The Great Geek Manual

1903
Richard Pearse of New Zealand reputedly flies a powered, heavier-than-air machine, nine months before the Wright Brothers make their famous and well-documented flight at Kitty Hawk. Accounts vary, but his flight may have traveled as far as 350 yards through the air before striking a large hedge. If true, the aircraft is the first to use modern ailerons, rather than inferior wing warping system that the Wrights’ early designs will use. Pearse’s machine also has a modern tricycle undercarriage permitting it to takeoff without ramps. Some sources will mark this as the anniversary of his flight, others will claim the event occurred some months later.

1930
The Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) institutes the Motion Pictures Production Code. Also known as the Hays Code or simply the Production Code, the code a set of censorship guidelines concerning crime, religion, sex, and violence in films.

John Logie Baird achieves the synchronization of sound with television pictures.

1939
Harvard and International Business Machines (IBM) sign an agreement for the construction of the Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). The computer will weigh nearly five tons and contain more than 750,000 separate components. The system will read instructions from paper tape and data from punch cards.

1951
The United States Census Bureau officially accepts delivery of the UNIVersal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC I), the first commercial computer, built by John William Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of Sperry Rand Corporation. Though it will be put into immediate use, it won’t actually be moved to the Census Bureau for months to come. The system is capable of performing 1,905 operations per second and storing data on magnetic tapes. It weighs sixteen thousand pounds, and contains five thousand vacuum tubes. It will remain in operation through 1963.

1956
The first test of the first space cabin simulator in the United States is successfully completed when Airman D. F. Smith emerges from a twenty-four hour stay in the cabin. Smith passed the time performing psychological evaluations while he was physically monitor with instruments which monitored his heart, respiration, and temperature. The cabin itself is about one hundred cubic feet in size and contains only a standard aircraft seat and a mock-control panel with displays, lights, and switches. It is equipped with air conditioning, a carbon dioxide absorption system, an oxygen supply, and a urine distillation and recycling system. This test receives national publicity which comes to a climax when, on February 16, 1958, Smith emerges from a seven day stay in the simulator to be greeted by Senator Lyndon B. Johnson and the press. The tests are held at the United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine (USAFSAM) in San Antonio, Texas.

1958
The United States Navy establishes its first atomic submarine division comprised of six submarines, three of which are atomic: the Nautilus, Sea Wolf, and Skate.

1966
Luna 10, the first spacecraft to orbit the Moon, is launched by the USSR from an Earth orbiting platform. It will enter lunar orbit on April 3, 1966 and complete its first orbit in three hours. The scientific instruments on board include a gamma-ray spectrometer, meteorite detector, and triaxial magnetometer. The spacecraft is also equipped with instruments to investigate gravity, infrared emissions from the Moon, radiation conditions of the lunar environment solar-plasma. It is battery powered, and it will operate for 460 lunar orbits before deactivating as planned on May 30, 1966.

1968
The final episode of the science fiction television series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, “No Way Back” first airs. In the episode, the Seaview is destroyed in an accident, and Mr. Pem takes Nelson back in time in an attempt to save the ship. However, Nelson discovers that he and his crew have actually been returned to the eighteenth century, from which they can never return. The series was the longest running American sci-fi series of the sixties, having run on the ABC television network for four seasons and one hundred ten episodes. TV.com

1970
NASA satellite Explorer 1 re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere at the completion of its twelve years in orbit. It was launched in 1958 in response to the Soviet launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite, and it was the first satellite to detect the Van Allen radiation belt. Read more about Explorer 1.

1981
Dr. Ananda Chakrabarty is granted a patent for a genetically engineered species of the single-celled Pseudomonas bacteria capable of breaking down crude oil into simple substances fit for consumption by aquatic life. (US No. 4,259,444) The patent comes following the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty on June 16, 1980 that held that life forms can be patented if they are the outcome of “human ingenuity and research” rather than “nature’s handiwork.”

1983
According to Twin Galaxies, Steve Haris scores a record-setting 317,850 points playing the Nintendo arcade game Popeye at the KC Pro Bowl in Kansas City, Missouri. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

1989
Howard Lincoln sends Atari Games a cease-and-desist order to stop manufacturing any version of Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). On April 7, Tengen, a subsidiary of Atari, will contend that their company owns all legal rights to produce home versions of Tetris.

IBM releases version 1.1 of its proprietary AIX PS/2 operating system

1993
A bug in the Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation (ARMM) software written by Dr. Richard Depew in an attempt to introduce the controversial concept of retro-moderation to Usenet causes two hundred copies of a message to be sent to the news.admin.policy newsgroup in rapid succession. The term Spamming is used by Joel Furr, one of the users of the newsgroup, to describe the incident. While it may be the first use of the term on Usenet, Furr borrowed it from its use in various MUD games he had previously played.

1994
The journal Nature reports the discovery of the first complete Australopithecus afarensis skull in Ethiopia.

1995
Microsoft releases Microsoft Bob for Windows. Price: US$99

1996
Version 1.20 of the EzyCom bulletin board system (BBS) is released for MS-DOS.

1998
Netscape releases the source code of its browser under an open-source license. The project is named Mozilla, and it will later be spun off into the non-profit organization named the Mozilla Foundation in 2003. Visit the official Mozilla website.

Shipments of personal computers in Japan over the past twelve months reach 6.85 million units.

1999
Shipments of personal computers in Japan over the past twelve months reach 7.53 million units.

Warner Bros. releases the science fiction film The Matrix, directed by the Wachowski Brothers and staring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, Joe Pantoliano, and Gloria Foster to 2,849 US theaters. The film will be awarded four Academy Awards, for Best Editing, Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Visual Effects, and Best Sound, as well as twenty-eight other awards. It is packed with references to cyberpunk, gaming, and hacker culture. Produced on a budget of US$63 million, the film will gross US$27,788,331 in its opening weekend and go on to become the first DVD to sell over three million copies in the US alone. Read an overview of the film at The Matrix 101. Visit the film’s official website. MPAA Rating: R Running Time: 2 hrs 16 mins

The website of The Force.net is hacked by “com-logik”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

2000
The website of Kids Party is hacked by “Wacor”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

2001
Sega discontinues production of the Dreamcast video game system, with approximately 10.6 million units sold.

2002
Version 1.0 of the Gentoo Linux operating system is released. Visit the official Gentoo website.

2003
The Calder Hall nuclear power station in England is closed after almost forty-seven years of service. When it opened on October 17, 1956, it was the world’s first commercial nuclear power station.

Intel releases the 2300MHz Celeron 2.3 and 2400MHz Celeron 2.4 processors, featuring 128KB Level-2 Caches and 400MHz Front-Side Buses.

Version 9 (not 9.0) of the Red Hat Linux operating system is released. Visit the official Red Hat Linux website.

2005
The day after the BBC announced that the new Doctor Who series would be renewed up for a second season, the BBC Press Office prematurely announced under pressure from the British Press that Christopher Eccleston would be leaving the series. His leaving was credited to a fear of being typecast and the long working hours involved in producing the show. The producers had earlier agreed with Eccleston that he would only appear for one season, without announcing his leaving until the series was finished so that the death of Eccleston’s character in episode thirteen would be a surprise for audiences. Fan reactions to the season spoiler and Eccelston’s departure so early into the series was immediate and violent. Debate and criticism would reach such a fevered pitch that several Dr. Who fan sites, including the Outpost Gallifrey, the most popular such site, were forced to close their forum for to allow a cooling off period.

Jon Lech Johansen, better known as DVD Jon, releases SharpMusique, a C# port of PyMusique, for Windows. The software allows users to download music from the iTunes Music Store before its FairPlay DRM is applied, thus leaving users free to transfer the music and re-downloaded it as needed. A cross-platform version of PyMusique was first released by Johansen on March 18, 2005, but on March 22, 2005, Apple Computer released an update that rendered PyMusique inoperative. A new, operable version of PyMusique was released the same day, but it wasn’t Windows compatible.

2006
Toshiba releases the first HD-DVD player in Japan, igniting a format war between the world’s largest electronics manufacturers. On February 19, 2008, Toshiba will announce that it will discontinue the format. Visit the official Toshiba website.

2007
In Sydney, Australia 2.2 million people participate in the first Earth Hour from 7:30pm to 8:30pm. Earth Hour is intended to be a global event during which people are asked to shut off all non-essential electricity-consuming devices for a single hour in order to raise awareness of conservation movements. The famed Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House are darked to mark the event. Visit the official Earth Hour website.

Version 1.0 of the BORGChat LAN messaging software is released. Visit the official BORGChat website.