The Great Geek Manual

1687
Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the three volume explanation of Newton’s laws of motion. Read Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica online.

1865
The world’s first maximum speed law is enacted in England. The speed limit of 2mph in town and 4mph in the country is imposed under the Locomotives and Highways Act.

1879
A near-complete skeleton of a Mastodon is discovered near Newburgh, New York, by a farmer’s son while digging a ditch. The area had been a bog until drained and cultivated fifty years earlier. From a five-foot deep trench over the next three days, neighbors unearthed about two hundred petrified bones, including ribs, spine, legs, feet, and a skull with its teeth and lower jaw in tact. The find will be reported in The New York Times on July 8th and 9th.

1908
In Paris, a French officer displays a new, powderless electric gun.

1923
The Kodak Model A film camera and Model A motorized Kodascope projector, the first complete 16mm system, are introduced in the US.

1937
Spam, the luncheon meat, is introduced the Hormel Foods Corporation. Read more about the history of Spam. Visit the official Spam website.

1944
Harry Crosby takes the first rocket airplane, the MX-324, on its maiden flight, at Harper Dry Lake, California. It was built by the Northrop Corporation. The rocket motor in the MX-324 uses monoethylaniline and red fuming nitric acid. After a tow to 8,000 feet from a P-38, the Aerojet motor is ignited and begins to produce 200lb of thrust. The flight lasts over four minutes and ends with a safe landing. The gliders are constructed of a metal tubing center section, with plywood elsewhere. The pilot lay prone, allowing it to be an all-wing aircraft, with no protruding cockpit. The craft also has the advantage of allowing the pilot to withstand a great deal of g-forces while maneuvering. Read more about the MX-324.

1951
Dr. William Shockley of Bell Labs announces the invention of the junction transistor in Murray Hill, New Jersey. This new type of transistor overcomes problems created by earlier point-contact transistors. The junction transistor consists of three layers. The outer layers are semiconductors with too many electrons (N-type) and the inner layer has too few (P-type). They don’t have the same ability to handle signals that fluctuate extremely rapidly as point-contact transistors, but in every other way, they are superior. The NPN transistors are much more efficient, use very little power, and are so much quieter that they can handle far weaker signals than the type-A transistors ever could. The junction transistor is a mudlike substance in the center of the board.

1954
At 19:30, the first edition of BBC Television News and Newsreel airs with and introduction by Richard Baker and voice-over commentary read by John Snagge and Andrew Timothy.

1956
Live studio scenes are first included in the BBC’s colour television experiments.

1966
A Saturn I-B rocket, an unmanned Apollo test flight, the first Apollo orbital mission, is launched at Cape Kennedy and makes four orbits at an altitude of about 113 miles (180km). The AS-203 mission will successfully evaluate the performance of the S-IVB instrument unit stage under orbital conditions and obtain flight information on venting and chill-down systems, fluid dynamics, and heat transfer of propellant tanks, attitude and thermal control system, launch vehicle guidance, and checkout in orbit. The Saturn rocket is designed for transporting humans to the moon, requiring a rocket larger and more powerful than any built before. It combines five F-1 rocket engines to yield more than 7.5 million pounds of thrust.

1974
The first quadraphonic experimental broadcast by the BBC is transmitted, the front pair of channels on Radio 2 stereo, the rear pair on Radio 3.

1984
At Atari, many departments outside of engineering are notified that Friday will be their last day of employment. In a meeting held with customer service, management announces its intentions to reduce Atari to a just two hundred people. Shiraz Shivja and a few other employees appointed by Jack Tramiel interview engineering personnel at Atari. Those already working on 68000 projects were clearly being prioritized. By Thursday, superiors will ask employees, such as Jerry Jessop, if they wish to stay at Atari or take advantage of a severance package that will expire after Friday, July 6.

1991
In San Francisco, California, US District Court judge Fern Smith rules in favor of Lewis Galoob Toys over Nintendo, allowing the manufacture and sale of the Game Genie to continue. Nintendo alleged that the product infringes on its copyrights, and plans to appeal the decision.

1993
Peter Steiner’s famous “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon appears on page sixty-on of The New Yorker. (Volume 69, No. 20)

1994
Intel announces the first of two price cuts on its microprocessors in a move designed to keep rival companies from taking a larger share of its market. Long dominant in the microprocessor industry, Intel will try a number of tactics to make its Pentium chips standard for IBM-compatible personal computers.

1995
The Smith Corona Corporation, a major manufacturer of typewriters and personal word processors, files for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code with liabilities of US$198.8 million against assets of $207.9 million. The growing use and affordability of personal computers are blamed.

1996
The first known Excel macro virus, “Laroux,” is discovered in Africa and Alaska. The virus was written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). It is able to operate under Excel 5.x and 7.x under Windows 3.x, Windows 95 and Windows NT. Once an Excel environment has been infected by this virus, the virus will always be active when Excel is loaded and will infect any new Excel workbooks that are created as well as old workbooks when they are accessed. The macros are stored in a hidden datasheet named “laroux”. ExcelMacro/Laroux consists of two macros, auto_open and check_files. The auto_open macro executes whenever an infected Spreadsheet is opened, followed by the check_files macro which determines the startup path of Excel. If there is no file named PERSONAL.XLS in the startup path, the virus creates one. This file contains a module called “laroux”. Laroux contains no deliberately destructive payloads; it exists only to replicate. Before long, it Laroux will become one of the most common Windows viruses in circulation.

Dolly, the first cloned sheep, is born at the Roslin Institute, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Scientists had replaced the nucleus of an egg cell with the nucleus from a parent cell – in Dolly’s case, an udder cell from a a Finn Dorset sheep. Somehow, the egg cell reprogrammed the donated DNA contained within its new nucleus, and Dolly is the result. The manipulation was done using microscopic needles, a method pioneered in human fertility treatments in the seventies. The resulting embryo was implanted into the womb of a third, surrogate sheep. Biologist Keith Campbell is recognized as having the key role in the team’s work, which was supervised by Ian Wilmut. The birth of Dolly will be announced in early 1997.

1997
The Board of Directors of Apple decides to ask for the resignation of CEO and Chairman Gilbert F. Amelio and to ask part-time advisor Steven Jobs to take over the position.

1998
Three hundred websites are hacked by the members of the “Milw0rm” and “Ashtray Luberjacks” hackavist groups.

1999
Videotopia is featured on CBS This Morning. Videotopia is a traveling science museum exhibition documenting the entire history of video games. It is the most comprehensive such exhibit currently in existence, encompassing not only every significant commercial video arcade machine and game console ever produced, but also interactive multimedia kiosks containing information about the history of the games’ development and their impact on popular culture. Watch the CBS report on Videotopia’s website.

2000
The Brazilian website of Centro Virtual de Estudos Polmticos is hacked by “M3L40″. View an archived version of the defaced website.

The Brazilian website of Companhia De Informatica Do Parana – Celepar is hacked by “M3L40″. View an archived version of the defaced website.

The Brazilian website of Jucelia Queiroz Amaral is hacked by the hacking group “Crime Boys”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

The Harry Potter fansite, The Leaky Cauldron (TLC) is launched by Kevin C. Murphy as a Geocities website loaded with the Blogger publishing system. Visit the current Leaky Cauldron website.

The website of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Ministery of Information is hacked by “M3L40″. View an archived version of the defaced website.

2006
Apple announces a special educational configuration of the iMac, replacing the old G4 eMac.

An auction begins in the Entropia Universe with an opening release of six new land areas full of hunting and mineral rights that will close in late July with a total of thirteen properties sold. The various virtual land masses include remote snow covered mountains, riverfront estates, vast rainforests, jungles, lake homes, and more sold for a combined US$213,784.00 dollars. Visit Entropia’s official website.