The Great Geek Manual

1812
The poet Lord Byron gives his first address as a member of the House of Lords, in defense of the Luddite violence against Industrialism in his home county of Nottinghamshire.

1813
The first federal vaccination legislation is enacted.

1900
Felix Hoffman is issued a patent for Aspirin. (US No. 644,077)

1932
The neutron is discovered by Dr. James Chadwick, using scattering data to calculate the mass of a neutral particle. Since the the experiments of Ernest Rutherford, it had been known that the atomic mass number A of nuclei is a bit more than twice the atomic number Z for most atoms and that essentially all the mass of the atom is concentrated in the relatively tiny nucleus. As of about 1930 it was presumed that the fundamental particles were protons and electrons, but that required that somehow a number of electrons were bound in the nucleus to partially cancel the charge of A protons. But by this time it was known from the uncertainty principle and from “particle-in-a-box” type confinement calculations that there just wasn’t enough energy available to contain electrons in the nucleus. Read more about the discovery of the neutron at Georgia State University’s physics department’s webpage.

1942
J.S. Hey discovers radio emissions from the Sun.

1947
The first closed-circuit broadcast of a surgical operation takes place at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Five operations are broadcast in all, four on the heart and one on nerves along the spine. Dr. Alfred Blalock performs the first two procedures. Ten observers in four classrooms simultaneously see each procedure. All of the procedures are in black and white. The first closed-circuit color broadcast of a surgical operation will be made from the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia on May 31, 1949.

1983
According to Twin Galaxies, Bill Camden scores a record-setting 1,666,604 points playing the Taito arcade game Qix at the Galaxy 1 arcade in Lynchburg, Virginia. Judd Boone scores a record-setting 1,029,160 points playing Atari’s Quantum at Mr. Bill’s arcade in Moscow, Idaho. Gary Hatt scores a record-setting 151,100 points playing Supper Zaxxon at the Starship Video arcade in Upland, California. John Roberts scores a record-setting 1,892,000 points playing Time Pilot at the Great Escape arcade in Plattsburgh, New York. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

1998
Just weeks after reorganizing Claris into a stand-alone subsidiary called FileMaker Inc., Apple Computer announces that it will discontinue development of the five year-old Newton Operating System and that won’t expand its current licensing program. In addition, the company announces the discontinuation of all of its Newton OS-based products, including the MessagePad 1200 and EMate 300. Instead, mobile products using Mac OS technology will be developed for release in 1999. According to Steve Jobs, who still fills the role as acting Chief Executive Officer, Apple will focus on developing the Macintosh, which is once again left as Apple’s only computing platform.

FBI agents catch a fifteen year old student of Cloverdale High School in California who allegedly has hacked into eleven United States military computers earlier in the past month. Bill Zane, president of Netdex, is credited with helping to identify several intruders, including the boy, who hid behind Netdex while implementing their attacks. On a radio talk show early the following week, Zane will state that one of the boys wrote him a note requesting a job. Zane said the note was poorly composed and riddled with bad grammar. Allegedly, the boys used hacking tools that were readily available on the Internet.

Netscape makes the source code for the Netscape Communicator 5.0 browser available as a free download. Read the original press release. See a screenshot online.

Sales of Crash Bandicoot 2 to date reach one million units in the US, eight hundred thousand in Japan, and three hundred forty thousand in Europe.

The websites of BEB Enterprises (www.localafffairs.com) and Hypermall (athena.hypermall.com) are hacked by “The Noid” and “TechVoodoo”.

The website of Napier University, in Edinburgh, UK is hacked by “Magica de Bin”.

2001
Intel“>Intel announces a new addition to its family of low-power processors for small mobile computers, the Low Voltage mobile Pentium III processor.

2002
John Sankus, Jr., age 28, of the piracy group “DrinkOrDie,” an underground software cracking and warez trading network, pleads guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. He will be sentenced in May to forty-six months in federal prison.

John Sundman of Salon magazine publishes an article entitled, “Artificial stupidity, Part 2 – Can chatterbots be as dumb as a box of hammers and still pass the Turing test? Go ask ALICE, she might know.” In the article he writes,

“A vocal camp in the brainy ‘philosophy of mind’ profession believes that the Turing test should be relegated to the history books, but I’m going to assert axiomatically that the test, as it is generally understood by ordinary humans like you and me, is interesting. The question of whether computers can successfully pose as human beings has obsessed writers, filmmakers and computer scientists for decades. Therefore, without getting sucked into a philosophical vortex about the nature of minds, machines, intelligence and so forth, all we need to find out — if we want to know if the Loebner competition matters — is whether there exists a more respectable variant of the Turing test. As far as I can determine, there doesn’t. The Turing test is, as it were, state-of-the-art.”

Read the entire story online at Salon.com.
Read the first part of the story online at Salon.com.

Version 2 (v1.4.1_02) of the Java programming language is released.

2007
Facebook is opened to the public.

2008
Dell became the first computer company to join The Climate Group, an international non-profit organization that became the world’s first global organization focused solely on solutions to climate change The company joined the organization in order to highlight the company’s commitment to environmental leadership. Visit the official Climate Group official website.

Microsoft has demonstrates and releases its WorldWide Telescope, a virtual telescope that allows user to add contextual data and news to the display. Visit the official WorldWide Telescope website.

Microsoft is fined a record-setting €899 million (US$1.35 billion) by the European Union’s anti-trust commission for the company’s failure to comply with the organization’s March 2004 antitrust decision.