The Great Geek Manual

1876
Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for an “Improvement in Telegraphy,” which will later come to be known as the telephone. (US No. 174,465) The patent application was submitted on February 14, just hours ahead of Elisha Gray. This first telephone has only one transducer for both listening and speaking. Originally envisioned as a way to transmit music to homes from a central location, the phone soon gains popularity as a means of communication. Within a short time after filing the patent, the Bell Company (Bell’s newly formed corporation) is besieged by lawsuits and challenges to the patent. On March 10, Bell will speak the famous words “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you” through a phone to his assistant after spilling some acid in their workshop. The message will be the first transmitted over a phone.

1926
The first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversation takes place, between New York and London.

1933
The game “Monopoly” is created and trademarked by Charles Darrow in Atlantic City. It is preceded by several other real estate games. The first, called “The Landlord’s Game,” was invented by Lizzie Magie of Virginia (patented 1904). In it, players rented properties, paid utilities and avoided “Jail” as they moved around the board. Darrow set about creating his own version, modeled on his favorite resort, Atlantic City. He introduced several innovations in his game, which had a circular, cloth board. He color-coded the properties and deeds for them, and allowed properties to be bought, not just rented. The playing pieces were modeled on items from around his own house. The game will be mass marketed by Parker Brothers in 1935.

1979
Scientists discover a ring around Jupiter while examining photographs taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The rings of Saturn were discovered in 1610. Astronomers had discovered rings around Uranus in 1977.

1981
An eighteen year old is stabbed to death at Disneyland. It is the first homicide committed in the park.

1983
Spike TV begins broadcasting as The Nashville Network (TNN). Visit the official Spike TV website.

1990
Richard G. Wittman Jr., age 24, of Denver, Colorado, admits breaking into NASA computer systems at the Marshall Space flight Center in
Huntsville, Alabama, and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. In a plea bargain, Wittman pleads guilty to a single count of altering information (a password) inside a federal computer. In exchange for the plea, federal prosecutors dropped six similar counts. Wittman told US District Judge Sherman Finesilver that it took him about one and a half to two hours on a personal computer using Telnet via telephone lines in his apartment to tap into the space agency’s restricted files. It took NASA investigators nearly three hundred hours to track down Wittman and an additional one hundred hours to rewrite the software to prevent a recurrence of the break-in. Wittman broke into 118 systems within the NASA network and acquired “super user” status, allowing him to review the files and electronic mail of other users. Wittman admitted to the judge that he had little in the way of a computer education, stating that he had learned most of what he knew from the hand full of books the FBI had seized from his home in the course of his arrest.

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit makes a ruling in favor of Nintendo, allowing Nintendo to sue retailers who buy unauthorized video game cartridges.

1994
Intel Release the 90 & 100 MHz versions of the Pentium Processor.

1996
The first photos of Pluto’s surface are released. Pluto is the only solar-system planet never visited by a spacecraft, but it is successfully photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The release presents the images taken in 1994 by a team of astronomers. To create a global map of the surface of Pluto, they took a total of twelve images at four distinct longitudes in the visible light spectrum and eight images in the ultraviolet spectrum. These photos cover nearly the entire surface of Pluto, taken as the planet rotates through its 6.4 day period. Pluto is revealed to be a complex object, with more large-scale contrast than any other planet, except Earth. The images also show almost a dozen distinctive albedo features, or provinces, never seen before. Read the original press release at the official Hubble website. See photos the original Hubble photos at the official Hubble website.

1997
Epic MegaGames, Inc. announces the Jay Wilbur, the former chief executive officer of id Software, has been hired as “Imperial Advisor”.

For the first time ever, an internet entry wins Bob Levey’s Washington Post neologism contest. Contestants are charged with creating a new word to describe a negative reaction to Washington. Scott Burroughs’ suggestion, “sqwashington,” arrived just eleven minutes before an identical entry. Visit Bob Levy’s official website.

Nintendo plans to cut the price of the Nintendo 64 from US$199 to US$150 in the United States. A Japanese newspaper reports that the cuts come in response to Sony Computer Entertainment America’s (SCEA) recent PlayStation price cuts. Nintendo officials will later refuse to confirm that the cuts are in response to Sony’s cuts, however.

1998
The website of The Jerusalem Post is hacked.

2000
The Intel Corporation announces a plan to offer a personal computer and Internet access for free to all of its seventy thousand full-time and part-time employees as early as July 2000.

2001
Express.com (www.express.com) files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Jesus Oquendo, age 27, of Queens, New York is convicted and sentenced in Manhattan federal court to twenty-seven months imprisonment on charges of computer hacking into the system of Five Partners Asset Management LLC, a venture capital company based in Manhattan, under the alias of “Sil”. Oquendo left a taunting message on the company’s network, “Hello, I have just hacked into your system. Have a nice day.”

Yahoo, Inc. warns that they expect that 2001 earnings to drop below the newly reduced estimates. They also announce that Tim Koogle, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), will step down from his position.

2002
Apple Computer announces the one millionth download of its iPhoto software.

Sony announces it will release a Linux development kit for the PlayStation 2 on May 22. The US$200 kit will include a 40GB hard drive, an Ethernet adapter, a mouse, and a keyboard. Visit the official PlayStation 2 developer’s network.

2006
The one millionth unique user joins the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection network at 1:31am PST.

2007
Marvel’s Captain America Number 25 hits newsstands. In it Captain America dies after being shot by a sniper twice, once through the shoulder and once in the stomach. Captain America first appeared in 1941 was actively in print for nearly sixty years. His obituary follows:

Steve Rogers, who had fought evil for 66 years as the red, white, and blue super soldier Captain America, died today. He was 89.

Rogers was fatally shot by a sniper as he left the Federal Courthouse in New York City. “Few details are clear at this time, but the scene outside the Federal Courthouse in Manhattan is a portrait of chaos and confusion as a former superhero has been shot,” Marvel comics reported on its website. However, some reports indicate that the assassination was orchestrated by the Red Skull and that the sniper was Crossbones.

Steve Rogers was born on July 4, 1917 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, to Irish immigrants Sarah and Joseph Rogers. Though rejected to serve his country in World War II, the scrawny Rogers was enlisted in a top-secret defense project called Operation: Rebirth. While in the program Rogers was given the Super Soldier serum and thus was born Captain America, who made his first appearance in 1941.

In 1945, after a botched attempt to stop an experimental drone plane equipped with an explosive, Rogers was hurled into the ocean. His body was not found and he was believed to be dead. Cap’s sidekick Bucky died in the explosion. Years later Rogers’ body was discovered in the North Atlantic, frozen in a block of ice.

In the recent superhero “Civil War,” Captain American led the Ant-Registration faction and resistance movement. But after realizing that his fight against the Registration Act was endangering civilians, Cap surrendered and ordered his faction to stand down.

A bio-pic on Rogers and his exploits as Captain America is in the works via Paramount.