The Great Geek Manual

1878
The first commercial telephone exchange is the world is installed in New Haven, Connecticut to serve twenty-one subscribers connected by a single strand of iron wire. For the first six weeks, the exchange will not be operated at night. The first experimental message sent over the system is “Ahoy, ahoy.” The first operator is George W. Coy. A Bell franchise had been awarded for New Haven and Middlesex Counties to Coy on November 3, 1877, paid for by incorporating the system into a company with two financial partners. Coy improvised the first crude switchboard, building it from carriage bolts, handles from teapot lids and bustle wire. The concept of interconnecting phone wires had been tried before by three other men, but none of them had operated commercially. Click here to view the original patent application for the telephone exchange.

1930
Austrian-Hungarian physicist Dr. Julius Edgar Lilienfeld is issued a patent in Canada for the first solid-state amplifying transistor.

1952
The Bank of America and SRI sign a contract for the development, construction, and testing of a pilot model Electronic Recording Machine – Accounting (ERMA) to provide service to the bank’s twelve branches at a cost of US$850,000 over four years, with an additional $25,000 for subcontracts. However, engineers will later estimate that the grand total of the project was closer to US$10 million.

The EDVAC, one of the earliest electronic computers, runs its first production program.

1958
Construction begins on the first privately owned thorium-uranium atomic reactor in Buchanan, New York. The Consolidated Edison Company’s Indian Point 1 nuclear generating station is the plant designed to utilize uranium-235 supplemented with thorium-232. It will be built at a cost of one hundred million dollars on the former site of an amusement park. It will produce 275,000kW of power for New York City. It will be decommissioned on October 31, 1974 due to a lack of an emergency cooling system for the reactor core.

1960
The first photograph transmitted by radio waves bounced off the Moon is transmitted between Hawaii and Washington, D.C. by the US Navy, using an eighty-four foot diameter parabolic antenna. The image transmitted is of the aircraft carrier Hancock with sailors on the deck spelling the words “Moon Relay.” The system operates in the ultra-high frequency range at approximately 400MHz, so as to avoid interference from geomagnetic storms or ionospheric disturbances.

1983
David Plummer, 14, scores 623,720 points on Atari’s Space Duel after playing the game for one hour and fifty-five minutes at Midtown Amusements in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

1984
Ottumwa, Iowa official holds “Tim McVey Day,” in honor of McVey’s record setting one billion point, one quarter game. It is the first day held to honor a video gamer. Read the official declaration.

1986
The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes seventy-three seconds after lift off from the Kennedy Space Center, approximately nine miles up, killing all seven of the astronauts on board, including mission commander Francis R. Scobee, pilot Michael J. Smith, mission specialist Ronald E. McNair, mission specialist Ellison S. Onizuka, mission specialist Judith A. Resnik, payload specialist Gregory B. Jarvis, payload specialist Christa McAuliffe, and Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first teacher in space, as part of the Teacher In Space Program (TISP). The failure will later be blamed on a Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster which leaked due to seal which had become fragile in the previous night’s low temperatures. The Space Shuttle Challenger previously flew nine successful missions. To read more about the disaster, visit Aerospaceweb.

1988
Atari Games enters into an agreement with Nintendo to become a licensed producer of game cartridges for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

1991
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Wounded” first airs. (No. 412) In it, the Enterprise is dispatched on a mission to intercept a rouge Federation ship that is jeopardizing the Cardassian peace treaty. Memory Alpha entry

1993
Nintendo releases the platform game Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins for the Game Boy in Europe.

1994
Bandai releases Bastard!! for the Super Famicom in Japan.

1997
Ian Goldberg, a Berkeley graduate student, takes part in the RSA Data Security challenge and cracks the 40-bit code by linking together 250 idle workstations to test one hundred billion possible “keys” an hour. In just three and a half hours, Goldberg decoded the message, which read, “This is why you should use a longer key.”

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) concludes an eight-month undercover investigation which resulted in a series of raids on homes and businesses across the country. “Operation Cyber Strike” focused on individuals and groups who had passed illegal copies of computer and video game software by any one of a number of means including Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).

1998
Internet traffic is re-routed through University of Southern California (USC) computers as a test Jon Postel. Visit the official website of Jon Postel.

Radio Shack executives announce their intention to sell Compaq computers rather than IBM brand computer in their chain of seven thousand stores in the US. Visit the official Radio Shack website.

The website of Datapark is hacked by “GiftGas”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) releases the tactical roleplaying game (RPG) Final Fantasy Tactics for the PlayStation in North America. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: T (Teen)

1999
PeopleSoft, the second ranking provider of business management software, announces plans to cut 430 employees, or about six percent of its work force. The firm will also take a charge against earnings in the first quarter of almost US$175 million for the formation of a new business group called “Momentum.”

Yahoo! acquires the GeoCities webhosting services. Visit the official Geocities website.

Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Taiwan, Yahoo! Singapore and Yahoo! Hong Kong.

2000
Amazon.com announces that it has cut 150 of its 7,500 work force. Visit the official Amazon.com website.

2001
During the Super Bowl, Tampa, Florida city officials deploy state-of-the-art surveillance equipment at the Raymond James Stadium. The system, positioned at stadium entrance turnstiles, acquires facial scans of attendees and compares them against a database of seventeen hundred “known felons, terrorists and con artists provided by multiple local, state and federal agencies” using cutting edge biometric facial recognition software. The fact that attendees aren’t notified of the scans will raise serious concerns over the ethics of privacy when the security enhancements are publicly disclosed.

2002
Apple Computer announces that it has received a record-breaking 150,000 pre-orders for the new iMac since its introduction exactly three weeks ago. The company also announces that it has begun shipping the first of the three iMac models.

Apple Computer begins shipping a Power Mac, featuring an 800 MHz PowerPC processor, a 256MB RAM, a 40GB hard drive, a CD-RW drive, and an ATI Radeon 7500 graphics card. Price is US$1,599.

Apple Computer begins shipping a Power Mac featuring a 933MHz processor, 256MB RAM, a 60GB hard drive, a DVD recording drive, Nvidia GeForce 4 MX graphics card. Price: US$2,299

Apple Computer begins shipping a Power Mac, featuring two 1GHz processors, 512MB RAM, an 80GB hard drive. Price: US$2,999

Capcom releases Onimusha: Warlords for the Xbox in Japan. Visit the game’s official website.

Ubisoft releases the roleplaying game (RPG) Grandia II for the PlayStation 2 in North America. ESRB: T (Teen)

2003
Apple Computer announces a new low-end Power Mac, featuring a 1GHz PowerPC G4 processor, 256MB RAM, a 60GB hard drive, CD-RW/DVD drive, 64MB Nvidia GeForce 4MX graphics card, 56kbps modem, USB 1.1, Ethernet, Mac OS 10.2.3, FireWire 800, and iLife digital media suite. Price: US$1,499

Apple Computer announces a new midrange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac, featuring a dual 1.25GHz PowerPC G4 processors, 256MB RAM, an 80GB hard drive, CD-RW/DVD drive, ATI Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card, 56kbps modem, USB 1.1, Ethernet, Mac OS 10.2.3, FireWire 800, and iLife digital media suite. Price: US$1,999

Apple Computer announces a new high-end http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac, featuring a dual 1.42 GHz PowerPC G4 processors, 512MB RAM, 120GB hard drive, 4X DVD SuperDrive, ATI Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card, 56kbps modem, USB 1.1, Ethernet, Mac OS 10.2.3, FireWire 800, and iLife digital media suite. Price: US$2,699

2005
Jeffrey Lee Parson, age 19, of Hopkins, Minnesota, is sentenced eighteen months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release and one hundred hours of community service for creating and unleashing a variant of the MS Blaster computer worm. During the sentencing hearing Judge Pechman stated “What you’ve done is a terrible thing. Aside from injuring people and their computers you shook the foundation of technology.” Parson was indicted in September 2003, after admitting that he had created his worm by modifying the original MS Blaster worm and adding a mechanism that allowed him to have complete access to certain infected computers. Attorneys for the government calculate that more than forty-eight thousand computers were infected by Parson’s worm.

The Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Babel One” first airs. (No. 412) In it, the Andorians threaten to go to war against the Tellarites after their envoy is allegedly ambushed en route to trade negotiations. Memory Alpha entry