View an archived version of the defaced website.

The website Systematic.com is hacked by “Claire Danes”.

2000
CNET News reports that Fry’s Electronics has threatened to file a lawsuit against Garret Maki for establishing a site with the domain name frysad.com and posting scanned copies of Fry’s newspaper advertisements on the site. David L. Frey, of the law offices of Foley McIntosh Frey & Claytor wrote to Maki on behalf of Fry’s Electronics demanding that he turn the domain over to Fry’s without compensation by Friday, March 2, 2001. When asked for confirmation about the letter, Frey told CNET News, “It’s got my name on it, doesn’t it?”

Ikenna Iffih, a computer science student at Northeastern University, is arrested and charged on three counts of hacking, after an extensive investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the US Attorney’s Office and university officials. Specifically, Iffih is charged with violating the following laws: Title 18, United States Code (USC), Section 2511(1)(a), the illegal interception and possession of electronic communications transmitted to and through a United States Government computer, Title 18, USC, Section 1030(a)(5)(B), the illegal and intentional access and damage of a computer used in interstate and foreign commerce, and Title 18, USC, Section 1362, the willful and malicious interference of a working communications system operated and controlled by the United States Government. These three counts combined carry a maximum penalty of twenty years incarceration and a potential fine of up to a quarter of a million dollars. Under a plea agreement, Iffih will be sentenced to six months’ house arrest, two years’ probation, and a five thousand dollar fine on October 25. Among Iffih’s extensive list of victims are the Defense Logistics Agency, which supplies and services the military, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Zebra Marketing Online Services (ZMOS), a Washington-state based company that provides Web service to other firms.

2004
The The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King becomes the second film in cinema history to gross over a billion dollars in box office receipts globally, following the 1997 blockbuster Titanic.

2005
F-Secure, a Finnish anti-virus and computer security software company, publicly announces the detection of Cabir, the first mobile phone virus, in a Santa Monica, California. Specifically, Cabir is a worm which infects phones running the Symbian OS. Whenever an infected phone is activated, the message “Caribe” is displayed. Infected phones also attempts to spread the virus through Bluetooth signals.

2006
The iTunes Store announces the sale of its one billionth song to Alex Ostrovsky, age 16, of West Bloomfield, Michigan. The song is “Speed of Sound” from the Coldplay album X&Y. To commemorate the milestone, Apple Computer awards Ostrovsky an iMac, ten fifth-generation 60GB iPods, a ten thousand dollar gift card good for any item at the iTunes Music Store, and a scholarship to the world-renowned Juilliard School of Music. Read the press release at Apple website.

2007
Warner Bros. releases the science fiction film The Astronaut Farmer by Michael Polish and starring Billy Bob Thornton, Virginia Madsen, Bruce Dern, and Max Thieriot, to US theaters. In it, Charles Farmer, a former astronaut forced to give up his dream job at NASA when his father commits suicide, builds his own space craft in an effort to launch himself into space while struggling with debt and his own family’s doubts. The film’s release date is just three days after the forty-fifth anniversary of John Glenn’s historical first orbit of the Earth. Produced on a budget of US$13 million, it will gross US$4,454,319 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: PG Running Time: 1 hr 44 mins Visit the film’s official website.

2009
India approves a £1.7-billion plan proposed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to launch its own astronauts into outer space for the first time by 2015.