The Great Geek Manual

1952
A patent for the Electrical Integration Circuit is issued to William “Willy” A. Higinbotham. (US No. 2,589,807) The circuit was conceived in the early forties for the Eagle radar bombsight.

1953
MGM, which has been working on its own wide-screen system, becomes the first studio to adopt CinemaScope. So as to create an industry standard and justify exhibitors’ commitment of investment in equipment, other major studios agree to adopt the Fox system as standard. Warner Bros will join later in the year after the release of The Robe but Paramount prefers to back developments in 3D.

1954
Howard Hughes buys RKO Pictures for US$23,489,478.

1955
The initial trial installation of electronic telephone switching for Morris, Illinois is announced. Recorded announcements of disconnects and changed numbers will be used in some small dial offices.

1965
Voskhod 2 is launched into space carrying Cosmonauts Aleksey Leonov and Pavel Belyayev aboard. On the second orbit Leonov leaves the spacecraft for twelve minutes, becoming the first person to walk in space. While outside the craft, he takes motion pictures and practices maneuvering. By the end of the spacewalk, Leonov’s spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum of space, and upon his return, he discovered that it was too wide to re-enter the capsule. With a bit of quick thinking, he opened a value to allow some of the suit’s air to bleed off without venting all of it, only barely getting back into the capsule in time. Voskhod 2 makes a total of seventeen orbits at an altitude of about 110 miles (177 km) above Earth.

1974
Atari Introduces Gran Trak 10. It was the first arcade game to use read-only memory (ROM) to store sprites for each car, the game timer, the race track, and the score. As such, it was the the first game to have defined characters rather than mathematically manipulated dots. The game’s controls, which include a four-position gear shifter, a steering wheel, and two foot pedals, were also all firsts for arcade games

1982
Federal District Judge George Leighton in Chicago orders Magnavox Home Entertainment Center to take its K.C. Munchkin video game off the market because of its similarity to Atari’s Pac-Man.

1986
The New York Times reports that a seventeen year-old student in New Jersey has discerned the launch of the new Soviet space station, Mir, before the Soviet government formally announced it. With a group of friends, Phillip Naranjo tracked transmissions between space vessels and control centers on Earth, and just before the Russians announced Mir on February 20, the teens had picked up some Cyrillic code.

1987
The discovery of “high-temperature” superconductivity is announced to thousands of scientists at a packed meeting of the American Physical Society in New York City. The phenomenon, discovered in 1911, is at first known to occur at only four degrees above absolute zero, when all electrical resistance in a metal sample disappears. In 1986, researchers will discover a ceramic material that is a superconductor at a temperature of more than thirty degrees above absolute zero. When published in September of that year, that news will stir the wider scientific community into action. By the time the APS meeting had convened, further discoveries had been made. The scene of excitement at the meeting will later be dubbed the “Woodstock of Physics.”

1991
In San Francisco, California, the Software Publisher’s Association holds its Spring Symposium, including the Excellence in Software Awards ceremony. Winners include: Lifetime Achievement Award: Steve Wozniak. Best Consumer Program: GeoWorks Ensemble. Best Business Program: Microsoft Windows 3.0.

1995
The SATAN (Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks) security tool is released on the Internet by Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema. The release raises a debate about whether security auditing tools should be given to the public. Visit the official SATAN website.

1996
Guillermo Gaede pleads guilty in Federal Court on charges of mail fraud and interstate transportation of stolen property. Formerly a software engineer at Intel’s Chandler, Arizona plant, Gaede stole proprietary 486 and Pentium specifications and transferred the data to video tape. He then offered the data to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) who turned the data and Gaede in to authorities.

Texas Instruments (TI) announces a new processor family, the TMS320 Digital Signal Processing (DSP), which doubles recording time in digital telephone answering devices and adds full-duplex speakerphone capabilities.

1998
Ehud Tenebaum, a nineteen year old Israeli, also known as The Analyzer, is arrested in Israel. During heightened tensions in the Persian Gulf, hackers touched off a string of break-ins to unclassified Pentagon computers in order to steal software. Officials suspect Tenebaum of working in concert with American teens to break into Pentagon computers. US Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre calls it “the most organized and systematic attack” on US military systems to date. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls Tenebaum “damn good … and very dangerous.” The attacks exploited a well-known vulnerability in the Solaris operating system for which a patch had been available for months.

Sony releases the black and white diamond patterned Dual Shock controller for the PlayStation in Japan.

Version 5.5.5 of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) freeware is illegally exported from the US anonymously.

1999
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates introduces version 5.0 of Internet Explorer at a launch event on Microsoft’s Redmond campus. Within a week, the browser will have been downloaded over a million times. At the same event, Gates announces that the second edition of Windows 98 will be released in fall 1999.

Federal prosecutors publish a report stating that Kevin Mitnick has agreed to a plea bargain in the matter of the twenty-five count indictment leveled against him. The indictment includes fouteen counts of wire fraud and eight counts of illegal possession of computer files. Mitnick, a thirty-five year old Los Angeles resident has been in custody since his 1995 arrest in North Carolina. His agreement with prosecutors includes the term that he will be barred from using computers for three years following his release and he may not profit from his story. Mitnick is the first person ever to be convicted under a law against gaining access to an interstate computer for criminal purposes. Read more about Mitnick at ThinkQuest.

Jay Satiro, an eighteen year old high school dropout is charged with computer tampering after hacking into the internal computers of America Online and altering some programs. Jay pleads guilty and will be sentenced to one year in jail and five years without a home PC.

2002
Registration begins for .aero domains, which will begin resolving on September 2.

2003
Apple Computer removes the original CRT-based iMac G3 from its main online store, effectively discontinuing the product.

2004
Adobe releases Photoshop Album 2.0.1.

2005
Jon Lech Johansen, better known by his web handle DVD Jon, releases PyMusique, an interface to Apple’s iTunes Music Store (written in Python) that allows users to purchase music before iTunes applies DRM to it and to re-download songs they’ve already purchased. In addition, the interface allows Linux users to use the iTunes Music Store for the first time. On March 22, Apple will release an update preventing the use of PyMusic. A new version will restore its functionality on Macs the same day as the update is release, and on March 31, SharpMusique, a C# port of PyMusique will be released for Windows.

Sony Pictures Entertainment releases the anime film Steamboy, directed by Katsuhiro Otomoand featuring the voice talents of Anna Paquin, Kari Wahlgren, and Patrick Stewart, to 39 US theaters. The film was the most expensive full length animated film produced to history, and it was in production for ten years. Produced on a budget of US$22 million, it will gross US$136,148 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: PG-13 Running Time: 2 hrs 6 mins

2007
Twittervision, a real-time geographic visualization of posts to Twitter, is launched. Through the service’s website, messages sent via Twitter appear on a map of the world and fade as quickly as they appear. Visit the official Twittervision website.

2008
After receiving complaints from Jewish settlers living in the West Bank, Facebook adds a feature that allows residents of Ariel, Beitar Illit, Maale Adumim, and fifteen other large Jewish settlements to list their hometowns as being in Israel, rather than the default Palestine.

Assembly of Dextre, the robot or telemanipulator, aboard the International Space Station, is completed. It will assist in the station’s construction under the guidance of ground control, freeing up the astronauts’ valuable time. Dextre is part of Canada’s contribution to the ISS and is named to represent its dexterous nature.

Gregory Kopiloff, age 35, is sentenced to 51 months in prison in what prosecutors claim is the first federal case against someone alleged to have used filesharing software to steal identities. Kopiloff plead guilty in November to accessing a protected computer without authorization, aggravated identity theft, fraud, and mail fraud after using LimeWire to gain access to bank statements, credit reports, financial-aid applications, and tax returns, of over fifty people, then using the information to buy and resell more than US$73,000 in merchandise.