The Great Geek Manual

1701
The Collegiate School of America, later named Yale University, is founded by Congregationalists who are unhappy with the liberal bent of Harvard.

1843
Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton conceives of the concept of quaternions, non-commutative extensions of complex numbers as he strolls along the Royal Canal in Dublin, Ireland with his wife. During the walk, he realizes that the theory of conjugate functions which he had been working on since the thirties could be solved using quadruplets rather than triplets. In his excitement over the realization, he carves the underlying equations in a nearby bridge.

1908
In Farnborough, the first aeroplane flight in England is accomplished by Samuel Cody, a self-proclaimed American cowboy who built his own flying machines. Read more online.

1914
The first blood transfusion of World War I is performed on a wounded soldier when Isidore Colas gives his blood to Corporal Henri Legrain of 45th Infantry Corps of the French Army.

1923
The Walt Disney Company is founded by Walt Disney and his brother, Roy Disney. The company will be a driving force behind camera and then computer graphics technology for decades to come.

1927
The first evidence of Peking Man, a well-preserved left lower molar, is uncovered by Swedish paleontologist Birgir Bohlin at a large-scale archaeological dig in caves inside Zhoukoudian Cave, outside Peking. A well-preserved, nearly complete skull of an adolescent will be excavated at the same site in 1929.

1928
A patent is issued for the first electric light bulb frosted on the inside with sufficient strength for commercial handling. (US No. 1,687,510) The inventor, Marvin Pipkin, is employed by the Incandescent Lamp Department of the General Electric Company in Nela Park, Ohio. Frosting the inside of a bulb rather than the outside means that the glass absorbs less light and collects less dust. Previously, bulbs had been frosted with an etching processes that weakened the glass, rendering the bulb too fragile to survive packaging and shipping.

1951
The first motion picture in the US of the inside of a living heart, A Cinematographic Study of the Function of the Mitral Valve in Situ, is shown at a clinical session of the New York Academy of Medicine Post Graduate Fortnightly held at Montefiore Hospital, New York City, where the film was made. The subject of the film is a dog’s mitral valve, which is often damaged by rheumatic fever.

1959
The Control Data Corporation (CDC) releases the model 1604 computer, designed by electrical engineer Seymour Cray, who will later go on to found Cray Research and be dubbed “the father of supercomputing.” The computer is the first model released by the company, which was founded by a group of former Sperry Rand Corporation employees under the leadership of William Norris, the new company’s CEO. At the time of its release, the 48-bit computer is the most powerful computer on the market, and it will rapidly become the world’s first commercially successful transistorized computer. The main body of each computer weighs one ton its console weighs another half ton. It boasts 32K 48-bit words of magnetic core memory with a cycle time of 6.4 microseconds organized into two banks of 16K words each. Each 48-bit word contains two 24-bit instructions: 6 bits for its operation code, 3 bits for a “designator” (access or jump instructions), and 15 bits for a memory address.

The first 1604 will be delivered to the US Navy in 1960 to supporting major Fleet Operations Control Centers in Hawaii, London, and Norfolk. By 1964, over fifty units will have gone into use for commercial applications, controlling weapons systems, processing data in real time, and solving large-scale scientific problems. The success of the model 1604 will be a precursor to success of the burgeoning company, which will distinguish itself by competing with industry IBM and winning. View an archived copy of the 1604 programming manual. View more photos at Histoire de l’Informatique.

1964
People’s Republic of China detonates its first nuclear weapon, becoming the fifth country with nuclear arms after the United States (1945), Great Britain (1953), the Soviet Union (1961), and France. The United States Atomic Energy Commission will later determine that the detonation took place in the vicinity of Lop Nor, a lake in a remote area of Central Asia and characterizes it as a low-yield explosion “typical of an early nuclear test” of a fission device employing uranium-235 equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT or less.

1982
Halley’s Comet is observed on its thirtieth recorded trip past Earth.

1984
Dr. Leonard L. Bailey performs the first transplant of a baboon heart into a human at the Loma Linda University Medical Center in California.

1986
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) led by Professor Robert A. Weinberg announce the discovery of the first tumor supressor gene, Rb, which specifically effects retinoblastoma.

1989
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Who Watches the Watchers?” first airs. (No. 304) In it, a holographically camouflaged Federation anthropology station is accidentally revealed to a primitive Vulcan-like native of Mintaka 3. After waking briefly aboard the Enterprise as his injuries are tended to, one of the planet’s natives begins raving that he’s discovered the existence of a Supreme being named, “The Picard” after being returned to the planet. Memory Alpha entry

WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) computer worm attacks SPAN VAX/VMS systems over the DECnet protocols (rather than TCP/IP protocols). The worm is very similar to last year’s HI.COM.

1995
Atari“>Atari begins shipping Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, a six-button ProController,and a JagLink peripheral for the Atari Jaguar home video game system. It is and will remain the only retro-title of an Activision classic for the Jaguar game system.

1996
Microsoft releases Service Pack 1 for Windows NT 4.0.

1997
The Web Copyright Law is signed by US President Bill Clinton. An infringement of property valued at US$1,000 or more may be prosecuted even if the violator does not profit from the crime. Penalties range from US$100,000-US$250,000. For infringements against properties estimated to be worth more than US$2,500, a jail term of up to three years may be imposed. A second offense may result in a jail term of up to six years. What this translates to is that previously questionable but prosecutable filesharing is made illegal and prosecutable.

1998
Version 3.0 of the FreeBSD operating system is released. Visit the official FreeBSD website.

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. files suit against Amazon.com alleging that the popular online bookseller is integrating proprietary technology from their inventory tracking systems.

2000
The anime series InuYasha premieres on television in Japan. It will run for 167 episodes, until September 13, 2004. Visit Viz’s official InuYasha website

Version 2.0 of the Python programming language is released. It introduces many new features, including a full garbage collector and support for Unicode. The version also marks the beginning of a more community-centric development process for the language itself. Visit the official Python website.

2001
Apple Computer releases the iBook G3 Dual USB Late 2001, a minor update on the iBook G3 Dual USB, featuring a 600MHz PowerPC G3 processor, a 256 KB L2 cache, 64 or 128MB RAM, a 15GB Hard Disk, and Mac OS X 10.1.

Yahoo! launches the Yahoo! Shopping Network and Yahoo! Warehouse.

2002
Microsoft admits that a part of its network have been hacked by an unknown party. Specifically, the server hosting Microsoft’s Windows beta community had been breached. The server allows over twenty-thousand Windows users to beta test software still in development.

The Star Trek: Enterprise episode “A Night in Sickbay” first airs. (No. 205) In it, Porthos, Captain Archer’s dog, causes a diplomatic incident and is poisoned on an alien world. Memory Alpha entry

2003
Apple Computer releases a version 4.1 of its iTunes software, the first version to support Windows computers (specifically Windows 2000 and XP). Apple calls this the “second generation of its revolutionary iTunes Music Store.” Read the official press release. Visit the official iTunes website.

2006
The creation of the heaviest man-made element, Ununoctium-294, is announced by researchers from Russia’s Joint Institute of Nuclear Research (JINR) and the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The results are published in the journal Physics Review. The element, when later confirmed, will be the first man-made noble gas, below Radon on the periodic table. The new element is the result of the collision of accelerated calcium ions with atoms of the man-made heavy element Californium, and it exists barely a millisecond before decaying into element 114, then element 112, and then, splitting in half.

The KSpread Team releases version 1.6 of the KSpread free software spreadsheet application. Visit the application’s official website.