The Great Geek Manual

1869
The first issue of the scientific journal Nature, edited by astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer, is first published. The first issue includes articles on astronomy, education, moths, plants, an obituary for chemist Thomas Graham, paleontology, and several meeting notices. Visit the journal’s official website.

1922
The entrance to tomb of King Tutankhamen is discovered in the Valley of the Kings where archaeologist Howard Carter had been making extended excavations. One of Carter’s laborers stumbled upon a stone step, the first step in a sunken stairway that ran down into the rock. Carter will open the tomb of the largely unknown child-king later in the month. In 1907, Lord Carnarvon, a wealthy English aristocrat with a passion for archeology, hired Carter and financed his excavations.

1939
First air conditioned automobile, a Packard, is exhibited in Chicago, Illinois. The Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan has been known for producing luxury automobiles since 1899.

1943
The X-10 nuclear reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory goes “critical” with a self-sustaining fission reaction, becoming the world’s second reactor to achieve such a reaction. The reactor took just nine urgent months to build. Over the next year, the reactor performed flawlessly, irradiating thousands of fuel slugs, which were disassembled and dissolved so the plutonium could be extracted, bit by precious bit. It is an experimental reactor far larger and more advanced than Fermi’s Chicago pile.

1946
Radio Corporation of America (RCA) demonstrates all-electronic color television using three picture tubes.

1952
On election night, CBS News uses a UNIVersal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC I) computer to predict the outcome of the 1952 presidential election after analyzing only five percent of the tallied votes. In the race between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, the computer projects a victory for Eisenhower, but journalists Charles Collingwood and Walter Cronkite find the result so dubious in the face of opinion polls that have consistently predicted a landslide victory for Stevenson that they postpone announcing the UNIVAC results until it’s clear to everyone that Eisenhower will win. News of the prediction will vault the UNIVAC to national fame.

The United States government establishes the cryptologic organization National Security Agency to collect and analyze foreign communications. Read more about the organization’s history. Visit the organization’s official website.

1982
Compaq announces the suitcase-sized, IBM-compatible Compaq Portable, featuring a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088, 128 – 640KB RAM, a nine-inch monochrome monitor, a 320KB 5.25-inch disk drive, and either the CP/M-86 or MS-DOS operating system. It is one of the earliest progenitors of the later laptop, and it is about the size of a portable sewing machine, which earns it the nickname “the sewing machine.” It will be the first successful IBM PC clone, largely due to a black-box clone of the IBM BIOS (Basic Input Output System) that makes the Compaq Portable completely compatible with IBM computers, but it cost Compaq US$1 million to create a ROM BIOS that didn’t violate any IBM copyrights. In order to replicate IBM’s BIOS with infringing on any IBM copyrights, Compaq set up two teams of programmers. The first group made a list of everything the BIOS did for a specific set of inputs, but carefully avoided any mention of the original code. The second group then took the notes from the first team and wrote a version of BIOS that performed exactly the same as the original, written from scratch without any contamination from the IBM source code. The computer, which will be shipped in January 1983, marks the end of IBM’s hardware monopoly and the birth of a multi-billion industry. Price: US$2,995 – $3,590 (two floppy system) Weight: 28lb (12.5kg)

1984
Dell Inc. is founded in Austin, Texas by University of Texas student Michael Dell as PC’s Limited with just US$1,000 in start-up capital. The business is at first operated out of Dell’s off-campus dorm room at the Dobie Center. The startup’s mission was to sell IBM-compatible computers, with the philosophy that a company that sold directly to customers could better tailor systems to meet their buyer’s needs. Dell will later drop out of school in order to work full-time. Visit the company’s official website.

1991
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Unification (Part 1)” first airs. (No. 507) In it, Spock is reported to have defected to the Romulans. Picard and Data travel to Romulus on a cloaked Klingon vessel to investigate. The episode is notable for the guest appearance of Leonard Nimoy as Spock and the brief dedication to Gene Roddenberry, who died on October 24, at the beginning of the episode. Memory Alpha entry

1994
TriStar Pictures releases the horror film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Kenneth Branagh, Robert De Niro, Helena Bonham Carter, Ian Holm, Tom Hulce, and John Cleese, to 2,177 US theaters. The production is notable for closely following the storyline of the original novel. Produced on a budget of US$45 million, it will gross US$11,212,889 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: R Running Time: 2 hrs 3 mins

1996
Corel releases version 7 of the CorelDraw vector graphics editor for Windows. Visit the application’s official website. Price: US$695 or US$249 (Upgrade)

1997
Apple Computer announces an agreement with the CompUSA retail chain under which Apple will launch a “store within a store” at 148 CompUSA locations to directly market Macintosh systems. Over the course of the holiday season, Mac sales increase from three percent of CompUSA system sales to fourteen percent.

1999
Disney Interactive, ESPN, and Konami announces an agreement to produce a line of ESPN sports games.

Version 1.2.1 of the Sather programming language is released. Visit the language’s official website.

2000
Tor Books releases the fantasy novel When The King Comes Home by Caroline Stevermer as a hardcover. (ISBN-10: 0312872143) It is the third book in the Galazon cycle. Length: 240 pages Visit the author’s official website.

2003
Del Rey publishes the Star Wars novel The Unifying Force by James Luceno as a hardcover. (ISBN: 0345428528) It is the last novel in the New Jedi Order series. Length: 529 pages

Microsoft announces a quarter of a million dollar bounty for any information leading to the arrest of the person or persons who released the MSBlast worm and the SoBig virus.

The most powerful solar flare ever observed by satellite instruments is recorded.

Novell announces plans to acquire SuSE Linux for US$210 million. Visit the official SuSE website.

Sony releases the Eye Toy camera for the PlayStation 2 in the US. Visit the game’s official website.

2004
The International Business Machines (IBM) Blue Gene/L becomes the fastest supercomputer when it perfroms 70.7 trillion calculations per second (70.7 teraflops).

Yahoo acquires game platform provider Stadeon.

2005
International Business Machines (IBM) and Sun Microsystems convenes the “OpenDocument Summit” in Armonk, New York, to discuss how to promote the adoption of the OpenDocument format (ODF). The summit brings together representatives from several industry groups and corporations, including: Adobe, Computer Associates, Corel, Google, Intel, Linux, Nokia, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, and Scalix. The providers committed resources to technically improve OpenDocument through existing standards bodies and to promote its usage in the marketplace.

xG Technology demonstrates a wireless technology, called xMax, which the company reports is one thousand times more efficient than WiMax, providing coverage to the same area as ninty WiMax base stations.

2007
Version 4.10 of the PureBasic programming language is released. This version is compatible with Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Visit the official PureBasic website.