The Great Geek Manual

1877
Nicolaus Otto, Francis Crossley, and William Crossley are granted a patent for the first internal-combustion engine to burn gasoline in a piston chamber. (US No. 194,047) View the patent online.

1911
Captain Carlo Piazza of the Italian military flies a Blériot XI monoplane on an hour-long reconnaissance mission of Turkish troop positions, becoming the first pilot to use an airplane for military purposes. Just more nine days later, Italian forces will carry out history’s first bombing raid based on the intelligence gathered by Piazza.

1956
The Jonathan Winters Show becomes the first program to broadcast (color) video footage recorded on magnetic tape. It’s televised coast-to-coast in the US.

1963
The first program written in Algol Extended for Design (AED) is compiled in a compatible time-sharing system using a bootstrap language compiler. AED was developed by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Electronic Systems Laboratory by a team led by Douglas T. Ross.

1972
The BBC announces the development of world’s first teletext service, which will later be renamed Ceefax, and outlines a series of tests of the system. Ceefax is a news service for the deaf that is the forerunner of early Internet news services. The system uses spare lines in the vertical blanking interval of the television signal to carry information for display on television receivers via a decoder. The BBC will first launch the system on September 23, 1974.

1981
According to Twin Galaxies, Dennis Hernandez scores a record-setting 30,100,000 points playing the Atari arcade game Asteroids Friday, October 23 through Sunday, October 25 for fifty hours and twelve minutes at the Space Odyssey arcade in Geneva, New York. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

A new service called TexNet that caters to the Texas Instrument TI-99/4a home computer users is offered through The Source online network. TexNet offers graphics animations, music, sound effects, synthesized speech, and exclusive software downloads to its members. Users are invited to sign up for just US$100 plus hourly fees of US$7.75 or US$5.75 on weekends. The service will be offer less than four years due to the high cost of maintaining it, the difficulty in keeping the service state-of-the-art without Xmodem protocols, and low access speeds.

The New York Times publishes an article entitled “When Computers Don’t Work,” in which Andrew Pollack writes that “The effects of a non-performing computer can go beyond frustrated expectations. A small business can become so critically dependent on a computer for its billing and accounting that, if the computer errs, the business can go bankrupt without even realizing it.”

1983
The 1984 commercial is shown for the first time at the Apple Computer annual sales conference to 750 of the company’s sales representatives, who received the commercial with thunderous enthusiasm.

1989
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Bonding” first airs. (No. 305) In it, a mysterious entity seeks to comfort a boy who has lost his mother in an accident on its planet. Memory Alpha entry

1995
The first court-ordered wiretap on a computer network is approved for use on the computer of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences during the last two months of 1995 as part of the prosecution of an Argentine man suspected of breaking into Harvard University computers in order to crack into numerous other computers at various US military sites across the country. Victims of the man’s exploits included the Navy Research Laboratory, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ames Research Center, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Naval Command Control and Ocean Surveillance Center. Law enforcement agencies have frequently conducted electronic surveillance on computer systems in the past with the consent of the users, but this case marks the first time such a wiretap has been court-ordered. The authorization is deemed necessary because Harvard computer systems do not inform users logging onto the system that their communications may be monitored. On March 29, 1996, Julio Cesar Ardita, age 21, of Buenos Aires will be charged with unlawfully intercepting electronic communications over a military computer and damaging files on a military computer. In return for Ardita’s agreement to come voluntarily to the United States (without extradition proceedings), he will only be sentenced to three years probation and a fine of US$5,000.

1996
At the Microprocessor Forum, the Digital Equipment Corporation demonstrates the Digital 21264 Alpha processor operating at 500MHz.

1997
Four game developers release the first arcade games based on Intel’s Pentium II platform and the Open Arcade Architecture. This system allows game changes by software only, without requiring a physical machine change.

In Japan, NEC Computer releases twenty-six models of the PC98-NX series, the first industry-standard Windows machines produced by the company. NEC also releases fifteen new models in its proprietary PC98 series.

Yahoo! completes its acquisition of Four11, the producer of RocketMail free webmail service, for US$92 Million. The service will eventually become Yahoo! Mail.

1998
Microsoft is forced to shut down a website offering Money 98 upgrades to qualified users after discovering that customers are gaining access to other users’ registration forms when mistyping their own. Microsoft states that the site host, Softbank Services Group, normally requires a secondary input for verification, but the step had been overlooked in this case.

1999
Apple Computer releases Mac OS 9 for Macintosh computers, featuring AppleScript, automatic updating, encryption, and Sherlock 2, an Internet shopping application. Apple will market the system as “the Best Internet Operating System Ever.” Visit the system’s official website. Code-name: Gershwin and Sonata Price: US$99

2001
Apple Computer introduces the iPod portable music player. This first model features a 5GB capacity Toshiba hard drive (”enough for a thousand songs”), FireWire connectivity, and a mechanical scroll wheel. The device requires the Mac OS 9 or higher to sync with a computer. The device’s introduction come several months after the January 9th launch of iTunes. Over one hundred million units will be sold within six years. Visit the device’s official website. Code-name: Dulcimer Price: US$400

The NASA space probe Mars Odyssey enters into Mars orbit. Its mission is to hunt for evidence of water or volcanic activity on the planet’s surface using its array of spectrometers and imagers. Visit the official Mars Odyssey website.

The pan-European Gigabit Research and Education Network (GÉANT) becomes operational, replacing the TEN-155 network.

Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) announces that it will release a Linux-enabled version of its PlayStation 2 video game console outside of Japan.

Warner Bros. releases the horror film Thir13en Ghosts, directed by Steve Beck and starring Tony Shalhoub, Embeth Davidtz, Matthew Lillard, Shannon Elizabeth, and F. Murray Abraham, to 2,781 US theaters. In it, Arthur and his two children, Kathy and Bobby, inherit his Uncle Cyrus’s estate, a glass house “designed by the devil and powered by the dead” to open the Eye of Hell. When the family enters the house, they find themselves trapped inside with 12 ghosts, racing to get out alive. Produced on a budget of US$42 million, it will gross US$15,165,355 domestically in its opening weekend. Visit the film’s official website. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: R) Running Time: 1 hr 31 mins

Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Essentials.

2003
Amazon.com launches the Search Inside the Book project. The project enables users to search the contents of over one hundred twenty thousand books. The move comes a month after the company launched the A9 search engine.

2006
Dell introduces new AMD-based servers, the PowerEdge 6950 and the PowerEdge SC1435, marking its entry into the AMD-based server-marketplace.

Larry Sanger launches the Citizendium wiki-based collaborative encyclopedia. The goal of the project is to improve upon the reliability of other popular wiki models by introducing a number by requiring its contributors to use their real names and more strictly regulating content through an article approval system and “gentle expert oversight.” Citizendium.org

2007
Twenty-four year old Jason Michael Downey of Dry Ridge, Kentucky, known by the web handle “Nessun,” is sentenced to a year in prison, three years’ of supervised release, one hundred fifty hours of community service, and US$21,110 in restitution for operating a six thousand computer bot-net known as Yotta-byte.net to conduct a series of denial of service (DoS) attacks. Before his arrest, which was the result of Operation: Bot Roast, Downey was the founder aand operator of the Rizon Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network.

2008
In Leeuwarden, Netherlands, a judge sentences a sixteen year old boy charged with stealing virtual goods (a virtual amulet and a virtual mask) during a course of a fight in the MMORPG RuneScape to 160 hours of unpaid work or 80 days in jail. It marks the first time a judge in the Netherlands – and possibly the world – has ruled that the theft of virtual property is illegal.