The Great Geek Manual

1896
The Aerodrome No. 5 makes the first successful flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air craft of substantial size. Its inventor, Samuel Pierpont Langley, launches the craft using a spring-actuated catapult mounted on top of a houseboat on the Potomac River, near Quantico, Virginia. In its first flight it travels 3,300 feet (1,005 meters), in its second flight, later the same afternoon, it travels 2,300 feet (700 meters). In both instances, it travels at a speed of about 25mph.

1925
John Logie Baird is granted a British patent for a spiral scanning disc which makes his mechanical television possible.

1949
The Electronic Delayed Storage Automatic Computer (EDSAC), the first practical stored-program computer, runs its first program and performs its first calculation. EDSAC was assembled by Maurice Wilkes of Cambridge University in England. It features a paper tape I/O, has a high-speed memory (mercury delay lines), three thousand vacuum tubes, and will be the first stored-program computer to operate a regular computing service. For programming the EDSAC, Wilkes established a library of short programs called subroutines stored on punched paper tapes. It performs 714 operations per second.

1962
The first US nuclear warhead fired from a Polaris submarine is launched. The submerged USS Ethan Allen test-fires a Polaris A-2 missile with a live nuclear warhead across the Pacific Ocean toward Christmas Island, 1,700 miles (2,700 km) away. The test, code-named Frigate Bird, is the only test the US ever conducted with any nuclear ballistic missile from launch through detonation. After a 12.5 minute, 1,200-mile (1,900 km) flight, the warhead exploded in the air between 10,000 and 15,000 feet (3,000 and 4,600 meters) high with a yield of 600 kilotons. Thirty miles from the air burst, at periscope depth, the USS Carbonaro captured the mushroom cloud on film.

1982
According to Twin Galaxies, Eric Ginner, age 20, scores 1,140,070 points playing the Atari game Dig Dug after playing the game for fifty-five minutes at the Central Park Center in Mountain View, California. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

1991
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Half a Life” first airs. (No. 196) In the episode, Lwaxana Troi finally finds love, but her new love has an appointment to undergo a ritualistic suicide. Memory Alpha entry

Sierra On-Line announces The Sierra Network, a dial-up modem-accessed service for playing computer games with others.

1995
Nintendo of America announces the development of its upcoming Ultra 64 game machine. It features a 93.75MHz MIPS R4300i processor manufactured by NEC with 16kB instruction cache, 8kB data cache, 64-bit integer and floating-point units, and a 32-bit system interface. A 62.5MHz Reality Coprocessor chip handles audio/video processing. The release is targeted for April 1996.

1996
The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “For the Cause” first airs. (No 494) In the episode, Sisko begins to suspect his girlfriend Kasidy is a Maquis smuggler. Memory Alpha entry

The Star Trek: Voyager episode “Tuvix” first airs. (No. 140) In the episode, a transporter accident merges Tuvok and Neelix into a new person. Memory Alpha entry

1997
Grandmaster Garry Kasparov reaches a stalemate in the third of six games against IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer.

Veritas acquires Openvision, and NetBackup formally became a Veritas product.

1998
Apple Computer introduces a new line of black PowerBook notebook computers that are designed around Apple’s PowerPC G3 processor. The system is the first to feature a solid-colored Apple logo (in crystal white.) Price: US$2,299

At the Flint Center Theater, where the original Mac was first unveiled in 1984, Steven Jobs introduces Apple Computer’s new iMac, featuring a 233MHz PowerPC G3 processor, a 512KB backside cache, 32MB RAM, a 4GB EIDE hard disk, ATI Rage IIc with 2MB SGRAM video, a 15-inch built-in monitor, 66 MHz PCI system bus, 10/100 BaseT Ethernet, an IrDA infrared port, a 33.6 kbps modem, two USB ports, 24X CD-ROM drive, and a Bondi Blue case (a color named for a beach in Sydney Australia). According to Jobs, the iMac is “the Internet-age computer for the rest of us.” The company predicts it will be available in ninety days, but it will actually be released August 15th. Between the announcement and the system’s release, Apple will book an unprecedented 150,000 orders. Code-name: Wall Street Price: US$1,299

Ghost 5.0c, a disk cloning program, is released.

Sony releases the Dual Shock controller for the PlayStation in the US.

1999
The Dell Computer Corporation reveals plans to build a manufacturing facility near Nashville, Tennessee. The Round Rock, Texas-based company estimates that the project will create a thousand new jobs in the Nashville area by the year 2000 and upwards of three thousand new jobs within five years.

2002
In San Jose, California, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is held. At the event, Steven Jobs unveils the latest Mac OS version, code-named Jaguar, and the iChat instant messaging software. QuickTime 6 and QuickTime Broadcaster are released to developers.

Intel releases the 2.26, 2.4 and 2.53 GHz Pentium 4 processors, with 533 MHz front-side buses. Price: US$423, US$562, and US$637, respectively.

2003
Apple Computer releases updated eMac computers, featuring 800-1 GHz G4 processors, 40 or 80GB hard drives, and 17-inch monitors.

CCP Games releases the persistent-world massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) Eve Online for the PC in the UK and US. Visit the official Eve Online website.

2004
Version 1.0 of Paint.NET is released. Paint.NET is a bitmap graphics editor for Windows, developed on the .NET Framework. Paint.NET originated as a computer science senior design project during spring 2004 at Washington State University (WSU) and was mentored by Microsoft. Paint.NET is written in the C# programming language, with small amounts of the C++ used for installation and shell-integration related functionality. Rick Brewster, one of the main designers, says on his weblog that version 1.0 was written “in 4 months … and was 36,000 lines of code.”

2005
The Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Demons” first airs. (No. 420) In the episode, a xenophobic faction on Earth threatens to undermine talks to form a new coalition of planets. Memory Alpha entry