The Great Geek Manual

1648
Margaret Jones is hanged in Boston for witchcraft in the first such execution for the Massachusetts colony.

1822
Charles Babbage announces his invention of a small mechanical difference engine able to carry out complex operations at a rate of about twelve calculations a minute mechanically in a paper entitled, “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables,” which he reads to the Royal Astronomical Society in London, England. In 1823, he will begin constructing an industrial strength calculator, which he will be abandon in 1834 due to a series technical and bureaucratic problems.

1834
The first US patent for a practical underwater diving suit is issued to Leonard Norcross of Dixfield, Maine. Calling it a “Diving Armor,” he designed the airtight leather outfit with a brass helmet connected via a rubber hose to an air bellows pump on a boat. To reduce buoyancy, the feet of the suit are weighted with lead shot. In May 1834, one month earlier, he tested the diving suit in the Webb River. Norcross will later name his son Submarinus in honor of the achievement. The first truly effective diving suit with a pump is attributed to Englishman Augustus Siebe, in 1829.

1881
Six patents are issued to Thomas Edison for electrical inventions, including two concerning an “Incandescent Electric Lamp,” an “Incandescent Electric Lamp,” a “Magneto or Dynamo Electric Machine,” about “Electric Lighting,” “Manufacturing Carbons for Electric Lamps,” and an “Electric Meter.” (US Nos. 242,896 to 242,901)

1884
New York becomes the first state in the US to enact legislation requiring the utility wires to be buried. The legislation requires that in any incorporated city with a population over 500,000, “all telegraph, telephonic and electric light wires and cables … be placed under the surface of the streets, lanes and avenues.” Furthermore, the act requires that telegraph poles are to be removed prior to November 1, 1885.

1892
A number of patents are issued to Thomas Edison for a variety of inventions, including a “Pyromagnetic Generator,” an “Expansible Pulley,” a “Trolley for Electric Railways,” a “Means for “Propelling Electric Cars,” an “Electric Locomotive,” a “Lightning-Arrester,” a “Conductor for Electric Railways,” an “Electric Meter,” a “Method of and Apparatus for Separating Ores,” an “Incandescent Electric Lamp,” and an “Electric-Arc Lamp.” (US Nos. 476,983 to 476,993)

1898
Three patents are issued Thomas Edison, which are for a “Drying Apparatus,” a “Phonograph,” and a “Mixer.” (US No. 605,475, 605,667, and 605,668)

1922
US President Warren G Harding gives a speech at the dedication of the Francis Scott Key Memorial in Baltimore that is broadcast by local radio station WEAR. It’s the first time a US president has been broadcast live.

1923
Charles Francis Jenkins gives the first true demonstration of television, or “Motion Pictures by Wireless”, using NOF. NOF, the call letters for radiophone broadcasts from Anacostia Naval Air Station, D.C., United States.

Charles Francis Jenkins makes his first experimental wireless television transmissions with a mechanical system called “Radiovision” from the Navy radio station in Anacostia to his Jenkins Laboratories office in Washington DC. It is the earliest transmission of moving silhouette images.

1938
Action Comics issues the first Superman comic.

1941
John Mauchly arrived in Iowa City for a meeting with John Atanasoff to see his computer. The two computer pioneers will later dispute who will be named the legal inventor of the electronic digital computer in court. Atanasoff will emerge from the long and tangled legal battle as the victor after Honeywell Inc. charged Sperry Rand Corp. with enforcement of a fraudulent patent. During the course of the trial, Atanasoff’s work emerged and a judge will determine that his work had preceded and contributed to the development of the ENIAC.

1943
Greyhound proposes using helicopter buses for large-scale public travel in an application filed with the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). Industrial designer Raymond Loewy and inventor Igor Sikorsky conceived the concept for a streamlined fourteen seat air bus. A scale model is shown at a hearings before the CAB, but none will ever be built. The company’s plan is to provide landing ports by adapting Greyhound bus terminals. The venture will be publicized in a New York Times article on September 9, 1945.

1948
The TeleVision Guide program listings journal is launched in New York by publisher Lee Wagner. The publication will eventually evolve into the TV Guide, which, for many years, will be the top-selling and most read publication in the US. Another listings guide, TV Digest is launched in Philadelphia by the Barowski brothers publishing company at nearly the same time.

1951
The UNIVAC I, the first commercial, general-use computer, is unveiled in Washington, DC. and dedicated five years after the ENIAC, the first electronic computer in the US was completed. The Univac was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert and manufactured for the US Census Bureau by the Remington Rand Corp. The massive computer is eight feet high, seven and a half feet wide, and 1fourteen and a half feet long. It can retain a maximum of one thousand numbers and is able to add, subtract, multiply, divide, sort, collate, and take square and cube roots. Its transfer rate to and from magnetic tape is ten thousand characters per second.

1952
The keel is laid for the first American atomic submarine, the USS Nautilus (SSN-571), in a ceremony attended by President Harry S. Truman. It was built by the Electric Boat Company, a division of General Dynamics Corp., under the supervision of Captain Hyman George Rickover. Its liquid-cooled atomic reactor provides power for steam turbines. The submarine will be launched in early 1954, tested under nuclear power on January 17, 1955, and completed April 22, 1955.

1954
The DuMont television network, the world’s first commercial television network, opens its Tele-Centre, a five-studio production facility built in the former Central Opera House at 205 East 67 Street, New York at a cost of US$5 million. Designed for live productions, with the five control rooms stacked above each other, it also features DuMont Labs’ transciption kinescope recording system. One studio is equipped for color film and slide output. The facility has a capacity for producing over one hundred sixty programs a week.

1962
The European Space Research Organisation, which will one day become the European Space Agency, is established in Paris, France.

1965
Inward Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) service is introduced on a trial basis in the state of Alabama by AT&T in an attempt to reduce the time spent by operators processing toll calls for business clients. The service, which would eventually come to be known as a “flat-rate plan,” will allow customers to receive unlimited long distance calls at a fixed price. The first inward WATS area code issued is 800.

1967
NASA launches the Mariner 5 space probe on a mission to Venus from Cape Canaveral.

1981
On Saturday, June 13 and Sunday, June 14, David Jannise, age 19, plays a top scoring game of Asteroids that lasts for thirty-six hours and twenty-nine minutes at the Rainbow Roller Rink in Beaumont, Texas.

1985
Apple Computer announces 1,200 layoffs, which amounts to approximately one fifth of its employees.

Paramount Pictures releases the science fiction film D.A.R.Y.L., directed by Simon Wincer and starring Barret Oliver, Mary Beth Hurt, Michael McKean, and Danny Corkill, to 1,100 US theaters. The film centers around a robot built in the form of a boy who is so lifelike that he is mistaken for a real boy, and, when liberated from a government laboratory, he is adopted by a couple who are consternated by the boy’s amazing abilities. The title of the film is the main character’s name, which is an acronym for “Data Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform.” The film will gross US$2,649,832 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG) Running Time: 1 hrs 40 min

1989
Nintendo releases the puzzle game Tetris for the Game Boy in Japan.

1993
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Timescape” first airs. (No. 625) In it, Picard, Troi, La Forge, and Data return from a conference to discover that the Enterprise has been trapped in temporal stasis on the very brink of destruction at the hands of the Romulans. Memory Alpha entry

Time Warner, one of the world’s largest media companies, announces a partnership with Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), a world leader in high-performance computing graphics technology, to create the Full Service Network (FSN), an interactive television test deployment to 4,000 homes in Orlando, Florida, despite having acknowledged the superiority of Sun technology and having publicly made assurances in mid-April that Sun had won the deal.

1994
Nintendo releases Donkey Kong for the Game Boy in Japan. The game is loosely based on the 1981 arcade game of the same name and its sequel Donkey Kong Jr.

1996
Columbia Pictures releases the comedy film The Cable Guy, directed by Ben Stiller and starring Jim Carrey, Matthew Broderick, Leslie Mann, and Jack Black, to 2,657 US theaters. The film is notable for being star Jim Carrey’s first US$20 million paycheck, which is the highest amount ever paid to a comedic actor. Produced on a budget of US$47 million, the film will gross US$19,806,226 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 1 hr 36 mins

1997
Tamapittchi, a cellular phone with a Tamagotchi built into it, is released in Japan. Tamagotchi has been popular as a keychain virtual pet which grows and survives by means of simple interaction by it’s “master.” Price: 45,000 Yen

1999
In the case of Robot Wars vs. BattleBots, US courts decide that Robot Wars has no right to prevent BattleBots from holding tournaments.

Intel releases the 400MHz Mobile Pentium II processor for use in mobile computers. The Mobile Pentium II processors, along with Celeron processors, are Intel’s first line of processors to be manufactured are the first made with 0.18 micron manufacturing process.

United States District Judge George O’Toole sentences Robert Simons, age 62, to serve a seventy month prison sentence and to pay US$908,000 to Microsoft and US$440,000 to the federal government for conspiring with his son to sell over twenty million dollars worth of stolen Microsoft software through their software store, Crazy Bob’s, in Wakefield, Massachusetts. His son is sentenced to twenty-two months in prison and to pay one hundred thousand dollars to Microsoft. The pair had acquired the software from two ex-KAO employees who plead guilty to selling stolen property.

Version 4.61 Netscape Communicator, the Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, is released. The suite includes the Netscape Navigator web browser, the Netscape Messenger e-mail client and news client, the Netscape Address Book address book, the Netscape Composer HTML editor, the Netscape Calendar enterprise calendar client.

2001
News begins to circulate that Ericsson, a leading provider of communications networks, plans to reduce their staff from 105,000 down to 90,000 and may even have to to continue their reductions down to 70,000. Just six months ago, Ericsson’s job ads boasted that the company had “more than 100,000 employees in over 150 countries.”

The research firm Ipsos-Reid releases a report indicating that literally billions of people within thirty countries of the world have no interest, need, money, or equipment to surf the Internet. Conversely, about four hundred million people use the Web on a daily basis. The survey indicates that ninety-eight percent of respondents own at least one television, that forty-eight percent own a personal computer, and that thirty-six percent have access the Internet.

A study conducted by Edison Media Research is reveals that 5.5 percent of Americans ages sixteen to forty have actively downloaded music from the Internet while not having purchased a music compact disc or cassette in the past year. The study surveyed 748 adults throughout the US.

2002
Version 5.0 of the Java Ascii Versatile Editor (JavE), a freeware GUI tool written in Java for drawing ASCII art. Visit the official JavE website.

2005
The bulk of the Solaris operating system is released on the Opening Day launch of the Sun Microsystems OpenSolaris project. Visit the official OpenSolaris website.

Yahoo! acquires DialPad Communications, a pioneer in the field of VoIP services. The software will be used as a core component of Yahoo’s voice communications products across its portal network, as well as in its instant messaging application.

2006
Google officially launches Google Maps for Enterprise as a commercial service, featuring intranet and advertisement-free implementations.

The Swedish newspaper SvD reports that The Pirate Bay had relocated its servers back to Sweden because of “pressure from the Department of Justice [in the Netherlands].” Upon reopening on June 3, 2006, its number of visitors doubled due to media exposure. That in turn increased the advertising revenues of founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. Directly after they raid, the site’s advertisements generated about US$75,000 per month according to speculations by the Swedish newspaper.

Windows developer Philip Su posts a blog entry in which he decries the development process of Windows Vista, stating that “the code is way too complicated, and that the pace of coding has been tremendously slowed down by overbearing process.” In the post he also describes Windows Vista as having approximately fifty million lines of code, with about two thousand developers working on the product.