The Great Geek Manual

1816
George E. Clymer of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania begins manufacturing the first printing press invented in America, the Columbian Printing Press, which he invented in three years prior. The device is iron, unlike its predecessor, the Gutenberg press, and it operates by means of a system of compound levers where the Gutenberg used an iron screw. At approximately US$400, the new press cost about twice the cost of a wooden press.

Read more about the Columbian Press at the National museum of American History.

1885
Ottmar Mergenthaler is granted a US patent for his linotype machine. The device allows printers to set entire lines of lead type as “slugs” for printing, drastically simplifies justification, and it introduces keyboards to the typesetting process. It will first be employed by the New York Tribune in 1886, and it is estimated that the device reduces the labor required by previous printing presses by eighty-five percent.

1930
The Adler Planetarium and Astronomical Museum is opened to the public in Chicago, Illinois. It is America’s first modern planetarium, and it was constructed by Max Adler, a former vice president of Sears, Roebuck & Co. at the cost of US$1 million. The the opening, a program using the Zeiss II star projector is presented by Professor Philip Fox, who resigned from the staff of Northwestern Observatory in order to take charge of the new facility. Adler was inspired to build the planetarium when he visited the world’s first planetarium at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. Visit the official website of the Adler Planetarium.

1934
Hans G. Lubszynsky and Sidney Rodda of EMI apply for a patent on the Super Emitron image iconoscope television camera tube.

1936
Efficiency experts August Dvorak and William Dealey patent the Dvorak typewriter keyboard. (US No. 2,040,248) Dvorak and Dealey designed the typewriter in a manner which would increase a user’s typing speed by placing the keys of common letters on the home row and within reach of the dominant fingers of the hands.

1937
BBC Television transmits the Coronation procession of King George VI to an audience of fifty thousand. It is the first official broadcast from outdoors, and the event marks the first use of a mobile television studio, known as an Outside Broadcast Van.

R.R. Law and Dr. Vladimir Zworykin of RCA give a demonstration of a large-screen television to the Institute of Radio Engineers in the US. The projector uses a Kinescope tube, the designers having recognized that a different type of tube is required for projection televisions than for domestic receivers. Visit the official RCA website.

1941
German engineer Konrad Zuse completes the Z3, the first fully automatic, programmable computer. It’s major advancement on its predecessors, such as the device designed by Charles Babbage is the implementation of a binary system. Earlier computers were based on decimal systems. The machine is capable of performing three to four additions per second, and one multiplication in between 3 and 5 seconds.

1965
The Soviet spacecraft Luna 5 crashes on the Moon.

1977
A judge grants Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) a restraining order prohibiting Microsoft from licensing 8080 BASIC until July 8 or until the arbiter’s determination is made.

1982
Release 18 of the Infocom interactive fiction game Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz is published.

1987
Knopf publishes the science fiction novel Sphere by Michael Crichton as a hardcover. (ISBN: 0394561104) Length: 385pp

1994
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) approves the Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) standard for connecting storage devices such as hard disks and CD-ROM drives inside personal computers.

1996
A group of investors announces they have acquired Prodigy Services, Co. online service from IBM Corporation and Sears, Roebuck and Company. The takeover is led by Prodigy management, including Ed Bennett, president and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), as well as International Wireless, Inc., a global communications company.

1997
Intel reveals that Pentium Pro and Pentium II chips contain a flaw that may cause occasional errors. Officially dubbed “Flag Erratum,” Intel declares a recall unnecessary and promises a software-based patch to correct the issue.

The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Blaze of Glory” first airs. (No. 523) In it, the few surviving members of the Maquis launch missiles at Cardassian targets. Sisko bring the traitor Michael Eddington along on a mission to stop the missiles. However, Eddington and Sisko clash. Memory Alpha entry

1998
Following Microsoft’s appeal, a Court of Appeals grants a stay of the December 1997 injunction, allowing the Windows 98 operating system to ship with Internet Explorer 4 still bundled. Six days later, on May 18, 1998, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) will file a formal antitrust action charging Microsoft with attempting to monopolize the Internet browser market by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.

Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Movies.

1999
Advanced tickets go on sale for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Lucasfilm insists on a twelve ticket per customer limit. However, as a result, some advance tickets will be sold by “scalpers” for as much as US$100 each, which a distribution chief for the National Association of Theatre Owners will call “horrible,” in a statement explaining that the situation is exactly what they wanted to avoid. Visit the official Lucas film website.

Nintendo announces a new video game console, code-named “Dolphin,” built around a 400MHz copper microchip technology called Gekko, which is based on the PowerPC processor. Nintendo has formed an alliance with International Business Machines (IBM) and Matsushita (Panasonic) to manufacture the systems for market prior to Christmas 2000. The system will later be known as the GameCube. Its codename it derived from its model numbers, DOL-001 and 101.

The Star Trek: Voyager episode “Relativity” first airs. (No. 524) In it, Captain Braxton of a 29th century Federation ship recruits Seven of Nine to travel through time in order to prevent Voyager from being sabotaged. Memory Alpha entry

Version 1.4 of the NetBSD operating system is released. Visit the official NetBSD website.

2000
Warner Bros. releases the science fiction film Battlefield Earth, directed by Roger Christian and starring John Travolta, Barry Pepper, Forest Whitaker, and Kim Coates, is released to 3,307 US theaters. The film is an adaptation of the novel Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard. The film will be a notorious commercial and critical disaster, widely dubbed “one of the worst films ever made”. Produced on a budget of US$73 million, the film will gross US$11,548,898 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: PG-13 Running Time: 1 hr 57 mins

2003
Yahoo! Games announces that it has entered into a partnership with leading video game publishers UbiSoft Entertainment and Vivendi Universal games.

2004
The 2004 Webby Awards are announced. Winners include: Best Practices: Google (www.google.com), Commerce: iTunes Music Store, Community: Wikipedia, and Humor: The Onion.

At a conference at the University of California, Zahi Hawass, the president of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, announces the discovery of a series of structure over thousand years old that archaeologists believe to be the world’s first university, the Library of Alexandria. The series of structures, which appear to be a complex of thirteen lecture halls featuring elevated podiums, was uncovered by a team of Egyptian and Polish archaeologists in the Bruchion region of Alexandria, Egypt. Read more at Al-Ahram Weekly.

The Star Trek: Enterprise episode “The Council” first airs. (No. 322) In it, Captain Archer attempts to convince the Xindi Council that humanity is not the true enemy, but that the Trans-Dimensional Beings known as the Sphere Builders are their enemies. He manages to convince all of the species except the Reptilians and Insectoids. The Reptillians along with the Insectoids seize control of the weapon in defiance of the rest of the council and deploy it. Memory Alpha entry

The United States Department of Energy announces plans to build the world’s fastest supercomputer, a system capable of a sustained performance of fifty trillion calculations per second (compared to 36.5 trillion for Japan’s Earth Simulator). The USD$50 million computer will be federally funded, and it will be built at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

2005
In a televised special hosted by Elijah Wood on MTV in the US, Microsoft unveils the Xbox 360 video game system.

Version 2.0 of NetNewsWire a freeware news aggregator for the Mac OS X which features a three-paned interface similar to Apple Computer’s Mail client, is released. Visit the official NewNewsWire website.

2006
The BBC reports on a study that reveals that the search terms “Limewire” and “Lime wire” were among those most likely to return links to malware from an internet search engine.

Former federal computer specialist Kenneth Kwak, age 34, of Chantilly, Virginia is sentenced to five months in prison, US$40,000 in restitution, and three years of supervised release for hacking the United States Department of Education computer system under the “zero-tolerance policy” recently adopted by the US Attorney’s Office regarding intrusions into US government computer systems. Kwak pled guilty to placing software on his supervisor’s computer to gain access to the supervisor’s email and the ability to observe the supervisor’s internet browsing habits.

2008
Microsoft launches its WorldWide Telescope, a free virtual telescope with access to two terabytes of data. The telescope also displays the position of celestial objects from any vantage point on Earth at any given date. Visit the official WorldWide Telescope website.

2009
NASA astronaut Michael J. Massimino becomes the first person to ever use Twitter from space. His “tweet” reads, “From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!” Read more at the Guardian. View the message at Twitter.