The Great Geek Manual

585 BC
A solar eclipse occurs, as predicted by Greek philosopher and scientist Thales, while Alyattes is battling Cyaxares in the Battle of Halys, also known as the Battle of the Eclipse. Because of the eclipse, both armies agree to a truce, out of fear. This is is one of the cardinal dates from which historians will calculate other dates in ancient history.

1897
Jell-o is introduced, fifty-two years after Peter Cooper (inventor of the Tom Thumb engine) received the first US patent for a gelatin dessert. Pearl B. Wait, a carpenter and cough medicine manufacturer from LeRoy, New York, produced varieties in strawberry, raspberry, orange, and lemon fruit flavors, named Jell-O by his wife, May Davis Wait. Sales are poor. Wait sold the Jell-O business for US$450 to his neighbor, Orator F.Woodward, who had founded the Genesee Pure Food Co. two years earlier. Success came slowly, but with Woodward’s creative sales and sampling strategies, Jell-O began to catch on. In 1902, when he launches his first advertising campaign in Ladies’ Home Journal, sales will reached US$250,000.

1928
In the US, WGY becomes the first television station to broadcast regularly scheduled programming. It’s schedule is aired on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons from 1:30 to 3:30pm, at a resolution of twenty-four lines. Television sets were being manufactured and distributed by General Electric in Schenectady, New Jersey.

1929
The Warner Brothers’ film On With the Show, the first talking movie that is all in color, debuts at New York City’s Winter Garden theater. The film uses two-colour Technicolor and Vitaphone sound.

1934
The identical Dionne quintuplets are born in Ontario, Canada. The girls are made wards of the government and put on display at a themepark called Quintland.

1936
Alan Mathison Turing, often considered to be the father of modern computer science, submits his seminal paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem for publication. The Entscheidungsproblem, which is German for “decision problem” was posed by Hilbert in 1928: Did there exist a definite method by which any mathematical assertion could be classified as true or false? Hilbert himself felt that there were no undecidable assertions. Turing modeled the “definite method” of Hilbert’s problem with an abstract computer. Turing imagined a machine that could do everything a computer could do, read, write and erase symbols, and subject symbols to certain arithmetical and logical operations like addition, multiplication, subtraction, division, ‘anding’ ‘oring’ and so on. A universal Turing machine could theoretically be programmed to perform any computable task.

1951
The US Supreme Court upholds the Federal Communication Commision (FCC) approval of the CBS color system.

1953
Walt Disney Studios premieres Melody, the first Technicolor 3-D animated film. It accompanies the world’s first 3-D western, Columbia’s Fort Ti at its Los Angeles opening in Los Angeles, California.

1959
A Department of Defense sponsors meeting at the Pentagon to commission a committee of researchers drawn from several computer manufacturers and the Pentagon which will develop a machine-independent programming language for business applications. The result will be released in 1960 as the COmmon Business Orientated Language (COBOL) programming language. COBOL will become widely used in business, finance, and government systems.

A Rhesus monkey named Abel and a Squirrel monkey named Baker, both female, are launched on a brief suborbital space flight in the nose cone of Jupiter Missile AM-18 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. They reach 300 miles altitude, and travel 1,500 miles at speeds over 10,000mph. Heart rate, sounds, body temperature, blood pressure, and radiation levels are monitored, along with muscle performance via electromyogram. Abel is trained to tap a switch when a red light flashes, to collect data on performance. After the mission, their successful recovery is the first for living beings. The monkeys survived the flight. Afterwards Able will die under anesthesia as the doctors remove an electrode from under her skin. Baker will die of kidney failure in 1984 at the age of twenty-seven.

1971
The USSR space probe Mars 3 is launched. It will arrive at Mars on December 2, 1971.

1981
The first message mentioning Microsoft is posted to Usenet.

1985
The board of directors of Apple Computer votes to remove Steve Jobs as general manager of the company’s Macintosh division.

1987
CompuServe releases the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) standard as a new format to save and retrieve computer-based images. The format uses a palette of up to 256 distinct colors from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame. The color limitation makes the GIF format unsuitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well-suited for more simple images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color. The standard is intended to replace their earlier Run-length encoding (RLE) format, which was restricted to black and white.

A robotic probe finds the wreckage of the USS Monitor near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

1990
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Ménage à Troi” first airs. (No. 372) In the episode, the Ferengi kidnap Deanna, her mother, and Riker. Memory Alpha entry

1992
The Summer Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is held in Chicago, Illinois, over four days. Nintendo has a 76,000 square foot booth, the largest in the history of the trade show. At the event, Nintendo announces that it will sell the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) system with one controller for US$99 in the US.

1993
Hollywood Pictures releases the film Super Mario Bros., starring Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper, and Samantha Mathis, to 2,081 US theaters. The film is based on the characters featured in Nintendo video games. It is the first major motion picture to be based on a video game. The film won’t be a huge critical or financial success, despite boasting such high-caliber actors as Hoskins and Hopper. The film is popularly criticized for having a boring plot while still being noted for its stunning visual effects. Produced on a budget of US$48 million, the film will gross US$8,532,623 in its opening weekend. IMDB listing

1996
Apple Computer announces the Macintosh Performa 6320CD computer, featuring a 120 MHz 603e PowerPC processor, 16MB RAM, 1.2GB hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, sixteen preinstalled titles, and fifteen CD-ROM titles. Price: US$2599

1998
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the K6-3D processor, featuring 66MHz front side bus, 32 KiB L-1 Cache, 3DNow! and MMX technologies.

America Online (AOL) agrees to settle complaints that it misled consumers by paying US$26 million to forty-four separate states. This announcement comes two years after complaints were lodged when AOL switched from hourly to flat-rate fees that inspired users to jam their systems. The terms of the settlement include AOL’s obligation to give subscribers a minimum of a thirty day notice of service changes and to make it clear that there is a one month limitation to the advertised initial fifty free hour offer.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) opens at the Atlanta Convention Center in Atlanta Georgia. The three day event will draw 41,300 people from eighty countries.

NASA releases a picture of what California astronomer Susan Terebey said may be the first extrasolar planet ever seen, dubbed TMR-1C. Digitized pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope seem to show an image of a planet apparently flung from a pair of young stars in the constellation Taurus, 450 light years from Earth. Located at one end of a bright trail that led from the newborn stars, the faint object appeared as if it is their offspring, a planet a few times as massive as Jupiter that has been expelled from its birthplace. However, by the following year, scrutiny of its spectrum will suggest to other astronomers that it could merely be a background star.

1999
Columbia Pictures release the film The Thirteenth Floor, directed by Josef Rusnak and starring Craig Bierko, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Gretchen Mol, and Vincent D’Onofrio, opens in 1,815 US theaters. The film is loosely based on the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye and the German mini-series Welt am Draht (World on Wires) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The film centers around the executive of a tech firm who enters a virtual world to investigate the death of his business partner. One of the characters grows suspicious and, upon discovering that his world his a simulation, escapes into the world of the executive. However, the mystery deepens as the executive begins to suspect that his own world is not what it appears to be, after all signs point to the possibility that he himself killed his partner while possessed by someone else. Produced on a budget of US$11,802,224, the film will gross US$3,322,416 in its opening weekend. IMDB listing

Japanese Business Trade newspapers report that Fujitsu, Hitachi Ltd., Mitsubishi, NEC, and Toshiba all posted losses that total nearly 300 billion yen or about US$2.4 billion. Reported to be a sign of an economic crisis in Asian, all five companies had expected to post a profit during the current fiscal year.

Yahoo! completes the acquisition of GeoCities for US$3.57 billion from . Yahoo’s acquisition of GeoCities will prove extremely unpopular and users will soon begin to leave en masse to protest the new Terms of Service imposed by Yahoo! for GeoCities. The site’s new terms will state that the company owns all rights and content, including media such as pictures. Yahoo! will quickly reverse the decision, but the service’s long growth had come to an end. Visit the official Geocities website.

2001
Crave releases Tokyo Xtreme Racer: Zero for the PlayStation 2 in Japan and in a limited release in North America.

Sega releases Crazy Taxi 2 for the Dreamcast.

2002
TheNerds.Net online electronics store is hacked by “Zilterio”. The next morning, 100,000 TheNerd.Net customers will receive emails from Zilterio@yahoo.com, which stated, in part, “I HATE TO INFORM YOU that your account has been hacked on THENERDS.NET. This site has a very weak security protection system and the database with credit cards and other personal information is not protected at all.” Included in each message was each email recipient’s personal information, including credit card number.

2003
3DO, a game and console developer, announces that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US, giving the company time to find a buyer for the company.

The first cloned horse is born in a natural delivery. It is the first cloned mammal born to its genetic mother. The foal, named Prometea, was created in the lab by fusing an adult skin cell and an empty egg then returning the resulting embryo to the female’s womb after a few days. The cloning was accomplished by Professor Cesare Galli, of the Laboratory of Reproductive Technologies in Cremona, Italy. It was the only successful birth of 328 reconstructed embryos. DNA tests confirm that the clone is genetically identical to both her mother and twin. Although clones are currently banned from racing, tissue from many top animals has been stored for future cloning. The birth is announced in the journal Nature on August 7, 2003.

Novell enters the SCO v. IBM controversy by publishing a press release concerning the SCO Group’s ownership of UNIX. “To Novell’s knowledge, the 1995 agreement governing SCO’s purchase of UNIX from Novell does not convey to SCO the associated copyrights,” says a letter to the SCO Group’s CEO Darl McBride. “We believe it unlikely that SCO can demonstrate that it has any ownership interest whatsoever in those copyrights. Apparently you share this view, since over the last few months you have repeatedly asked Novell to transfer the copyrights to SCO, requests that Novell has rejected.”

In Tokyo, Japan, Sony vice president Ken Kutaragi unveils the PSX, which combines a PlayStation 2 game console with a DVD recorder. The PSX also includes a broadcast satellite tuner, a 120GB hard drive, a Memory Stick slot, Ethernet, and USB ports.

2004
20th Century Fox releases the sci-fi disaster film The Day After Tomorrow, directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum, Sela Ward, and Ian Holm, is released to theaters worldwide. The film was inspired by the book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. Produced on a budget of US$125,000,000, the film will gross in its opening weekend. Worldwide, it’s the 40th top grossing film of all time, with total revenue of US$542,771,772, and it’s the second highest grossing movie not to be number one in the US box office, behind My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The film is most notable for the excessive dramatization of the effects of global warming in a quasi-scientific manner. IMDB listing

Comcast launches G4techTV in Canada and the United States after purchasing the TechTV cable channel and merging it with Comcast’s own G4 channel. G4techTV keeps some shows from TechTV, such as The Screen Savers, as well as shows from G4, such as The Electric Playground. On the whole, the merger is ill-received by former fans the very popular TechTV channel.

GMX Media releases The Black Mirror for Windows in the UK.

2006
The New York Times first reports that the new Batwoman character will be written as a lesbian of Jewish descent in an effort by DC editorial staff to diversify its publications. The new incarnation will first appear in week 7 of the mini-series 52 in July.

2008
Mininova announces that it has served five billion bittorrent files. Visit the official Mininova website.