The Great Geek Manual

1885
French scientist Louis Pasteur and his colleagues inject the first of fourteen daily doses of rabbit spinal cord suspensions containing progressively inactivated rabies virus into nine year old Joseph Meister, who had been severely bitten by a rabid dog two days prior. The immunization will be successful. This marks the beginning of the modern era of immunization.

1905
The fingerprints of John Walker become the first to be exchanged by police officials in Europe and America. Law enforcement units in London and St. Louis, Missouri make the exchange.

1920
A radio compass is first used for aircraft navigation. In a test of the radio compass as an aid to navigation, an F5L leaves Hampton Roads and flies directly to the battleship Ohio (BB 12), ninety-four miles at sea in a position unknown to the pilot. Without landing, the plane makes the return trip to Hampton Roads, Virginia, this time navigating by signals from Norfolk, Virginia.

1928
Warner Brothers premieres the first all-talking motion picture, Lights of New York, directed by Bryan Foy and starring Helene Costello, Cullen Landis, and Eugene Pallette, in New York. Produced on a budget of US$75,000, the film will ultimately gross over US$2 million. IMDB listing

1964
The Federal Telecommunications System (FTS), the world’s largest private line network, goes into operation.

1982
James Towne, formerly a former Tektronix manager, becomes the first corporate president of Microsoft. Visit the official Microsoft website.

Microsoft becomes a registered trademark in the U.S. (US No. 1,200,236 in Int.Cls 9 and 42)

1984
About 95% of Atari employees in most departments are eliminated by Jack Tramiel. One observer will later note, “We were under no pressure at all to exit the building. We were free to take essentially anything we wanted, nobody cared or looked at anything we carried. We were also free to return on Monday and essentially take whatever we wanted and people did.” One ex-Tramiel executive will later report that after clearing the finance department, they found a great number of unsigned traveler’s checks in an unlocked safe. It isn’t known if any had been taken or why any remained.

Warner Communications sells off the home video game and computer systems divisions of Atari to Jack Tramiel for US$240 million in long-term loans. Warner has the option to purchase up to 32% interest in the new company for US$2 per share.

1989
Apple Computer announces that it will sell its 16.4% stake of Adobe Systems.

1992
Microsoft files a patent pertaining to long-filename extensions in the Windows ’95 file allocation table entitled, “Method and system for accessing a file using file names having different file name formats.” (US Patent 5,745,902) The patent will cover a means of generating and associating a short, 8.3 filename with a long filename (for example, “Microsoft.txt” with “MICROS~1.TXT”) and a means of enumerating conflicting short filenames (for example, “MICROS~2.TXT” and “MICROS~3.TXT”). It is unclear whether this patent will cover an implementation of FAT without explicit long filename capabilities. Hard links in Unix file systems do not appear to be prior art; deleting a FAT file via its long name will also remove its associated short name. Renaming a file to a “short” name also updates the long file name. Renaming a file to a “long” name will allocate a new “short” name. Finally, at the application programming interface (API) level, both names are always provided together when a directory lookup is requested. They do not appear as two separate files, and they do not have to be “matched” to determine unique files. Read more about the history of the FAT32 filesystem. Read the full patent.

The Win32 Professional Developers Conference is held in San Francisco, California. During the event, Microsoft makes the first public reference to work on “Chicago,” the next version of Windows operating systems. Microsoft also gives out over 4,500 copies of the Win32 SDK software development kit and pre-release versions of Windows NT for Intel 386/486 processors and MIPS R4000 processors.

1995
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) completes its US$3.5 billion acquisition of Lotus Development, the developer of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application, making it a wholly-owned subsidiary. Visit the official IBM website.

1996
America Online, Inc. settles lawsuits filed in California alleging that AOL had misled subscribers in regard its monthly service charges. As part of the settlement, customers will receive US$22 million in free service and cash rebates. Visit AOL’s official website.

1997
Apple Board of Director members Edgar S. Woolard Jr. calls CEO and Chairman Gilbert F. Amelio at Stonewood, his Lake Tahoe mansion to breaks the news to him that the board wishes for his to resignation following steep fiscal loses. Later, CFO Fred Anderson will assume many of Amelio’s day-to-day responsibilities.

1998
Version 6.5 of the IRIX operating system is released. It is the fifth generation of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) Unix systems. Visit the software’s official website.

1999
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in collaboration with NAI and RSA Inc., releases version 6.5.1 of PGP as freeware. The version for Windows Macs is first version of PGP to feature a graphical user interface (GUI) compatible with PGP 2.6x. Shortly after its release, it will be illegally exported anonymously.

2000
Robot Wars, now apparently abandoning the U.S. market to BattleBots‘ overwhelming success in the states, announces that it will be holding an event in London in two short weeks, inviting American competitors to attend, all expenses paid.

2001
The Walt Disney Company announces that it will close its Chicago DisneyQuest location on Tuesday, September 4th and cease planning new locations pending a thorough review of its business model. According to Disney’s website, “DisneyQuest is an Indoor Interactive Theme Park, combining cutting-edge entertainment technologies such as virtual reality and 3-D…” The park is comprised of five floors with over two hundred fifty attractions, rides, and games. The company had planned to open up to twenty locations at a cost of nearly US$30 million each, but the US$30 admission kept attendance low.

2002
The source code of the eMule peer-to-peer file sharing application is released on SourceForge at version 0.02. Visit the official eMule website.

2006
Microsoft announces that it will release a handheld to rival the iPod. Read more at GameDaily BIZ.

Scientists publish an analysis of the gene Mc1r as found in the DNA of a woolly mammoth. The gene’s structure suggests that the color of the hair in the animal’s coat had similar varieties as in currently living mammals.

ThoughtWorks releases version 1.1 of the Buildix open source operating system. Buildix is a Knoppix-based Linux distribution specifically designed for agile software development. Visit the software’s official website.

The website of the Bulgarian Justice Department is hacked by the hacking group “Crime Boys”. View an archived version of the defaced website.