The Great Geek Manual

1837
Professor Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cook successfully transmit a message between two places, almost two kilometers apart, using their needle telegraph.

1847
Richard M. Hoe of New York City is granted a patent for the rotary printing press. The revolutionary device rolls paper on a cylinder over stationary plates of type, rather than maneuvering the heavy type plates themselves.

1911
American Hiram Bingham III re-discovers the Lost City of the Incas, Vilcapampa, which will later be called Machu Picchu, where the last Incan Emperors once found refuge from the conquistadors.

1948
The character Marvin the Martian debuts in the short Looney Tunes cartoon Haredevil Hare.

1950
A rocket is successfully launched from Cape Canaveral for the first time. The rocket, “Bumper” No. 8, is a captured German V-2 rocket topped by a seven hundred pound Army-JPL Wac Corporal rocket. The V-2 climbs for for ten miles before separating from the second-stage Corporal, which then travels another fifteen miles. Canaveral will grow from four launch pads and a hand full of buildings to become the heart of U.S. efforts explore space.

1951
Physicist and engineer John Bardeen notifies AT&T Bell Laboratories that he will be leaving the company where, along with Walter Brattain and William Shockley, he had developed one of the most essential components of modern computing, the point-contact transistor. Despite his triumph, Bardeen was unhappy with Shockley, who he believed was limiting his involvement with further refinements to the transistor. Bardeen will go on to take a position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

1954
The sound of a human voice is, for the first time ever, transmitted beyond the ionosphere and returned to Earth after being reflected off of the Moon. James H. Trexler, an engineer in the Radio Countermeasures Branch at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), spoke into a microphone at the laboratory’s Stump Neck radio antenna facility in Maryland. Two and a half seconds later, his words returned to him after traveling 500,000 miles. The objective of the Communication Moon Relay project was to explore options for the Navy’s secure global communications technologies that might reduce the chance of ionospheric storms cutting off radio transmissions to the US fleet.

1969
Apollo 11 splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean at 12:50pm EDT approximately 812 nautical miles southwest of Hawaii. The three astronauts transfer to a life raft and are met by a Navy frogman. All four men involved are wearing biological isolation garments. A helicopter picks them up and transports them all to the USS Hornet, where they will stay in quarantine for three weeks.

1974
Atari releases the racing game Gran Trak 10 to arcades. This game marks the first use of ROM in an arcade games. The diode-based ROM is used to store the sprites for car, the score and game timer, and the race track. The game’s controls, which included a steering wheel, a four-position gear shifter, an accelerator, and a brake foot pedals are also all firsts for arcade games.

1991
Andrew G. Lyne of the University of Manchester announces the discovery of a planet outside the solar system, around pulsar PSR 1829-10. He will later retract his claim at the January 1992 meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta, Georgia. He will explain that the modulation of radio waves coming from the pulsar isn’t caused by the presence of a planet but is rather an artifact of the Earth’s motion around the Sun.

1994
Steve Hardt, an M.I.T. student, releases the free open source side-scroller XEvil to other M.I.T. students via Project Athena. The game is a free-for-all deathmatch that pits any player against another player or a computer player. The game will later be made available online. Despite the relatively amateur nature of the game, XEvil will gain in notoriety after being repeatedly cited as one of the most violent games of all time. Visit the game’s official website.

1996
Caldera International acquires DR-DOS from Novell.

Caldera International files an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, seeking monetary damages resulting from Microsoft’s MS-DOS licensing practices. The lawsuit also seeks a court order for Microsoft to end all per-processor license agreements on any operating system, and end pricing policies that make hardware vendors dependent exclusively on Microsoft.

The press begins covering the difficulties arising from the installation of International Business Machines (IBM) systems at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. One such report issued by the Associated Press is titled “IBM Stumbles At Olympics.” Although the company had more than three years to prepare its systems, IBM computer software installations begin failing with an unacceptable frequency. The downtime causes erroneous reports, incorrect judgments, and misrouted data. Summaries that should have been issued to the press promptly have to be typed, faxed, and retyped to circumvent IBM systems that are not behaving properly. IBM paid US$80 million to be named the “lead technology integrator” of the Atlanta Summer Olympics and had expected to escort major customers to the games to demonstrate how well the systems were functioning, but those plans were delayed or canceled altogether in light of the company’s ongoing struggles to keep the system up and running. IBM will issues statements acknowledging that some problems exist but claiming that most of the problems are “behind the scenes” and will not affect what spectators see.

1997
The same Scottish scientists who produced Dolly the cloned sheep announce that they have cloned a sheep with human genes. Polly and four other cloned lambs mark a milestone in the effort to alter the genetic make-up of animals. The scientists hope that their research will eventually lead to drugs, milk, and transplantable organs. PPL Therapeutics and the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, produced the animal, which was born on July 9th.

2000
Andrew Miffleton, age 25, of Arlington, Texas is sentenced in federal court to twenty-one months’ imprisonment and US$3,000 restitution. Miffleton, also known by the handle “Daphtpunk” associated with a group known as “the Darkside Hackers,” who were interested in using unauthorized access devices to fraudulently obtain cellular telephone service through cloned cellular telephones or long distance telephone service through stolen calling card numbers.

A French state prosecutor urges a court to challenge recent assertions made by Yahoo! Inc. that selectively barring some Yahoo! auctions from users in France is an impossible task by appointing independent computer experts to investigate the issue. The investigation is triggered by recent public concern over auctions of Nazi memorabilia.

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) introduces a commercial edition of the world’s most powerful supercomputer to date, the ASCI White. Also known as the RS/6000 SP, the computer is capable of handling up to 12.3 trillion calculations per second. Its speed is approximately thirty thousand times faster than a standard personal computer. Read more at IBM.

Novell first releases the Novell Identity Manager. Visit the application’s official website.

Stephen King posts the first installment of his electronic serial “The Plant” on his website. Each installment of the serial is freely downloadable, but King stipulates that at least seventy-five percent of downloads must be backed by a one dollar donation if fans wish to continue to see new installments. The experiment will initially be successful, but the rate of paying customers will decline over time, and only six parts of the story will be posted in all. The six parts will form a sort of standalone story, which King will tell fans that he plans to expand upon. King originally wrote “The Plant” in the mid-eighties, but the project was shelved, as his colleagues felt that the material was too much unlike his traditional work to be published. The story is about an editor who is sent a mysterious magical planet after he rejects the manuscript about magic sent to him by a man he assumes is a crackpot.

2003
Yahoo! and the Carat independent media services firm release a study revealing that young adults ages thirteen to twenty-four spend more time online than watching television. The study polled 2,500 participants, who, in an average week spent: (1) 16.7 hours online (excluding email), (2) 13.6 hours watching TV, (3) 12 hours listening to the radio, (4) 7.7 hours talking on the phone, and (5) 6 hours reading books and magazines (personal, not scholastic). Read the original press release.

2004
The pilot episode of the science fiction television series Lost is premiered at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, California.

2005
Atari releases the Atari Flashback dedicated video game console. The consoles come pre-programmed with classic Atari 2600 and Atari 7800 console games.

2006
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) agrees to pay US$5.4 billion in cash and stock to acquire ATI Technologies of Canada.

The pilot episode of Aquaman becomes one of the first television shows offered by Warner Brothers on iTunes, though only for US customers. Within a week, it will reach the number-one slot on the list of the most downloaded television shows, and it will hold that spot for over a week. Price: US$1.99