The Great Geek Manual

1881
David H. Houston, a Scottish immigrant, patents roll film for cameras.

1887
Dorr E. Felt, of Chicago, Illinois, is granted a patent for the Comptometer, which is the first practical key-driven calculator. He experimented with an adding device that he built in a “macaroni box.” (US No. 371,496) The comptometer, an adder, displays a single register of results. Subtraction is carried out by nines-complement arithmetic, and multiplication by repeated addition. The comptometer will become commercially successful and be widely used in business. Read the patent.

1939
United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt receives the Einstein-Szilárd letter, in which notable physicists warn Roosevelt of the possibility that Nazi Germany could be conducting research on nuclear fission that may lead to the creation of atomic bombs and urge him to launch similar research before it was too late. The letter was written by Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner, but received considerable national attention because it was also signed by renowned scientist and media icon Albert Einstein. The letter is arguably the genesis of the Manhattan Project, and it will later become legendary when it’s revealed by scientist Linus Pauling that, by the end of his life, signing this letter had become one of Einstein’s greatest regrets. Read the letter at HyperTextbook.com.

1950
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issues the first license to broadcast television in color to CBS after an ad hoc National Television System Committee is formed, the initials of which are applied to the system (NTSC). However, RCA will successfully dispute the license and block CBS from putting it into effect.

1957
The Jodrell Bank radio telescope, the world’s largest radio telescope, designed by Sir Bernard Lovell, is opened in Cheshire, England by Manchester University. Though the telescope is popularly known for tracking and communicating with man-made satellites, its primary function is to investigate cosmic rays. It will play an important role in the research of gravitational lenses, masers, meteors, pulsars, and quasars, and it will be heavily involved in tracking space probes even later.

The orbit of the last stage of the R-7 Semyorka rocket carrying Sputnik I is first successfully calculated on an IBM 704 computer by teams at The M.I.T. Computation Center and Operation Moonwatch, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1958
NASA launches its first spacecraft, the lunar probe Pioneer 1 on a mission to study the ionizing radiation, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, and micrometeorites in the vicinity of the Earth. It will later fall back to Earth, to burn up in the atmosphere.

1962
International Business Machines (IBM) introduces the IBM 1440 data processing system, featuring a major achievement in data storage technology, the IBM 1311 disk storage drive with disk packs. IBM proclaims it is “one of the most important new products we have ever announced.” The 1311 is about the size and shape of a top-loading washing machine and stores two million characters on a removable IBM 1316 disk pack. Each disk pack is four inches high, weighs ten 10 pounds (4.5 kg), and contained six disks fourteen inches in diameter with ten recording surfaces.

1968
NASA launches Apollo 7, the first successful manned mission in the Apollo lunar-landing program. The launch is performed with very little fanfare, as it is the first American space mission since three astronauts died in a fire aboard Apollo 1. Aboard Apollo 7 are astronauts Walter Cunningham, Donn F. Eisele, and Wally Schirra.

The five-day NATO Software Engineering Conference for which the term “software engineer” was coined comes to close. The term, which is meant to provocative, was created by Professor Fritz Baur of the Munich University of Technology to reflect the general perception that computer programming had failed to keep pace with the rapid development of computer hardware, thereby precipitating a “software crisis.”

Blogger’s Note: Some sources cite British scientist Brian Randell with coining the term “software engineer,” but Randell himself credits its creation to Fritz Bauer on his website, though not definitively. There doesn’t seem to be one definitive first use of the term, and nobody has stepped forward and claimed the credit for its first use. Certainly, whoever first used the term, the NATO Software Engineer Conference was certainly marks the first widespread use of the term.

The Star Trek episode “And the Children Shall Lead” first airs. (No. 59) In it, the crew of the Enterprise rescues a group of children stranded on a planet, along with their evil “imaginary” friend. Memory Alpha entry

1973
Atari releases the arcade game Gotcha.

1979
The Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode “Plot to Kill a City, Part 1″ first airs. (No. 6) In it, Frank Gorshin guest starred as Seton Kellogg (continuing the trend of former “Batman” villain guest stints) as the leader of the Legion of Death, a group of criminals with various superhuman powers. Markie Post also appeared as JoElla Cameron, one of Buck’s many female friends, as well as James Sloyan, who appeared as Barney Smith. TV.com entry

Visicalc, the first killer app for personal computers, is released by Dan Bricklin. The spreadsheet application transformed personal computers from hobbies to serious business tools nearly overnight. While VisiCalc is the first electronic spreadsheet, Bricklin will not patent the system. So, soon after more sophisticated clones, including SuperCalc (1980), Microsoft’s MultiPlan (1982), and Lotus 1-2-3 (1983), will soon be released by larger companies. Visit the developer’s official website.

1980
The Soviet cosmonauts Valery V. Ryumin and Leonid I. Popov return to Earth after spending a record one hundred eighty-five days in space aboard Salyut 6 space station,.

1983
The last hand-cranked (magneto) telephones in the United States go out of service as 440 telephone customers in Bryant Pond, Maine, are switched to direct-dial service. Previously, a resident’s phone number could be as short as “33″. The Bryant Pond Telephone Co. had been a family operation, with its switchboard in the back room of Elden Hathaway’s house. He had bought stock in the telephone business in 1951 with about 100 subscribers, and had himself strung wire to add more. With his wife and daughter, they acted as switchboard operators and hand-connected calls. At age 65, he decided to sell out to the Oxford County Telephone & Telegraph Co. which announced its intention to replace crank with dial phones, despite the fervent efforts of residents at town meetings and their lawyers.

1984
Aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan becomes the first American woman to perform a “space walk,” officially known as an extra-vehicular activity (EVA). Read Sullivan’s biography at the NASA official website.

1988
Mathematicians use a network of computers in the United States, Europe, and Australia to factor a one hundred digit number for the first time. The number is factored in less than a month. It is a significant in cryptography because the accomplishment demonstrates that it is feasible to solve factoring problems using many computers working in parallel. It is also demonstrates that cryptographers must use even larger numbers to maintain the security of modern encryptions.

1990
Czechoslovakia (.cs) connects to EARN/BitNet. The .cs domain will be deleted in 1993/

1993
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Gambit (Part 1)” first airs. (No. 704) In it, the Enterprise crew investigate the apparent murder of Captain Picard during an archaeological trip. Riker is kidnapped by mercenaries and finds Picard working as part of their crew. Memory Alpha entry

1994
International Business Machines (IBM) announces that the release name of the next OS/2 version will be “OS/2 Warp”.

JVC releases the platform game Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in North America.

The mission of the Magellan space probe to explore Venus ends when flight controllers descends into Venus’ dense atmosphere. Radio contact will be lost the next day.

1995
Americans Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland, and Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen wins the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work in proving that Chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions are eating away the Earth’s ozone layer.

1996
NEC Home Electronics releases Angelique In Wonderland for the NEC PC-FX video game console in Japan.

1998
ICWHEN.COM launches the Eye Site Award, a recognition program for Internet Web Sites that support classic gaming or computing. The first recipient of the awarf is AtariHQ.com, operated by John Hardie and Keita Iida.

Six domains are hacked by “the #pascal crew”. View an archived version of the defaced websites.

1999
Activision releases the compilation Intellivision Classics for the PlayStation in North America. Price: US$29.99

Principal photography on all three of the films in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy begins in New Zealand. It will end on December 22, 2000 after a record-setting 274 days.

2000
Microsoft releases Office 2001 (version 9.0) for Macs. The suite includes Excel 5, PowerPoint 4, and Word 2001.

The one hundredth Space Shuttle mission is flown. (STS-92)

2001
The Polaroid Corporation files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

2005
Tor Books publishes the fantasy novel Knife of Dreams by Robert Jordan as a hardcover. (ISBN-10: 0312873077) It is the eleventh book in the Wheel of Time series. In it, the dead are walking, men die impossible deaths, and it seems as though reality itself has become unstable: All are signs of the imminence of Tarmon Gai’don, the Last Battle, when Rand al’Thor, the Dragon Reborn, must confront the Dark One as humanity’s only hope. But Rand dares not fight until he possesses all the surviving seals on the Dark One’s prison and has dealt with the Seanchan, who threaten to overrun all nations this side of the Aryth Ocean and increasingly seem too entrenched to be fought off. Visit the book’s official website. Length: 783 pages

2006
Meisha Merlin Publishing, Inc. publishes Myth-Gotten Gains by Robert Asprin and Jody Lynn Nye as a paperback. (ISBN-10: 159222105X) It is the seventeenth book in the Myth series. In it, Aahz discovers that the shabby-looking sword he bought at a flea market in a remote dimension is Ersatz, leader of the Golden Hoard, a fabled collection of powerful magical treasures that can turn any ordinary being into a hero. They go in search of the other members of the Hoard, only to find that they’re not the only ones looking. A dancer named Calypsa, working with Aahz’s old friend Tananda, is seeking to collect them to free her grandfather from the dreaded wizard Barrik. Trouble is, everyone wants the treasures for themselves, and there are good reasons why the Golden Hoard is never all in the same dimension at one time. Length: 288 pages

Qualcomm and the Mozilla Foundation announce that “future versions of Eudora will be based upon the same technology platform as the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email program.” Code-name: Penelope