The Great Geek Manual

1457
The Gutenberg Bible is printed by Johannes Gutenberg. While it isn’t the very first book to be printed using Gutenberg’s movable type system, it will become the first popular work.

1895
The first motion picture shown on a screen is presented by Auguste and Louis Lumière during a private screening for the Société d’Encouragement à l’Industrie Nationale. An invited audience at forty-four spectators at the Rue de Rennes in Paris, France, viewed the film La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière, a film they shot specially for the occasion. The film is a recording of workers leaving the Lumières’ own factory in Lyon, which manufactured photographic products. The workers stream out, most on foot, some with their bicycles, followed by those with cars. Several more such screenings will follow before the first public exhibition at the Salon Indien of the Grand Café at 14 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris on December 28. The Lumières will soon after began opening cinemas in Berlin, Brussels, London, and New York.

1935
Television broadcasts begin in Berlin, Germany, with a low definition, 180 line system.

1942
The BBC begins transmitting news bulletins in Morse code for the benefit of resistance fighters in mainland Europe.

1946
The first rocket built in the United States, one of the WAC Corporals, leaves the Earth’s atmosphere, a year after Germany had launched a rocket. The US rocket is launched from White Sands, New Mexico, and attains an altitude of fifty miles.

1955
In the UK, television broadcasting hours for both BBC and forthcoming ITV services are fixed at a total of thirty-five hours on weekdays, with a daily maximum of eight hours. Broadcasts are not to be transmitted before 9am nor after 11pm, with a closedown between 6pm and 7pm and no more than two hours before 1pm. The same restrictions apply on Saturday. On Sunday, the maximum is seven and three-quarter hours, and not more than a total of fifteen hours for the entire weekend. On Sunday, programs can be transmitted between 2pm and 11pm, with a shutdown from 6:15pm to 7:30pm. Religious services may be broadcast outside these boundaries, in addition to the total permitted hours. Broadcasts of special events are also not included in the daily limits.

1960
The first patent on a laser is issued assigned to Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes, who assign it to Bell Telephone Laboratories. (US No. 2,929,922)

1971
Dr. Thomas Stanley of RCA Laboratories applies for a patent for the Capacitance Electronic Disc (or CED), the vinyl equivalent of the DVD. (US No. 3,842,194) Stanley suggested in 1959 that video could be stored capacitively on a vinyl disc if a means could be found to mold sufficiently small signal elements into the surface of the vinyl. Formal research on this concept began at RCA Labs in 1964, and took off when the team of Jon Clemens and Eugene Keizer was put together shortly thereafter. Clemens, a recent graduate of MIT, was deeply involved with getting CED to market and can rightly be called “the father of the CED.”

Ralph Baer files yet another pivotal patent in video game’s technology. This one is for the creation of a “Television Gaming and Training Apparatus.” Baer and his colleagues are inventing interactive entertainment concepts that will become the very foundation of gaming as we know it. Read more about Ralph Baer at TalkSpot.com.

1981
RCA begins selling the SelectaVision VideoDisc, exactly ten years after RCA applied for its first patents. Based on electronic capacitance technology, RCA VideoDiscs contain a groove of varying depth which is played with a stylus sensitive to the depth of the groove immediately underneath it. The system emerges as a marvel of mass-production research and development, able to play a two-hour movie on a twelve-inch, fifteen-dollar record using a US$500 player. However, SelectaVision arrives on the market too late to compete and will fail in the marketplace, due to the drastic decreases in VCR prices. Manufacturing will be abandoned in April 1984.

Soyuz 39 carries two cosmonauts (one Mongolian) to the Salyut 6 space station.

1983
According to Twin Galaxies, Steve Harris scores a record-setting 895,140 points playing the Atari arcade game Food Fight at Bob’s IGA arcade in Kansas City, Missouri, and Ron Bailey scores a record-setting 77,490 points playing Berzerk at the Time Out Arcade in Gastonia, North Carolina. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

1984
Microsoft Press introduces its first two titles, “The Apple Macintosh Book” by Cary Lu and “Exploring the IBM PCjr Home Computer” by Peter Norton, at the 1984 West Coast Computer Faire.

1985
The Ekran 14 satellite is launched. The Ekran 14 is one of a series of geostationary Russian satellites developed to deliver one television and two radio channels to cable systems throughout the USSR as well as to individual home receivers in northern Siberia. The first satellite of Ekran series was launched in 1976.

NASA launches Intelsat VA.

1989
Nintendo finalizes a contract to port Tetris to its Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The contract includes a clause obligating its Russian creator to testify in the court battle that it knew would ensue. While the cost of the right were never publicly disclosed, the cash advance for the game was three to five million dollars.

1993
The Intel Corporation ships the first Pentium microprocessors (80586), invented by Vinod Dahm. The chips feature 60 and 66 MHz clock speeds, 100+ MIPS, with over 3.1 million transistors, a 64 bit data path, and the ability to address 4 GB of memory. Engineers Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, San Mazor, and Matsatoshi Sima, an engineer from the Japanese firm of Busicom, invented the world’s first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, at Intel in 1971. The new processor continued exponentially increased the speed and power of personal computers over the decades of its development, allowing for the incorporation of speech, sound, handwriting, and photographs into documents. Read more about the history of Busicom, visit Intel4004.com.

Microsoft released Microsoft Encarta, the first encyclopedia designed to run on a computer. Visit the official Encarta website.

1994
Soyuz TM-21 returns from the Mir space station.

1995
Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov returns after a record-setting 438 days stay in outer space.

1996
In Japan, Bandai releases the Pippin Atmark multimedia system, featuring a PowerPC 603 processor, 6 MB RAM, a 14.4 kbps modem, and a CD-ROM reader. Bandai will ultimately fail to sell enough units to justify continuing support for the system. A planned merger to Sega in January 1997 will seal the consoles fate. Sega is marketing a similar product called Netlink, so Bandai will cease all Pippin support in favor of the Sega product. When the merger faila, the Pippin will die off. Price: 64,820 yen (US$620)

The Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched on the third U.S. shuttle mission to the Russian space station Mir.

1997
The comet Hale-Bopp makes its closest approach to Earth. To read more on the history of the comet, visit NASA’s website or Hale-Bopp: The Great Comet of 1997, an article by Martin J Powell

1999
Bleem, LLC begins accepting preorders for BLEEM!, a PlayStation emulator for personal computers. The first thousand purchases qualify for the introductory price of US$19.95. Shipments begin on Saturday, April 10, 1999.

2001
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) launches the 1.33 GHz Athlon processor. Price: US$350 in 1000-unit quantities

The CeBIT exhibition in Hanover, Germany attracts 8,106 exhibitors and 830,000 visitors.

2002
New Line Cinema releases the action film Blade 2, directed by Guillermo del Toro and starring Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, and Ron Perlman, to 2,707 US theaters. It is the second film based on the fictional Marvel Comics character Blade. Produced on a budget of US$54 million, it will gross US$32,528,016 domestically in its opening weekend. Visit this film’s official website. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: R Running Time: 1 hr 57 mins

2005
A group of cosmologists announce a new theory to explain the accelerating universe as one of the after-effects of the “inflationary period” of the early Universe rather than as an effect of dark energy.

2006
Dell, the world’s largest computer manufacturer, announces that it will acquire gaming computer manufacturer Alienware Corp. for an undisclosed sum. Visit the official Alienware website.

2007
US District Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr. strikes down the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a Congressional attempt to make it a crime for commercial website operators to allow children to access material considered “harmful” (pornographic) by a contemporary community standard. The law is ruled unconstitutional on the grounds that it violates the constitutional protection of free speech. The ruling supports the injunction that prevented the law from taking effect in 1999 and the ruling in the subsequent 2004 case of Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union.