The Great Geek Manual

1790
The very first United States patent is granted to Samuel Hopkins of Vermont for a process for making potash and pearl ashes for use in in soap and fertilizer. (US No. 1) The patent is granted for a term of fourteen years and signed by President George Washington, who signed the first US patent statute into law on April 10, 1790.

1930
The radio program The Shadow airs for the first time on the Mutual Broadcasting System. Listen to original episodes of The Shadow at the Internet Archive.

1964
The American space probe Ranger 7 transmits the first photo moon’s surface ever taken by a US spacecraft, mapping the surface for a future lunar landing. Ranger 7 carries six slow-scan vidicon TV cameras capable of transmitting high-resolution television pictures of the lunar surface. A total of 4,308 photographs before Ranger 7 crashed in Mare Cognitum (Sea of Clouds).

1971
NASA astronaut Dave Scott becomes the first person to drive a vehicle on the Moon. The battery-powered Lunar Rover (LRV) is first used during the Apollo 15 mission, in the mountainous Hadley-Apennine region. The LRV, built by Boeing, weighs 460lb (209kg) and folds into a space 5ft by 20in (1.5m by 0.5m). Each wheel is independently driven by a 200W electric motor, and the rover has a top speed of about 8mph. It allows the astronauts to travel further from their landing site to sample a wider variety of lunar materials. During the course of the mission, the car travels 17.4 miles (28km) and is used to collect about 168 pounds (76kg) of lunar material to return to Earth.

1976
NASA releases the famous Face on Mars photo taken by the Viking 1. Later, after analysis of higher resolution photos from the Mars Global Surveyor, the face will be determined to be an optical illusion, but until then, the face will spark imaginations and lead to rampant conspiracy theories.

1980
Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Pocket Computer manufactured by the Sharp Corporation, featuring a twenty-four character display, a QWERTY keyboard, and 1.9KB of programmable memory. Price: US$230

Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Color Computer, featuring the Motorola 6809E CPU and 4kB RAM. The TRS-80 has the same case, keyboard, and layout as the AgVision/VideoTex terminals, and it also closely resembles its predecessors. Price: US$399

Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Model III, featuring a Zilog Z80 processor and 4KB RAM. Price: US$699

1994
The Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA) publicly announces a new rating system for video games based on violence, sex, and language content. The rating system will later come to be known as the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).

1997
Version 3.03 of the Netscape Navigator web browser is released. Visit the official Netscape website.

1998
Interplay releases the platform game Heart of Darkness for the PlayStation in the North America. The game was the first video game ever to be scored by a full orchestra, but because of delays in the game’s release, it isn’t the first game to reach store shelves with a full orchestral soundtrack. Instead, The Lost World: Jurassic Park became the first game to feature a full orchestral soundtrack when it was released on November 17, 1997. (ESRB: E)

1999
The Brazilian website of the Ministério da Educação is hacked by the hacking group “bl0w team”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

NASA intentionally crashes the Lunar Prospector spacecraft into the lunar surface, bringing its mission to detect frozen water on the Moon to a close.

2000
Intel releases the 1.13GHz Pentium III processor, incorporating 44 million transistors in a 0.13-micron process. Code-name: Tualatin

The website of Korea Telecom is hacked by “ph33r the b33r”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

2003
Felix Baumgartner, age 34, became the first man to glide across the English Channel without an aircraft when he jumps from a plane thirty thousand feet above Dover, England wearing carbon fiber wings attached to his back. He glides twenty-two miles across the Channel in ten minutes at a starting speed of 220 mph and slowing to a speed of 135 mph. Baumgartner finishes his flight with a parachute landing in Cap Blanc-Nez, France.

2004
The Sophos security firm releases a report revealing that seventy percent of virus activity for the first of 2004 has attributed to one eighteen year-old named Sven Jaschan. Jaschan, the confessed author of both the Netsky-P worm, which accounted for nearly half of all virus activity in addition to the Sasser worm. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, tells the press that, “For a single German teenager to have such an impact on computer security is simply staggering.” July 8, 2005, Jaschan will receive a very lenient twenty-one month suspended sentence for releasing the viruses because he was a minor at the time of their release.

2006
The Entertainment Software Association announces that their annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show will be scaling back “into a more intimate event focused on targeted, personalized meetings and activities” from the “mega-show” it has been for over a decade. The group cites the rising costs for attending publishers becoming counter-productive as one of the reasons for closing the current show.

2007
A beta version of R+, a commercial version of the R programming language is released.

2007
The iTunes Store sells its three billionth song, just one month after becoming one of the top three music retailers in the US with ten percent of all sales.

2008
NASA announces that the Phoenix spacecraft has confirmed the presence of water on the surface of Mars, as predicted by the Mars Odyssey orbiter, when ice was accidentally heated, releasing water vapor for the craft’s mass spectrometer to detect.

2009
The Mozilla Foundation announces that its open source Firefox Web browser has been downloaded over one billion times to date. The milestone comes just seventeen months after its five hundred millionth download. According to Firefox director Mike Belztner, Mozilla estimates there are 300 million Firefox users, up from the 175 million users the previous year.