The Great Geek Manual

1882
Alexander Graham Bell is granted US citizenship by the Supreme Court after his second application.

1951
A trial run of long distance customer dialing is offered in Englewood, New Jersey. It is the very first direct-dial coast-to-coast telephone service in the United States. To inaugurate the service, Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood calls Mayor Frank Osborn in Alameda, California. Three digits are added to phone numbers. They begin to talk just eighteen seconds after dialing. Before the service, coast-to-coast calls could only be placed by long-distance operators.

1961
Neil Armstrong sets a new speed record speed in an X-15 rocket plane, at 6,587km/h. Visit the X-15′s official NASA website.

1966
The Star Trek episode “The Corbomite Maneuver” first airs. (Episode 10, Production 03) In it, the Enterprise is threatened by Balok, commander of a starship from the First Federation. Memory Alpha entry

1967
The Star Trek episode “Metamorphosis” first airs. (Episode 38, Production 31) In it, Kirk finds Zefram Cochrane, inventor of the warp drive, who has been missing for 150 years and his mysterious alien companion. Memory Alpha entry

1970
The Soviet Lunar probe Lunokhod 1 launched.

1972
The Canadian Anik-1 domestic geostationary communications satellite is launched from Cape Canaveral by Telesat Canada. Anik means “little brother” in Inuktitut. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) takes three of the transponders to carry one color video signal, two audio channels, and a cue and control circuit. The satellite broadcast is received from coast to coast between thirty-ninth parallel to eighty degrees north.

1974
Two teams of American scientists announce the discovery of the “charmed quark” subatomic particle. The first group is from the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the other group is from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The newly discovered particle has a mass of 3095 MeV and a lifespan about one thousand times longer than that of other particles with a comparable mass. In 1976, the scientists leading the two groups, Samuel Ting and Burton Richter, are awarded the Nobel Prize in physics.

1981
Walter Day opens the Twin Galaxies video game arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa. Shortly thereafter, he would begin to maintain records of video game high scores around the globe. Visit the official Twin Galaxies official website.

Panasonic introduces The Link handheld computer, the size of a small book, with a keyboard but no display. It can be hooked up to a television or to a host computer via a telephone dial-up connection. Price: US$500 – $600.

1983
Activision lays off many of its staff, due to the decrease in demand for home video game machines and cartridges.

Fred Cohen, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California, presents the first documented virus, created as an experiment in computer security, to a security seminar held at Lehigh University. Others had written about the potential for creating malicious programs, but Cohen is the first to create a working example. In a paper he’ll publish approximately a year later, he will define a virus as “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to include a … version of itself.” Cohen added his virus to a graphics program called VD, written for a VAX11/750 mini-computer running on Unix. The virus hid inside VD and used the permissions users had to look at other parts of the Vax computer to spread around the system.

William Henry Gates, III of Microsoft formally announces that Microsoft Windows for the IBM PC is ready for market at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in New York City in what will be considered one of the most elaborate product introductions in industry history. The new operating system provides an extension to the popular MS-DOS operating system, featuring drop-down menus, mouse support, tiled windows, data transfer between applications, and the ability to run multiple unrelated applications simultaneously. Gates promises that the system will be released in April 1984 and predicts that, by the end of 1984, Windows will be used on over ninety percent of all IBM compatible computers; however, Windows 1.0 won’t actually be released until November 20, 1985. Price: US$100

1986
Atari exhibits a large booth at the entrance of the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas. The booth is staffed by Atari personnel and sixty-five third-party developers who share fourty demonstration stations. New products demonstrated at the booth include a US$59 monitor box from JNL Industries, a touch screen system from Video Touch, and a US$99.95 SX212 1200 baud modem from Atari. The booth’s theme is “Atari Means Business.”

1989
WordPerfect Corporation released WordPerfect 5.1. Price: US$500

1994
The Codex Leicester, a manuscript of scientific notes written by Leonardo da Vinci, is sold at auction. It is the last of da Vinci’s thirty known journals still privately owned, and it is sold to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates for US$30.8 million.

1997
At a worldwide “Apple Event,” Apple Computer introduces the Power Macintosh G3 lines of computers, featuring a 233 or 266 MHz PowerPC 750 processor, a 66MHz system bus, a 4GB hard drive, 32MB SDRAM, a 512KB cache, and a 24X CD-ROM drive. At the same event, the company announces that it will establish a chain of retailers knowns as the Apple Store, and it unveils an agreement made with CompUSA to establish a “Apple store within the store” at CompUSA locations across the country. Within twenty-four fours, Apple will report a half million dollars of sales through the Apple Store. Visit the Apple Store’s official website. Price: US$1,999

Hewlett-Packard releases the HP 360LX handheld computer, featuring a Hitachi 60 MHz SH-3 processor, 8MB RAM, 10MB ROM, a 640×240 pixel grayscale display, and the Windows CE 2.0 operating system. Price: US$699

Hitachi announces the 200MHz SuperH SH-4 processor. The unit will go into production in summer 1998. Price: US$40 in quantities of 10,000

International Business Machines (IBM) announces the world’s highest capacity desktop PC disk drive with new breakthrough technology called Giant Magnetoresistive (GMR) heads. Pioneered by scientists at IBM Research, GMR heads will be used in a new 16.8GB hard drive for the IBM Deskstar 16GP. This new hard drive has more storage capacity than any other computer. No bigger than the head of a pin, the GMR head is a major advancement over the standard magnetoresistive head.

WorldCom and MCI Communications announces a US$37 billion merger, the largest merger in US history. On September 15, 1998 the new company, MCI WorldCom, opened for business.

Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Travel.

Yahoo! surpasses twenty-five million registered US users.

1998
Reuters news service reports that an Intel executive testified that Microsoft Corporation’s, Bill Gates, threatened to withdraw his company’s $500 million in computer chip technology unless Intel abandoned a pending software project. It is some of the most dramatic testimony to date in the Microsoft anti-trust trial, which is in its fourth week.

1999
Apple Computer releases Mac OS X (DP2).

The Compaq Computer Corporation unveils a computer targeted for corporate Internet users called the “iPac“. Price: US$499

The Japanese Fair Trade Commission raids thirty Sega of Japan facilities including the company’s headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. According to later statements made by officials, the raids are focused on reports that Sega may have been involved in illegal price fixing practices.

Silicon Graphics releases IRIX 6.5.6.

Warner Bros. releases the animated film Pokémon: The First Movie to 3,043 US theaters. The film will be described as “weird and wacky humor,” “truly funny, goofy and stupid,” and “hilarious lowbrow humor.” Produced on a budget of US$30 million, it will gross US$31,036,678 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: G Running Time: 1 hr 36 mins

2000
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) lures two Russians, Alexey Vladimirovich Ivanov and Vasiliy Gorshkov, to Seattle, Washington for what is purported to be a job interview with a shady tech firm. Just hours after landing at SeaTac Airport, Ivanov and Gorshkov were arrested and charged with conspiracy, computer fraud, hacking, and extortion. The arrests are the beginning of the agency’s crackdown on the proliferation of hackers that operate outside US jurisdiction in Romania, Russia, and the Ukraine. Read a more in-depth account of the incident at LegalAffairs.org.

Warner Bros. releases the science fiction film Red Planet, directed by Antony Hoffman and starring Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss, Benjamin Bratt, and Tom Sizemore, to 2,703 US theaters. Astronauts searching for a solution to save a dying Earth from severe pollution and overpopulation on Mars suddenly find themselves struggling to survive. Among the most notable features of the film is the computer generated robot, AMEE. Produced on a budget of US$80 million, it will gross US$8,721,296 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: PG-13 Running Time: 1 hr 46 mins

2001
Apple Computer releases the first iPod, which features a 5GB “1,000 song” capacity. While the device is far from the first MP3 player on the market, it is notable for its large capacity, quick loading times, and sleek design. Price: US$399

Version 4.79 of the Netscape Communicator web browser is released. Visit the application’s official website.

2002
Apple Computer releases Mac OS X 10.3.1.

2004
By the end of the first day after the initial public release of the Firefox web browser, the application has been downloaded over one million times. Visit the application’s official website.

Google opens up the Google Advertising Professional program.

2005
The first virus to exploit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkits“>Sony-BMG’s rootkit digital rights management (DRM) technology, which controversially masks files with filenames beginning with “$sys$” from detection, is discovered in the wild. The Stinx Trojan, a variant of the Breplibot Trojan, creates a local copy of “$sys$drv.exe” in the Windows system directory, which, upon execution, installs an IRC backdoor on the infected system. The trojan is transmitted across the internet as an attachment in a spam email claiming to have been sent from a legitimate business magazine.

2006
Activision releases the first-person shooter (FPS) Call of Duty 3 for the Xbox and Xbox 360 in Europe. Visit the game’s official website. PEGI: 16+

The full genome of the California purple sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) is published and is discovered to contain many novel genes as well as many analogous gene commonly found among vertebrates.

The NASA spacecraft Cassini records a hurricane-like storm on the south pole of Saturn. It is the first time such an event has been observed on another planet.

The popular bittorrent index website TorrentSpy surpasses two million registered users less than a year after it registered its millionth user. Visit the official TorrentSpy website.

Warner Bros. releases the fantasy film The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, and David Bowie, to 2,281 US theaters. It based on the 1995 World Fantasy Award-winning novel of the same name by Christopher Priest. In it, two magicians’ rivalry ends in tragedy when the they both turn to Nikola Tesla for trick to end all tricks. Produced on a budget of US$40 million, it will gross US$14,801,808 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: PG-13 Running Time: 2 hrs 15 mins