The Great Geek Manual

1904
The first underground New York City Subway line opens. The first line runs between the Brooklyn Bridge and Broadway, from City Hall to West 145th Street.

1920
KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is granted the first public radio broadcast license.

1922
The Audion, one of the first systems for synchronizing film with an audio recording, is demonstrated by Western Electric’s Bell Laboratories to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers at Yale University’s Woolsey Hall. The system requires a projectionist to hand-crank the film in time with the audio disk.

1927
The first newsreel to feature sound debuts.

1946
Geographically Speaking, the first commercially-sponsored television program first airs, sponsored by Bristol-Myers.

1961
NASA launches the first dedicated “space launcher,” the Saturn I rocket on Mission Saturn-Apollo 1, its first test flight.

1966
The Star Trek episode “Miri” first airs. (No. 08) In it, the Enterprise discovers an exact duplicate of Earth, where the only survivors of a deadly plague are the planet’s prepubescent children. Memory Alpha entry

1969
The Vidicord teleplayer is demonstrated in London. Using Super 8mm film stored in a cassette, it plays monochrome video back via the aerial socket of a conventional television receiver. Because a number of films are already available on Super 8 format for the amateur market, there is a ready-made supply of programming, including Charlie Chaplin shorts, travelogues, and cartoons. Price: £370.

1973
The Star Trek: The Animated Series episode “The Magicks of Megas-tu” first airs. (No. 08) In it, while investigating the theory of creation, the Enterprise is caught inside an energy/matter tornado. After emerging from the storm, the crew encounter a world where magic works and science doesn’t. Memory Alpha entry

1980
The ARPANET stops functioning altogether for approximately four hours when the routing processes in all of the Interface Message Processors (IMPs) crashes after one of them corrupts the network’s routing tables with an accidentally-propagated status-message virus. It is the first major network crash.

1982
China announces that its population has exceeded one billion people.

1983
Richard Stallman posts a message to the newsgroups net.unix-wizards and net.usoft announcing that, “Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.” Later, Stallman will expand this message into an entire hacker manifesto entitled, “The GNU Manifesto” (1985). The best known creation to result from the GNU project will be Emacs, an editor favored by many hackers, and GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), a C compiler that will be very important to the development of Linux. Read “The GNU Manifesto” online.

1986
In New York City, Microsoft announces Microsoft Word 3.0 for the Macintosh.

1992
Microsoft ships Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.1, which integrates networking and workgroup functionality.

1994
HotWired becomes the world’s first commercial web magazine. With fourteen advertisers signed up to sponsor its launch, the launch will be marked as the beginning of the internet advertising industry. In fact, the magazine’s initial sponsorship business model lead it to design the “ad banner” display areas that will later become ubiquitous among commercial websites. The banners or “graphical ad units,” as they’re initially called, are designed by ad executive Frank D’Angelo of Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer (MVBMS). The first banner displayed by the magazine (or anywhere on the internet), is a single panel display ad for AT&T. Zima, Volvo, MCI, Club Med, and 1-800-Collect will soon follow suit, running ad campaigns through the site. Though the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, is less than a year old, these first clickable banners are such a novelty that the first ad campaign (which featured only the text “click here”) will achieve a 78 percent click-through-rate! The following year, the use of the internet advertising will gain widespread acceptance as both Maytag and United Airlines make concerted efforts to promoted their websites with banner ads. By 1996, banner ads and pop-ups will be everywhere, and websites will be widely promoted through the use of traditional media. Read more at Advertising Age.

1997
Intel and the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) settle the lawsuit brought by DEC in May, entering into a ten-year cross-licensing agreement. Intel will purchase the company’s chipmaking plants for about US$700 million. Intel will fabricate Alpha processors for DEC, and will take over development of StrongARM embedded processors. DEC will begin making servers and workstations based on Intel’s IA-64 architecture.

Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 4.0 on CD-ROM for retail distribution. Price: US$49

1998
China’s Human Rights website is hacked by “bronc” of the hacktivism group “Legions of the Underground” (LoU).

Microsoft announces that the final name for Windows NT 5.0 will be Windows 2000.

Reuters News Service reports that Danish scientists have created a computer chip where a single atom can generate binary code by jumping back and forth. Although other scientists have conducted experiments with similar results, Dr. Francois Grey, the team leader, points out that this is the first time it has been accomplished in an environment at room temperature without a frozen material.

Sun Microsystems releases Solaris 7 (SunOS 5.7).

US President Bill Clinton signs the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) into law. The Act is named in honor of the late singer-turned-politician Sonny Bono, who died in January. The Act extends copyright protections by an additional twenty years to the life of the author plus 70 years for works published by individuals and to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication for works of corporate authorship, whichever endpoint is earlier. It is the eleventh time in forty years that Congress has extended copyright protect. One of the more notable works about to pass into the public domain at the time of the signing is Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie, which was originally released in 1928. Disney’s role in lobbying for the passage of the bill will earn the Act the pejorative nickname “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.”

VM Labs announces that the official name of their Project X game system technology will be known as Nuon. According to VM Labs, the Nuon name will appear on all hardware that integrates the technology. The name was created by Lexicon and the logo that combines a wavy line and a circle was developed by Beeline Group in Newark, California.

1999
The Dell Computer Corporation boasts having taken the number one position in computer sales in the United States educational market from Apple Computer, Inc. According to Dataquest, a market research firm, Dell has maintained a five percent lead over Apple for two consecutive quarters.

2000
Apple Computer releases Mac OS X Server 1.2v3.

At a seminar in Stockholm, Sweden, Microsoft President and Chief Executive Steve Ballmer reports that the hackers who broke into the company’s computer systems had gained access to some of its key programs, but assures programmers and reporters that the hackers did not alter them.

2002
Version 6.2.3 of the XBasic programming language is released.

2003
Apple releases iTunes for Windows. Visit the application’s official website.

Dell introduces its Digital Jukebox (“DJ” for short) as a less expensive alternative to Apple’s iPod. It will offer the devices in partnership with MusicMatch, a rival of iTunes. By December, Dell will stop offering iPods through its website in order to focus on the sale of its Jukeboxes.

2004
Google acquires Keyhole, a company noted for developing geospatial data visualization applications. On June 28, 2005, Keyhole’s Earth Viewer application suite will become Google Earth. Visit the official Google Earth website.

Yahoo! launches a search engine for mobile users.

2005
The first light pictures taken by the Large Binocular Telescope on October 12 are released to the public. The photo is an edge-on shot of a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Andromeda known as NGC891 24 million light years away.

Iran launches its first satellite, the Sinah-1 reconnaissance satellite, from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northwestern Russia at 22:52 local time (06:52 UTC).

2006
EMI Music CEO Alain Levy admits to an audience at the London Business School that the CD format is dead. He says that physical media still has a place, but it isn’t going to have it for very long. According to Levy, record companies will no longer be able to market CDs without including “value added material,” and he predicts that record companies will have to make CDs a more attractive purchase to the consumer. “We have to be much more innovative in the way we sell physical content.”

2008
Microsoft demonstrates Windows Azure, a cloud platform.