The Great Geek Manual

1895
Otto Steiger is issued a patent for the “Millionaire calculating machine”. Four thousand seven hundred of the 120 pound machines will be built over the next forty years, by Switzerland’s Hans Egli. The calculating machine’s main selling point is its ability to easily perform multiplication calculations.

1946
Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, which will later be renamed Sony in 1958, is founded with about twenty employees. Read more at Sony’s website.

1952
The concept of the integrated circuit is first presented at a symposium on “Progress in Quality Electronic Components” in Washington, D.C. by radar scientist Geoffrey W.A. Dummer. He and his team of researchers at the Royal Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defense work towards developing methods of improving the reliability of the Royal Air Force’s radar systems. Dummer was working from a theory that it is possible to fabricate multiple circuits onto a single half-inch square of silicon, however, by 1956, his attempts to create such a functional circuit will fail.

1954
International Business Machines (IBM) announces the IBM 704 Data Processing System. the world’s first mass produced computer to feature floating point arithmetic hardware. The IBM 704 will leave a significant impression on the computer industry before it is withdrawn from market on April 7, 1960. Both the FORTRAN and LISP programming languages were first developed for the IBM 704, as well as the first music application, MUSIC. Physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr. of Bell Labs will synthesize speech for the first time in history on an IBM 704. A demonstration of the synthesis using the song Daisy Bell will inspire a scene in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Read more about the IBM 704 at its official IBM webpage.

1962
NASA announces that the Mercury-Atlas 7 (MA-7) manned orbital flight has been delayed several days due to checkout problems with the Atlas launch vehicle.

1963
The United States launches the Telstar II communication satellite on behalf of AT&T. On its tenth orbit, it transmits the first transatlantic television program seen in color. It succeeds AT&T’s original Telstar satellite, which ceased operating on February 21, 1962, when radiation from a high-altitude nuclear test causes transistor damage to the satellite. The Telstar II was built with shielding against such radiation.

1967
German-born American inventor Ralph Baer first tests his circuit for a simple block chase game, “Fox and Hounds”, on a standard television set. The game features one dot chasing another. The “hound” dot would disappear when it was caught. According to Baer, the game is the very first two-player video game, but Baer will later loose the game.

1990
May 7 through Wednesday, May 9, the United States Secret Service and the Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau implement Operation Sundevil, a series of raids on alleged computer hackers in Cincinnati, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. Read more in Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker CrackDown.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Most Toys” first airs. (No. 171) In it, an obsessed collector, determined to add Data to his private collection of unique items, fakes Data’s death. Memory Alpha entry

1992
NASA launches the Space Shuttle Endeavour, a US$2 billion replacement for the Space Shuttle Challenger, on its maiden voyage. (STS-49) It is the forty-seventh US shuttle mission. While capturing and correcting the orbit of a satellite, the astronauts will set new records for the duration of a spacewalk and the number of astronauts outside the craft.

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

Intel releases the Pentium II processor, featuring a new 66MHz bus interface called Slot 1, a 200MHz 32KB Level 1 cache, MMX instructions, and a 512KB Level-2 external cache. The processors are available at clock speeds of 233, 266, and 300MHz. The processor incorporates 7.5 million transistors using 0.35 micron process technology, performs at 613 MIPS (300 MHz), and is able to address 64GB of memory. This new processor’s advantages over its predecessor, the Pentium I, include an expanded instruction set (MMX) and a larger on-chip cache. Code-name: Klamath Price: US$636 (233 MHz), US$775 (266 MHz), and US$1981 (300 MHz) in 1000 unit quantities

The Star Trek: Voyager episode “Displaced” first airs. (No. 166) In it, Crew members are replaced one-by-one with aliens from an unknown race. Memory Alpha entry

The website of Gjallarhornet is hacked anonymously. View an archived version of the defaced website.

1998
Compaq Computer reveals plans to lay off up to fifteen thousand Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employees, or about twenty-seven percent of the company’s workforce, resulting in a write-off of US$2 billion following Compaq’s US$9.6 billion takeover of the company.

International Business Machines (IBM) announces the company’s fifth generation of microprocessor-based mainframe computers, the System/390 (S/390) G5.

1999
Foreign hackers deface three US government websites with messages condemning the NATO bombing of the Chinese in Belgrade, Serbia. The websites were the United States Department of Energy, the United States Department of the Interior and the National Park Service. The hackers also post pictures of the three Chinese journalists who died in the bombing to the website of the Interior Department. Read more about the incident at CNN.

Next Generation Online reports that they have discovered plans among major media outlets to attend the upcoming E3 trade show in Los Angeles, California to work up stories on violent content in video games. According to the report, some publishers have re-edited the demonstration videos that will be shown at the event to in the hope of not becoming a media target.

Visteon Rear Seat Entertainment Systems becomes available through United States automobile dealerships. The systems, designed for minivans, fit a Nintendo 64 video game system into the rear seats. Price: US$1,499

2000
Philippines authorities announce that they have no law allowing prosecution of the Manila woman suspected of creating the “Love Bug” virus that has damaged computer systems worldwide. Despite the set back, Philippine National Bureau of Investigation attempts to persuade a judge to issue a warrant to search the woman’s house, and on May 8th, the bureau will “invite” woman’s boyfriend Reomel Ramores, age 27, to answer question regarding the case. Investigators will finally seek a warrant under the Access Devices Regulation Act of 1998, which was chiefly written to protect against credit card fraud.

The website of Banco de Mexico is hacked by a Brazilian group calling themselves the “Cyb3r Fuck3rs”, whose members include: cutthroat, Pl4st1ck_3x, SysVinit, tH1JK, and VUG0. View an archived version of the defaced website.

2001
The Dell Computer Corporation reveals plans to lay off three to four thousand employees, or about ten percent of its workforce, over the next six months. Visit the official Dell website.

The official website of the Diablo II video game is hacked and defaced.

2003
During an online chat session, Brian Countryman, Manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Program, publicly announces that the Internet Explorer web browser will no longer be distributed separately from the Windows operating system. Instead the browser’s development will be seen as a part of Windows’ evolution.

The Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Regeneration” episode first airs. (No. 223) In the episode, a small group of Borg are recovered and revived after being frozen under ice in the Antarctic. Memory Alpha entry

The US subsidiary of Infogrames Entertainment, Infogrames North America (Infogrames NA), adopts the Atari brand and registered trademark for all its operations and renames its European operations “Atari Europe,” effectively changing the name of the entire subsidiary to Atari. Infogrames acquired the Atari holdings division of Hasbro in early 2001, and Infogrames also spins this original division off into a separate corporate entity, Atari Interactive. The company’s main holdings will remain named Infogrames Entertainment. Visit the official website of the Atari brand.

2004
Sven Jaschan, the eighteen year-old computer science student who authored the Sasser worm, is arrested in Rotenburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. Shortly after his arrest, he will confess to having written it when he was seventeen, along with Netsky.AC, a variant of the Netsky worm.

Universal Pictures releases the monster movie Van Helsing, directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale, is released to 3,575 US theaters. In the film, infamous monster hunter Van Helsing and his sidekick Carl travel to Transylvania to battle monsters out of legend, including Dracula and the Wolfman, in order to keep the Count from bringing his undead children to life. Though the film will gross nearly twice its budget in theaters globally, it will be extremely poorly received by critics. Produced on a budget of US$160 million, the film will gross US$51,748,040 domestically in its opening weekend. Visit the film’s official website. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 2 hrs 10 mins

2005
The first Time Traveler Convention is held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The convention was organized by Amal Dorai and other Pi Tau Zeta residents with the goal of making contact with time travelers from the future. The convention is held at 22:45 EDT in the East Campus Courtyard at 42.360007 degrees north latitude, 71.087870 degrees west longitude. The spacetime coordinates were prominently publicized in such publications as the New York Times, Slashdot, and Wired, and they will continue to be publicized so that future time travelers will be aware of the event. The idea originated in a Cat and Girl comic strip by Dorothy Gambrell.

2008
Take-Two Interactive announces that Grand Theft Auto: IV had grossed US$500 million dollars in sales in its opening week (following its April 29th release), making it the most successful entertainment launch in history. Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick explains “We believe these retail sales levels surpass any movie or music launch to date.” In comparison, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, the top-grossing film opening in history, earned US$196 million in its opening week.