The Great Geek Manual

1990
Andrew Milner and Phil MacKay release version 0.01 of RemoteAccess BBS (RA) software. Written in Turbo Pascal and Assembly Language, RemoteAccess is initially a QuickBBS clone, but it will quickly outstrip its competition in terms of features and popularity.

The Muses-A or Hiten lunar orbiter is launched by Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. The Hiten is the first space probe not of Soviet or U.S. origin to reach a lunar orbit. However, the two-stage probe will fail to send back data. Visit NASA’s profile of the Hiten orbiter.

The United States Secret Service and the New York State Police raid the homes of three members of the hacker group Masters of Deception (MoD), “Acid Phreak”, “Phiber Optik” (Mark Abene), and “Scorpion” in New York City after AT&T’s national telephone system crashed. Mark Abene and other MOD members are suspected of having played a part in the incident. No charges will be filed, as AT&T will vehemently deny that hackers were involved. The cause of the crash will later be pinned on a software error.

1995
Macromedia completes the acquisition of Altsys, the developers of Freehand, a vector graphics editor. Visit the official Macromedia Freehand website.

1997
Apple Computer releases Mac OS 7.6, the first part of Apple’s new OS strategy, exactly thirteen years after the debut of the Macintosh.

Microsoft releases version 5 of Visual FoxPro for Windows. Visit the official Visual FoxPro website.

1998
The website of Program One, Inc is hacked by “GiftGas”, “Sn1per”, and “SpiritWalker”.

The website of TSI is hacked by “Giftgas”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

2000
At approximately 7pm GMT, the United States National Security Agency (NSA) experiences “serious” computer failures, leaving it unable to process intelligence data for seventy-two hours. Later in the week, the agency will reveal that although “no significant intelligence information has been lost,” thousands of man-hours and US$1.5 million dollars were required to remedy the situation. Visit the official website of the NSA.

Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard (HP), IBM, and other computer manufacturers begin selling systems with the Windows 2000 operating system pre-installed.

EMI of the UK and Warner Music of the U.S. announce that they will merge to become the world’s largest record company, with nearly a twenty-five percent global market share. The deal would allow the companies to better compete with the Universal Music Group of France. However, European regulators will oppose the plan and it will fail. Visit the official EMI website. Visit the official Warner Music website.

Norwegian authorities raid the home of Jon Lech Johansen and seize computer equipment. Johansen had gained global notoriety for releasing the DeCSS application for decrypting DVD video disks.

Sun Microsystems releases the Solaris 8 operating system. Visit the official Solaris website.

2001
AOL Time Warner announces that it will cut about two thousand jobs in an effort to streamline operations.

Japan’s leading daily newspaper, The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, reports that the Sega Corporation has admitted that it will be discontinuing production of the Dreamcast video game system after March 2001 in favor of releasing games for rival systems.

A misconfigured router leaves several Microsoft websites offline, leading to widespread speculation that the sites had been hacked.

Novell releases version 7.1 of the SUSE Linux operating system.

2004
NASA’s Opportunity rover lands on Mars, arriving three weeks after the landing of its identical twin, the Spirit rover.

At the World Economic Forum, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates tells audiences “two years from now, spam will be solved.” During the talk, Gates predicts the creation of an internet-wide authentication system that would verify senders’ identities and levy some form of micropayment fees on e-mail.

In the journal of Physical Review Letters, a team of MIT researchers announce the creation of a new form of matter, called a fermionic condensate, sixth known form of matter, after gases, liquids, plasma, solids, and Bose-Einstein condensates, which were only discovered in 1995. A fermionic condensate is a superfluid phase formed by fermionic particles at low temperatures where a Bose–Einstein condensate is a superfluid phase formed by bosonic atoms under similar conditions. The researchers predict that fermionic condensates could help lead to the next generation of superconductors.

2006
Jeanson James Ancheta, age 20, pleads guilty in a Los Angeles court to hijacking nearly half a million computers and harnessing them to send out spam in what prosecutors characterize as the first case in history to specifically target botnet use. Ancheta was arrested on November 3, 2005 by the FBI on a seventeen count indictment that includes allegations of conspiring to violate anti-spam legislation, computer misuse, and fraud in connection with a fourteen month botnet campaign that he launched in June 2004. Under the terms of the plea agreement, Ancheta will be sentenced to serve four to six years in prison and pay US$15,000 in restitution. The agreement also stipulates that he forfeits the proceeds of his botnet campaign, which includes US$60,000 and a 1993 BMW. Read more at ZDNet.

The Walt Disney Company, the third largest media producer in the the world, agrees to purchase Pixar Animation Studios in a US$7.4 billion all-cash deal, leaving Steven Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder. Visit the official Pixar website.

2007
Google drops the beta tag from Google Groups. Visit the official Google Groups website.

In an entry on his blog, Rick Jelliffe reveals that a Microsoft employee offered to pay him to make corrections to Wikipedia articles regarding Office Open XML. In response, a Microsoft spokesperson will later defend the offer by explaining that the article had been “heavily written” by IBM employees in support of their rival OpenDocument format, though no evidence of that claim will ever be provided.

2008
Version 2.6.24 of the Linux operating system is released. Visit the official Linux website.

2010
Having earned a cumulative US$552.8 million domestically and another US$1.28 billion internationally (US$1.84 billion worldwide), Avatar becomes the second-highest grossing movie in history in Canada and the United States, not adjusting for inflation, as well as the best selling movie overseas in history. The movie opened December 18, 2009.

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