The Great Geek Manual

1604
German astronomer Johannes Kepler observes that an exceptionally bright star had suddenly appeared in the constellation Ophiuchus, which later turns out to be the last supernova to have been observed in our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

1881
Bell and Tainter donates a sound recording machine to the Smithsonian Institution that uses jets of air to inscribe sounds.

1885
A steel-making process is patented by Sir Harry Bessemer, a British inventor and metallurgist. His patent is a method of making steel by blasting compressed air through molten iron to remove impurities and excess carbon called the “Bessemer Process,” which makes it possible to mass-produce steel inexpensively.

1888
The first issue of National Geographic Magazine goes on sale. It will initially be published irregularly, only when the National Geographic Society accumulated sufficient material to fill an issue. Visit the official National Geographic Magazine website.

Thomas Edison files a patent for the first movie projector, the Optical Phonograph, which projects images just 1/32-inch across. Edison claims that it will, “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.”

1907
The first commercial transatlantic wireless telegraph service is officially inaugurated. The line runs between Nova Scotia and Ireland. The first message sent from Europe was a statement from Lord Avebury to the New York Times. The first message sent from North America was from Canada’s Prime Minister, Wilfred Laurier to the London Standard. Messages are limited to fifty words each, and by 7:30pm over ten thousand words had been exchanged. In one message, English inventor Hiram Maxim sent a message to American inventor. Peter Cooper Hewitt, in which he wrote, “All honor to Marconi! Perhaps the next step will be to harness the whole energy of Niagara to make an attempt to communicate with the planet Mars.”

1919
Experimental radio station 8XK in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, set up by Dr. Frank Conrad, a manager at the Westinghouse plant in nearby Pittsburg, becomes the first to broadcast music from records. Due to widespread interest, Conrad announces that 8XK will broadcast music for two hours on Wednesday and Saturday evening. The local record store, Hamilton Music Store, provides records free in return for a mention of its name on air, which is the first radio advertising and sponsorship deal.

Radio Corporation of America (RCA) is incorporated in Delaware, established by the merger of the General Electric Company (GE) and the Marconi Company of America. Read more about the history of RCA.

1933
Physicist Albert Einstein emigrates to the United States, fleeing his former home in Nazi Germany.

1949
In the United States, the toll dialing networks on the east and west coast are joined for the first time. For the first time, operators can dial long distance coast-to-coast. To encourage use of the network, toll coupon books will be sold for gifts during the Christmas season.

1956
The first Italian computer conference is held in Rome. The principal topic of the conference is the establishment of the International Computation Center in Rome.

The Queen of England opens Calder Hall, Britain’s first nuclear power station, in the shadow of the massive chimneys of the Windscale plant, where explosives were made for Britain’s first atomic bomb. In it also the world’s first gas-cooled nuclear power plant. In a speech she makes to mark the occasion, the Queen says, “This new power, which has proved itself to be such a terrifying weapon of destruction, is harnessed for the first time for the common good of our community.” At 12:16GMT, she pulls the lever which directs electricity from the power station into the National Grid for the first time. The event is attended by several thousand people, including scientists and statesmen from almost forty nations.

1957
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) states its intention of allowing subscription television experiments under certain conditions.

1961
International Business Machines (IBM) announces the IBM 7702 magnetic tape transmission terminal and the IBM 1013 card transmission terminal which transmit and receive data over telephone lines at speeds of up to 300 characters per second.

1962
Nick Holonyak Jr. publishes the first paper describing Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs)

1969
George Smith and Willard Boyle of Bell Labs invent the charge-coupled device (CCD), the image sensor upon which digital cameras will later be based, while attempting to develop a new kind of computer memory for computers. In less than a year, the device will be used to create the world’s first solid-state video camera. Read more about CCDs.

1975
In the UK, the science fiction television series Space: 1999 premieres with the episode “Breakaway.” In it, radiation from nuclear waste disposal site threatens a deep space probe. When the waste explodes, the Moon is hurled into deep space, along with Moonbase Alpha and all it crew. The series will run for two seasons and forty-eight episodes. Space: 1999 is the first large-scale science fiction series to be attempted following the cancellation of Star Trek in 1969, but while Star Trek wasn’t a hit during its original run, Space 1999 will fail to even match its ratings, much less its fanatical long-term following. However, many critics will later praise the series’ special effects, specifically citing its excellent scale model work and its sophisticated props and set dressing. TV.com entry

1979
Personal Software releases VisiCalc for the Apple II. Price: US$99

1981
Ex-jockey Pat Roper, president of a producer of educational films cakked National Career Consultants, runs an advertisement in the Dallas Morning News and the San Francisco Chronicle looking for game programmers. Ed Salvo, an Iowa high school student, answers the ad and submits a game called Skeet Shoot, which he Salvo had been working on at home. Hiring Salvo to work full time and using Skeet Shoot as its flagship, Roper launches Games By Apollo, one of the first third-party developer for the Atari 2600 video game console. Skeet Shoot will be released in December. Browse a database listing of all Games By Apollo releases.

Texas Instruments (TI) hosts an “afternoon with the management of TI” for the Southern California area TI-99/4 and TI-99/4a home computer users. Don Bynum, TI’s Personal Computer Division Manager, and Brian Gratz, TI’s Users’ Group Coordinator are the masters of ceremony. The event is held at 1pm in the Café Ricard room of the Airporter Inn in Irvine, California. Highlights of the event include demonstrations of TI’s EDITOR/ASSEMBLER package, text-to-speech technologies, and the LOGO programming package.

1984
Atari sells 640,000 warrants to Warner Communications for US$8 million. A warrant is a security that entitles the holder to buy stock of the company that issued it at a specified price, which is much higher than the stock price at time of issue.

1985
Intel releases the 80386 DX microprocessor with support for clock frequencies of up to 33MHz, the ability to address up to 4GB of memory, and support for virtual memory of up to 64TB, which will prove vital to the important for marketing purposes). It also includes a larger instruction set than the 80286. At the release, the fastest version of the processor runs at 20MHz and can achieve 6.0 MIPS. It contains 275,000 transistors.

1990
Col Needham and some of his friends launches the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), as the “rec.arts.movies movie database.” The site, which will grow into one of the most visited websites on the internet, initially begins as a collection of Unix shell scripts that can be used to search four lists: an “Actors List,” an “Actress List,” a “Directors List,” and a “Dead Actors/Actresses List.” By the end of the year, the lists will include nearly ten thousand movies and television series. Visit the official IMDB website.

1994
International Business Machines (IBM) announces that it will be cutting back its line of personal computers from nine models to four. It also notifies the public of several new models and says it will bring back the brand name many have long connected to the company, the IBM PC. The plan to consolidate IBM personal computer production calls for four divisions: Aptiva for home users, IBM PC for commercial desktops, IBM PC Server for networks, and Thinkpad for portables.

1996
Microsoft announces that it will cease development of Windows NT for systems using MIPS processors, due to decreasing demand.

1998
Apple Computer releases the Mac OS 8.5 operating system, the first version of the Mac OS to run only on Macs equipped with a PowerPC processor. The system features AppleScript, QuickTime 3 Pro, and Remote Access 3.1.2. Code-name: Allegro and Scimitar

The Fall COMDEX show is held Saturday, October 17 through Wednesday, October 21 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Visit the event’s official website.

2000
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) officially releases the 1.2GHz Athlon processor. Price is US$612 in 1,000 unit quantities.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) officially releases the 800MHz Duron processor. Price: US$172 in 1,000 unit quantities

2001
Microsoft announces that the Xbox video game console will go on sale in Europe on March 14, for €479.

2002
Apple Computer begins offering its Mac OS X operating system to primary and secondary school teachers free of charge in the United States.

2003
Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan surpasses the Petronas Towers in Malaysia to become the world’s tallest building when a 197 foot (60m) spire is added to its roof.

2005
At the Intel Developer Forum, Intel introduces Intel Turbo Memory, a technology which uses NAND flash memory to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes for a computer to boot by placing the most-used system files onto the flash modules.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette features a profile of Jon Lech Johansen, known by the web handle DVD Jon, best known for reverse engineering media formats. The article begins, “Jon Lech Johansen dropped out of high school after just one year. He lives alone most of the time, except when he stays with his parents in his native Norway. The 21-year-old doesn’t drive, rarely goes to parties and says he has no close friends, except his father. He spends about nine hours a day in front of his computer screen. Yet this reclusive young Norwegian is the man who may be the entertainment industry’s worst nightmare. Mr. Johansen, Hollywood executives claim, has done more than almost anyone in the world to ignite the explosion of movie piracy on the Internet, costing them billions of dollars in lost sales. He scoffs at that. At the age of 15, Mr. Johansen wrote a computer program that allowed users to copy DVDs. Then he posted it on the Internet. A Norwegian private school awarded him a prize for making an outstanding contribution to society. The Norwegian government indicted him.” Read the entire article.

Yahoo! acquires the British company Whereonearth Ltd., which provides location technology.

2006
ATI Technologies releases the X1950 Pro graphics card to replace the X1900GT in the competitive sub-$200 market segment. The X1950 Pro GPU is built from the ground up on the 80nm RV570 core with only twelve texture units and thirty-six pixel shaders. The X1950 Pro is the first ATI card that supports native Crossfire implementation by a pair of internal Crossfire connectors, which eliminates the need for the unwieldy external dongle found in older Crossfire systems.

CoreLabs releases version 0.95 beta of the Core force freeware personal firewall software for Windows. Visit the application’s official website.

Grant T. Stanley and Scott McCausland, administrators of the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker site, are sentenced to five months of prison, five months of home arrest, and a US$3,000 fine at the conclusion of Operation D-Elite. Operation D-Elite was a joint operation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement against leading members of EliteTorrents precipitated by the tracker’s release of the Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith workprint approximately six hours prior to the movie’s theatrical release. Read an archive of the US Department of Justice press release.

Registered sex offender Andrew Lubrano, age 39, is arrested on charges of sexual misconduct by the New York Suffolk County Police Department for using MySpace to associate minors after three prior arrests for sexual offenses. The arrest is accomplished with a thousand-line Perl script written by former hacker Kevin Poulsen that located over seven hundred registered sex offenders listed online under Megan’s Law actively using MySpace. Following extensive coverage by Wired magazine, for which Poulsen works as an editor, the code will be published under an open-source license. Read more at Wired.com.

2007
Retail giant Best Buy announces that, as of October 1st, its stores have discontinued sales of all models of analog televisions and pulled all unsold stock from the shelves of its stores. The retailer says that the move comes “as the end of the analog broadcast era draws near,” but the move make makes Best Buy the first consumer-electronics retail chain to exit the analog-TV business. Read more at MSN. Visit the official Best Buy website.

2008
20th Century Fox releases the action film Max Payne, directed by John Moore and starring Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis, to 3,376 US theaters. The film is based on the 2001 Remedy Entertainment video game Max Payne. Produced on a budget of US$35 million, it will gross US$17,639,849 domestically in its opening weekend. Visit the official Max Payne website. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 1 hr 40 mins