The Great Geek Manual

Today is Cinco de Mayo in Mexico and the United States, as well as Tango no Sekku (Boy’s Day) or Kodomo no hi (Children’s Day) in Japan.

1809
Mary Kies becomes the first woman to be granted a US patent. The patent is granted for a technique to weave straw with silk or thread. The technology will be used to manufacture straw bonnets.

1834
William Whewell writes a letter to Michael Faraday concerning names to describe the process of electrolysis which he was investigating. Whewell suggests the names Anode and Cathode. The terms are based on the Greek prefixes “ana-” meaning “up” and “kata-” meaning “down.” The chosen prefixes refer to the idea that that electric current flowed from a battery’s positive to a negative pole, in the manner that water would flow down from a hillside to a valley. He suggests the term ion for the two together, rather than Zetodes or Stechions. Faraday would later reply that he was “delighted with the facility of expression which the new terms give me and I shall ever be your debtor for the kind assistance you have given me.”

1925
High school science teacher John Scopes, age 24, is arrested in Dayton, Tennessee for teaching Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in a Tennessee’s public school. Scopes had agreed to act as defendant in a case intended to test Tennessee’s new law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in its public schools. On May 4, the day before Scopes’s arrest, the Chatanooga Times had run an ad in which the American Civil Liberties Union of New York, concerned by the law’s infringement on constitutional rights, offered to pay the legal fees of a Tennessee teacher who was willing to act as a defendant in a test case. George W. Rappelyea and other resident leaders of the small mining town of Dayton met at Robinson’s drug store. Rappelyea saw the publicity that would accompany such a trial as an opportunity to promote the town. He approached John T. Scopes, a teacher and football coach, who, hesitant at first, agreed to test the legality of the law in court.

1943
The film curator of the Library of Congress, Howard Walls, announces that about 5,000 films will be preserved in the library.

1945
The only WW II civilian deaths in the mainland United States results from a Japanese bomb dropped over Gearhart Mountain, Oregon by an unmanned balloon. The deaths occur when the bomb is disturbed, killing the civilians who discovered it during a picnic: five children and Elsie Mitchell, the pregnant wife of a minister. Sand in the ballast bags carried by the balloon will be identified under a microscopic as having come from Japan. Earlier, on February 23, 1942, the mainland was first bombed (without casualties) by shells fired from a Japanese submarine about a half-mile offshore of Ellwood, California.

1952
Robert Noyce presents the concept for the integrated circuit at Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. The final design will allow conductive channels to be printed directly on the silicon surface. Noyce will go on to found Intel Corp. with Gordon Moore and Andy Grove.

1961
NASA Astronaut Alan Bartlett Shepherd, Jr. becomes the first American to travel in space when he makes a fifteen minute suborbital flight that reaches an altitude of 115 miles, during which he experiences about five minutes of “weightlessness.” He was launched in the 2,000 pound capsule Freedom 7 from Cape Canaveral, Florida by a Mercury-Redstone 3 rocket. The flight traveled 302 miles at a relative ground speed of 4,500 mph. Although Shepard became the first American in space, the world’s first human in space flight was Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, launched into orbit less than one month earlier, on April 12, 1961.

1977
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), maker of the Altair 8800, files for a restraining order against Microsoft, to prevent Microsoft from licensing 8080 BASIC until its dispute with MITS is resolved.

1980
XCOR Aerospace sells twenty percent of its holdings in Williams, an electronic gaming and amusement company based in Chicago, Illinois that will later make its mark in the coin-operated arcade video game market.

1981
At the National Computer Conference in Chicago, Atari announces that the 8K Atari 400 will be discontinued and that the price on the 16K version is being reduced to US$399.

1988
WordPerfect ships WordPerfect 5.0 for personal computers. Price: US$500

1992
Id Software Inc. releases the original Wolfenstein 3D, the first-ever first person shooter computer game for DOS computers. The game follows an American soldier named BJ Blazkowicz who is attempting to escape from a Nazi stronghold. There are many armed guards, as well as attack dogs. The building has a number of hidden rooms containing various treasures, food supplies, and medical kits, as well as three different guns and ammunition.

1993
The final episode of the science fiction television series Quantum Leap, “Mirror Image,” first airs. (No. 522) In it, Sam must decide whether to return home or continue leaping. The series ran for ninety episode over five seasons. The series was unusual in that it’s impetus was firmly established as science fiction, but the series itself rarely relied on science fiction or fantasy story devices. Rather, the series’ episodes most often played out as dramas centered around the personal story of the character had jumped into each week. As such, many science fiction fans have criticized the series being categorized as science fiction.

1994
Nintendo announces that their forthcoming Project Reality will be a cartridge-based system, despite the fact that the current trend is to convert to a CD-based platform. According to Nintendo, CD-ROM Input/Output (I/O) is too slow for a video game system.

1995
Chris Lamprecht, age 24, also known as “Minor Threat” becomes the first person banned from the Internet. After being sentenced to seventy months in prison for laundering US$153,000 from the sale of stolen Southwestern Bell circuit boards, Lamprecht is also given the unusual punishment of being allowed no access to the Internet until 2003 by order of Judge Sam Sparks of the US District Court. While he is a known computer hacker, Lamprechtnor is not nor ever will be proven guilty of a computer related crime, making the sentence even more unusual. In the early nineties, Lamprecht is known to have wrote a wardialing program for MS-DOS called ToneLoc (an amalgam of the words Tone Locator). The program is modeled on the program Matthew Broderick uses in the movie WarGames. It scans for dial tones in order to find open modem lines in a telephone exchange. Read more at Wired News. View an interview with Minor Threat.

1997
Caldera ships OpenLinux Standard 1.1, the second offering in Caldera’s OpenLinux product line.

The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Children of Time” first airs. (No. 520) In the episode, the starship Defiant is caught in a type of “time-bubble” above an inhabited planet. When they investigate, they discover that the inhabitants are the descendants of the Defiant’s crew. The inhabitants have lived on the planet for many years and their own history began when the Defiant crashed with no hope of contacting the Federation or repairing the ship. Faced with that reality, the small crew of the Defiant (including Dax, Sisko, O’Brien, etc) decide to remain and establish a society. Memory Alpha entry

1998
Bill Gates, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Microsoft tells reporters that an injunction to delay the release of Windows ‘98 “would hurt the American economy and cost American jobs.” Due to claims that Microsoft engages in monopolistic practices, Microsoft may be subject to injunctions sought by thirteen state attorney generals to stall the release of Windows ‘98, which is otherwise scheduled for June 25. Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems have been aggressively lobbying for antitrust action taken against Microsoft.

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) hosts a celebration for their full-time employees to commemorate the sale of ten thousand PlayStation game consoles. The festivities begin at 3:00pm at The Player’s Billiard and Volleyball Club in Belmont, California. Each employee is congratulated and receives a t-shirt as well as a red envelope containing a hundred dollar bill.

THQ completes the acquisition of GameFX, a 3D game developer.

1999
International Business Machines (IBM) introduces the IBM WorkPad z50 handheld computer, featuring the Windows CE operating system, a 64,000-color 8.2-inch LCD screen, an NEC MIPS 133 MHz processor, 20 MB ROM, 16 MB RAM, a keyboard, a 33kbps modem, and eight hours of battery life. Price: US$999 Weight: 2.6 pounds

John Hardie of Atari Gaming Headquarters (www.atarihq.com) forwards news that Mark Goodreau of Hasbro Interactive expects to declare the Atari Jaguar 64-bit video game system an “open system”.

Microsoft releases the Windows 98SE (Second Edition) operating system. It includes fixes for many minor issues, improved USB support, and the replacement of Internet Explorer 4.0 with the significantly faster Internet Explorer 5.

National Semiconductor reveals its intentions to exit the competitive Personal Computer market with the sale of its Cyrix processor division. Instead, it will refocus on chips designed specifically for “smart devices”. Although the details of such chips are not revealed, National Semiconductor’s wholly owned Mediamatics has placed a three-quarter page recruitment advertisement on page three of the Monday, April 19, 1999 issue of Silicon Valley TechWeek magazine. The ad calls for a number of engineers to work on a “DVD-on-a-chip”. National Semiconductor blames price wars between rival companies such as Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) and Intel Corporation for its decision.

The Star Trek: Voyager episode “11:59” first airs. (No. 217) In the episode Captain Janeway reminisces about one of her ancestors, Shannon O’Donnell from Indiana. Memory Alpha entry

2000
A conjunction of the five bright planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – forms a rough line across the sky with the Sun and Moon. The conjunction is not visible from Earth, because the the line of planets is behind the Sun and hidden by its luminance. Such a conjunction last occurred on February 1962 and will not happen again until April 2438.

In the case of A&M Records, Inc., et al. v. Napster, Inc., US District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel rejects Napster’s arguments that it is a “mere conduit” for information and rules that Napster is not entitled to “safe harbor” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Based on the ruling, she orders the company to stand trial for copyright infringement. This ruling establishes that knowingly failing to take steps to prevent infringement, while benefiting from said infringement, is grounds for contributory infringement, a ground-breaking precedent that will carry far-reaching effects for many internet firms. On July 26, Patel grants an RIAA request for a preliminary injunction and orders Napster to shut down.

The ILOVEYOU virus or “Love Bug” continues to spread, crippling computers around the globe. Variants of the worm are discovered damaging computer systems under new names.

RemoteAccess BBS 2.60 is released.

2004
The first picture of Titan with better resolution than any Earth based observation is taken from a distance of 29.3 million kilometers (18.2 million miles) by the Cassini-Huygens robotic spacecraft on a mission to Saturn. Titan is the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere surrounding it. The atmospheric pressure near Titan’s surface is sixty percent greater than Earth at sea level.

The Star Trek: Enterprise episode “E²” first airs. (No. 321) In the episode, the crew of the Enterprise meet their descendants from an alternate timeline. Memory Alpha entry

2006
The Walt Disney Company completes the acquisition of Pixar in a stock-swap of one Pixar share for 2.3 shares of Disney valued at US$7.4 billion that leaves Steve Jobs the single largest shareholder of Walt Disney stock.

2008
Version 2008.05 (Indiana) of the OpenSolaris operating system is released. Visit the official OpenSolaris website.