The Great Geek Manual

1275
Chinese astronomers observe and record a total eclipse of the Sun.

1675
John Flamsteed is appointed the first Astronomer Royal of England.

1774
The Orion Nebula is first sighted by William Herschel.

1840
Alexander S. Wolcott and John Johnson open the world’s first commercial photography studio in New York City. Wolcott will patent a camera using a mirror reflector May 8, 1840.

1880
The first reproduction of a photograph with a half-tone graphic is printed in the New York Daily Graphic newspaper. The graphic is entitled “A Scene in Shantytown.”

1887
Gottlieb Daimler unveils his first automobile which he demonstrates in Esslingen and Cannstatt Germany.

William Randolph Hearst, age 23, buys the San Francisco Examiner, which will become the first building block in the later vast Hearst newspaper empire.

1925
Calvin Coolidge becomes the first President of the United States to broadcast his inaugural speech over the radio. It is broadcast over twenty-one US radio stations, the largest “network” arrangement to date.

1955
The first radio facsimile transmission is sent across the United States.

1956
An Wang sells International Business Machines (IBM) his patent on ferrite core memory for half a million dollars. Wang’s memory will be used almost universally in digital computers in the fifties through the seventies. Visit the official IBM website.

1959
The NASA spacecraft Pioneer IV misses its intended destination, the Moon, and becomes the second artificial satellite ever and the first launched by the US.

1962
The Atomic Energy Commission announces that the first Antarctic atomic power plant, the PM-3A Naval Nuclear Power Unit at McMurdo Sound, has been activated. The prefabricated plant was assembled between January and March first by a team of contractors and military technicians as a power source that will be able to operate for years without new fuel. The reactor will be decommissioned in 1972, and it will be replaced with a diesel-fueled electric generator.

1968
Orbiting Geophysical Observatory 5 launched from Cape Canaveral. It carries twenty-five experiments.

1974
Atari introduces QuadrapongKee Games releases the game simultaneously as “Elimination.” The games are the first to be housed in cocktail cabinets. Cocktail cabinets are sometimes called table cabinets. They are shaped like low, rectangular tables with a monitor set in the woodgrain top and a set of controls set on opposing sides.

1975
The first television coverage of a Canadian parliamentary committee is broadcast on television.

1977
The first Cray-1 supercomputer is shipped to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The first Freon-cooled Cray-1 supercomputer, which costs nineteen million dollars, will be used to design sophisticated weapons systems. This Cray-1 has a peak performance of 133 megaflops, and it features a distinctive housing. The system is a cylindrical tower seven feet tall and nine feet in diameter, which weighs thirty tons. It requires its own electrical substation to power it, at a cost of about US$35,000 a month. Read more about the history of Cray computers at the official Cray site.

1979
Photographs taken by the NASA robotic space probe Voyager I reveal Jupiter’s rings. Visit the official Voyager website.

1982
NASA launches the Intelsat V communications satellite.

1984
The anime Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, is released to theaters in Japan. IMDB listing Running Time: 1 hr 56 mins

1986
The Today, a newspaper which will pioneer the use of computer photosetting and full-color offset printing while British national papers are still using Linotype machines and letterpress, is launched in the United Kingdom.

1990
The NASA Space Shuttle Atlantis, the 65th manned space mission, returns from space. (STS-36)

1991
The most primitive form of the World Wide Web goes online.

Sierra releases Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers for personal computers on floppy disks. It is among the first games to make use of motion capture animation, and it cost over a million dollars to produce.

1994
NASA launches Space Shuttle Columbia on mission number STS-62. Read more about the mission.

The US Senate subcommittee on video game violence re-convenes. Seven prominent members of the game industry, including 3DO, Acclaim, Atari, Electronic Arts, Nintendo, Philips, and Sega, assure the committee that the industry will implement a self-regulated ratings systems for video games in time for the Christmas buying season. The companies will form the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA) in April. The IDSA will establish the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) to create and enforce ratings. By 2003, the ESRB will have rated eight thousand games from three hundred fifty separate publishers. Visit the official ESRB website.

1996
Comet Hyakutake is imaged by the US Asteroid Orbiter Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous – Shoemaker.

Netscape Communications announces an agreement to acquire Netcode Corporation, a developer of JAVA-based object toolkits.

Texas Instruments (TI) announces the TravelMate 5300 notebook computer, featuring a 133MHz Pentium processor with PCI bus architecture and a 256KB Level-2 cache. Price: US$5,499

1997
The comet Hale-Bopp flies directly above the Sun (1.04 AU).

Microsoft announces plans to acquire Interse, and eventually, the company’s products will become a part of Microsoft BackOffice Server.

United States President Bill Clinton bans federally funded human cloning research.

1998
Government, naval, and university computers running Windows 95 and Windows NT across the United States are crashed by an anonymous hacker. The crash affects computers running at twenty-five universities, incluing: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Northwestern University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

The website of Yuzuncu Yil University is hacked anonymously.

1999
Microsoft acquires CompareNet Inc., and eventually, it’s services will become a part of MSN Shopping.

Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) announces the formation of two new businesses established to produce critical components for the PlayStation 2 in order to reduce production costs and protect the proprietary technology. One operation is a joint operation with Toshiba to produce the 128-bit Emotion Engine chip. The second new company will produce a Graphic Synthesizer.

2000
Sony releases the PlayStation 2 video game system in Japan. It features a 294.912MHz 128-bit Emotion Engine processor, 32MB RAM, a 147.456MHz Graphics Synthesizer with a 4MB embedded VRAM cache, 2MB sound RAM, forty-eight sound channels, and a 24X CD-ROM/4X DVD ROM drive. It comes with an 8MB memory card, an AV multicable, a Dual Shock 2 controller, a PlayStation 2 demo disc, and a power cord. The main processor is classified a supercomputer in Japan, and not allowed for export. Price: ¥39,800 (about US$360)

2001
Forwarding email in Australia becomes illegal with the passing of the Digital Agenda Act, as it is seen as a technical infringement of personal copyright.

2002
The Canadian government bans human embryo cloning but permits government-funded scientists to use embryos left over from fertility treatments or abortions.

Handspring begins selling its Treo handheld computer in Europe.

Intel releases the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor-M, at speeds of either 1.6 or 1.7GHz. Price: US$401 (1.6 GHz) and US$508 (1.7 GHz) in 1000-unit quantities

2003
Del Rey publishes the sci-fi novel Tatooine Ghost by Troy Denning as a hardcover. (ISBN: 0-345-45668-8) It is the first book in the Star Wars Expanded Universe to begin to span the original Star Wars trilogy and the trilogy’s prequels. Length: 416

Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) releases Primal for thePlayStation 2 in the US. Price: US$39.99

2006
The final attempt to contact Pioneer 10 is made by the Deep Space Network, but no response is received. The spacecraft was the first to pass through the asteroid belt.

2007
Approximately thirty thousand voters take advantage of electronic voting during the parliamentary election in Estonia, the world’s first nationwide election in which citizens are allowed to vote remotely via the Internet.