The Great Geek Manual

1906
Dr. Lee DeForest, one of the “fathers of radio,” announces his three-element electrical vacuum tube, later known as a triode, to a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE). He had discovered that when a mesh of wire is placed between the filament and collector “plate” in a diode tube, a large voltage-amplifying effect could be produced. The ability of the tube to amplify weak signals makes long-distance communication possible for the first time.

1955
The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien is published. It’s the third and final book in the The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

1960
The length of the meter is redefined by the international body Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures (General Conference on Weights and Measures) to make the measure more accurate. Originally, the measure was one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Following the conference, the meter is re-defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in a vacuum of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the 2p¹⁰ and 5d⁵ quantum levels of the krypton-86 atom.

1981
Atari is granted a patent for the 400/800 computer system. (US No. 4,296,476)

1984
The Monterey Bay Aquarium, the largest artificial environment for marine life, opens on Cannery Row on the site of the old Hovden sardine cannery, with a US$40 million grant from David Packard of Hewlett Packard to house 6,500 marine animals of at least 525 species. The idea for an aquarium devoted to showcasing Monterey Bay habitats came in 1977 from a group of four marine biologists at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station. Currently, the aquarium has an active research program, with groups working on Sea Otter conservation and Tuna conservation biology and a sister institution, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which conducts deep-sea research in the vast Monterey submarine canyon. Visit the organization’s official website.

1989
The AmiEXPO trade show for Amiga computers is held in Santa Clara, California, over three days.

1992
In the case of Sega versus Accolade, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismisses Sega’s appeal of the earlier August 28th ruling in favor of Accolade. The case sets a precedent under which copyright does not extend to content required by another system to operate where the content is deemed non-expressive. It was a landmark case for the software industry.

1997
Apple Computer unveils the final model in its Newton line of personal digital assistants (PDAs), the Newton Message Pad 2100. It was the first Newton to support an ethernet card. The device also includes 4MB of RAM, a drastic improvement over the 1MB of previous models. Price: US$1,000

1998
Spacetec IMC, a three dimensional input device maker, merges with audio specialist Labtec.

Tor Books releases the fantasy novel The Path of Daggers by Robert Jordan as a hardcover. (ISBN 0-312-85769-1) It is the eighth book of The Wheel of Time series. Length: 604 pages Visit the author’s official website.

1999
The Encyclopaedia Britannica opens its long-awaited free website, which immediately crashes because of the enormous amount of traffic the site receives.

2004
The Ubuntu Linux distribution is released for the first time. Based largely on the popular Debian Linux distribution, Ubuntu was developed to be easily installed and highly usable by the users otherwise unfamiliar with Linux systems. It’s name is a Zulu word embodying the concept that “a person is a person only through other people.” The word can also loosely be translated as “humanity.” It’s both free and open source, but Canonical Ltd, the company that sponsors the system, finances Ubuntu’s development and distribution by selling system support. Visit the system’s official website.

Infineon Technologies pleads guilty to charges of fixing the price of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), resulting in a US$160 million fine, the third largest antitrust fine in US history. Four executives from Infineon were each sentenced to four to six months in jail, and fined US$250,000 several days earlier. After the four were sentenced, Scott D. Hammond, the Director of Criminal Enforcement for the DoJ Antitrust Division, said, “These four executives are the first to plead guilty to a charge of fixing prices in what is still a very active and far-reaching investigation into antitrust violations in the DRAM industry. We will continue in our efforts to bring to justice other domestic and foreign-based executives who were involved with fixing DRAM prices.” Hynix Semiconductor, Samsung, and Elpida will later plead guilty to the same charge.

Sharp Electronics discontinues development and sales of handheld computers in the US.