The Great Geek Manual

1852
The theory of valence was announced by English chemist Sir Edward Frankland. The theory lays out the fundamental principal that any atom can combine with a certain, limited number of other atoms.

1860
The discovery of the element Caesium is announced by German chemists, Robert Bunsen and Gustav Robert Kirchoff to the Berlin Academy of Scientists.

1894
“Wireless” is born when Guglielmo Marconi sends a radio wave three-quarters of a mile. Three years later the Marconi Company will successfully communicate “ship to shore” over a distance of twelve miles.

1925
John Thomas Scopes is given a preliminary hearing before three judges. He had been arrested and charged under a new Tennessee’s state law, the Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in public schools. Scopes had agreed to participate in a challenge to that law, with the support of the local town leaders in Dayton, Tennessee and the American Civil Liberties Union. A few weeks later, at what became known as the Scope’s Monkey Trial, he will be found guilty and fined US$100. Upon appeal, the fine will be ruled excessive and over-ruled, but the state law itself will not be found unconstitutional. Thereafter, the law will not be enforced, but it will not repealed until 1967.

1929
Disney completes the first Silly Symphony film, The Skeleton Dance. It is notable for being the first animated cartoon to use non-post-sync sound.

1949
The first planetarium in the US owned by a university opens at the University of Chapel Hill, in North Carolina. The Morehead Planetarium, one of the largest planetariums in the US, is the gift of John Motley Morehead III, class of 1891. The Morehead Building, erected at the north end of the campus, included the 68 foot dome, the 300 seat Star Theater, and the Zeiss Model II Star Projector. Morehead is an industrialist and chemist who commercially developed the production of calcium carbide, basic to manufacturing acetylene gas, which led to the founding of the Union Carbide Corporation. As the US space program began, the planetarium will provide important celestial navigation training for US astronauts in the Mercury program.

1950
The Pilot ACE, one of the first computers built in the United Kingdom, is completed at England’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and runs its first program.

1954
Gordon Kidd Teal of Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI) announces to the National Conference on Airborne Electronics in Dayton, Ohio, that TI has produced the first commercial mass-produced high frequency germanium transistor. Teal, who was the second to last speaker of the day, stunned a sleepy crowd who had been hearing from previous speakers that the procedure was still impossible. On word of the announcement, the room met with a TI executive handing out literature and disbanded, effectively leaving the last speaker without an audience.

1960
The nuclear submarine USS Triton completes the first wholly underwater circumnavigation of the Earth. IMDb profile

1962
The classic monster movie Mothra is released to US theaters. In the movie, an expedition to an irradiated island brings civilization in contact with a primitive native culture. When one sensationalist entrepreneur tries to exploit the islanders, their ancient deity arises in retaliation.

1969
Apollo 10 transmits the first color photographs of Earth from space.

1979
UC Berkeley releases the Second Berkeley Software Distribution (2BSD) operating system. The system includes two new programs by Bill Joy that will continue to be distributed with Unix systems for decades to comes: the vi text editor (a visual version of ex) and the C shell.

1983
Atari forms a joint venture with MCA Video Games, to create coin-operated video games, home video games, and computer software based on motion pictures, television, and other MCA properties.

1984
Hewlett-Packard introduces the HP 110 laptop computer, featuring a 5.33MHz 8086, 272KB RAM, a 384KB ROM, a flip-up LCD display a 80×16 text or 480×120 graphics display, the MS-DOS 2.11 operating system, and a 300bps modem. The ROM chip contains Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, MemoMaker word processor, Infocom’s Zork game, and a communications package. Price: US$2,995 Weight: 8.5 pounds

1987
Journalist G. Pascal Zachary publishes an article in Knight-Ridder newspaper affiliates, entitled “Atari picks up momentum”. Referencing the Sunday Advocate in Stamford, Connecticut, an analyst at D.H. Brown, Barbara Isgur states that she expects that Atari will “more than double its computer sales here in 1987.”

1993
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Suspicions” first airs. (No. 622) In the episode, Dr. Crusher risks her career to solve a murder. Memory Alpha entry

1997
An advanced access preview release of the Be File System (BFS) is released. BFS is the native file system for the BeOS operating system developed by Dominic Giampaolo and Cyril Meurillon over a ten month period, beginning in September 1996, to provide BeOS with a modern 64-bit capable journaling file system.

Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, reaches a stalemate in the fifth of a six game chess match against IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer.

Florists’ Transworld Delivery (FTD) officials issue a statement denying an earlier Associated Press story that FTD experienced a critical computer outage on Thursday that may affect thousands of Mother’s Day orders. Although FTD, based in Downers Grove, Illinois, acknowledged that there was a serious computer outage, they claim that all orders had been backed up and were being reprocessed properly. The false story, however, makes front page headlines while the correction is largely ignored.

1999
Apple Computer announces that over eight hundred Sears, Roebuck & Co. retail stores will begin selling the translucent iMac computers by Memorial Day weekend. In the same announcement, Steve Jobs, Apple’s “interim” Chief Executive Officer (CEO), claims that first-time computer users make up thirty-two percent of Apple iMac purchases.

SC&T International, Inc. announces a licensed partnership with VM Labs, Inc. of Mountian View, California. SC&T, according to the announcement, will manufacture and market a variety of peripherals compatible with VM Labs’ forthcoming Nuon DVD technology.

2000
At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) announces a release date in the United States of Thursday, October 26th for the PlayStation 2 and a retail price of US$299.

Intel Corporation releases the Itanium Processor Microarchitecture reference, a guide for software developers that details the functional behavior of Intel’s forthcoming Itanium processor.

In Los Angeles, California, the Electronic Entertainment Expo“>Electronic Entertainment Expo is held. The event is attended by 57,800 people.

Microsoft offers a package of restrictions on its business practices to the United States Department of Justice, as a compromise to the proposed break-up of the company.

The Star Trek: Voyager episode “Life Line” first airs. (No. 624) In the episode, The Doctor’s creator, Dr. Zimmerman, is dying in the Alpha Quadrant, and the Doctor travels there in an attempt to treat the reluctant patient. Memory Alpha entry

2001
Transatlantic cable TAT-14, completed March 21st, goes into commercial service. The cable system is a dual, bi-directional ring configuration using DWDM multiplexing (dense wavelength-division multiplex) with sixteen wavelengths of STM-64 per fiber pair. It carries 640 Gbps, corresponding to 7.7 million telephone circuits, of which 80 percent will be used for Internet traffic. The 15,000 kilometers of cable connecting Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands with the United States is owned by a consortium of fifty members, including AT&T, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, Deutsche Telekom, and France Telecom.

2002
The California State Controller computer system is hacked. Approximately 265,000 people’s personal information is exposed.

2004
Microsoft holds a press conference in Los Angeles, California. The event features a video entitled “The Novice,” in which Donald Trump pokes fun at fake Sony executives and praises Microsoft executives for their online video game strategies. Microsoft announces that it will release Halo 2 with multiplayer support on November 9. Electronic Arts announces it will begin including Xbox Live support in its games. To date, Microsoft has sold fourteen million Xbox systems.

The first official version of PearPC is released. PearPC is an architecture-independent PowerPC platform emulator capable of running many PowerPC operating systems, including Darwin, Linux, and Mac OS X. It is released under the GPL. It can be executed on Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and other systems based on POSIX-X11.

2005
Maple 10 the general-purpose commercial mathematics software package is released.

2006
The developers of Black Mesa report that a portion of the source code, codenamed “Alpha 5″, has been leaked. Screenshots of the internal alpha release have been reported on at least two forums.

In Los Angeles, California, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is held, over three days. At the event, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata announces that Nintendo is unlikely to produce new version of the Game Boy Advance in the future.

Opera announces that it will be developing a browser for Nintendo’s Wii console. Genyo Takeda, senior managing director and general manager of Nintendo’s Integrated Research & Development Division, says “For our Wii console launch in 2006, we required a browser that was fast and secure with support for the latest standards, including AJAX. Opera proved perfect for our purposes and is an exceptional addition to both the Nintendo DS and the Wii console.” The browser will be made available for free via the Wii Ware (or Wii Software in Europe) page of the Wii Shop Channel. After June 30, 2007, it will only be available for 500 Wii Points.

USA Today reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) has had a separate, previously undisclosed program in place since 9/11 to build a database of information about calls placed within the United States, including phone numbers dialed, dates, and the duration of each call. According to the article, phone companies AT&T, Bell South, and Verizon disclosed the requested records to the NSA freely, but Qwest did not. The article quotes an unnamed source as saying that “it’s the largest database ever assembled in the world.” The Bush administration will not confirm the existence of the program. On Fox News, George Bush “refused to even confirm that he was refusing to confirm or deny reports that the government is maintaining a secret domestic telephone database.” Read the original USA Today article.

2008
The website of Zimbabwe’s state-owned Herald newspaper is hacked by “r4b00f”. The headlines of the newspaper were replaced with the word “Gukurahundi“, which refers to a campaign of atrocities allegedly committed by the government that left as many as twenty thousand dead following the independence of western Zimbabwe. The site’s visitors are redirected to the website of a state-owned Sunday newspaper, and the Herald’s servers are taken offline. The servers will remain offline for nearly four full days as administrators correct the defacement.