The Great Geek Manual

1538
The first university in the New World, the Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, is established.

1636
A vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony establishes the first college in what will later become the United States, The President and Fellows of Harvard College, which will later be renamed Harvard University.

1868
Thomas Edison applies for his first patent, for an electrical vote recorder.

1914
The first of what will later be known as zippers, a hookless fastener developed by Gideon Sundback, first goes on sale as the “Hookless No. 2.”

1946
A five-man commission of civilians is appointed by President Harry S. Truman to become The Atomic Energy Commission, which was established by the August 1, 1946 US Atomic Energy Act. The commission’s mission is to develop and utilize atomic energy for the public welfare, increasing the standard of living, strengthening free competition in private enterprise, and promoting world peace. The commission will first convene on November 13, 1946.

1970
The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) announces two new products: the IBM System/3 Model 6 and IBM System/7, two low-cost computers for the factory, laboratory, and office.

1971
The first British satellite, Prospero, is launched. Britain is the sixth nation to have a satellite launched into orbit with a Black Arrow rocket from Woomera, Australia. The mission of the Prospero, a Black Knight 1 satellite, is to test solar cells and other technologies experiments.

1983
Battered by loses of US$223 million during the first nine months of 1983, Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI) publicly announces its intention to exit the personal home computer market and to discontinue support for the TI-99/4a computer. The Home Computer Division was more than US$500 million in the red by the end of September, largely due to the series of price reductions and rebates passed in the course of the last year as a part of the company’s strategy to bolster sagging sales that finally ended up costing the TI US$50 for every computer sold. Visit the official Texas Instruments website.

1985
Bill Gates decides to proceed with an initial public offering of Microsoft stock.

1991
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Game” first airs. (No. 506) In it, Wesley pays a visit to the Enterprise, but he discovers that the crew has become addicted to a computer game. Memory Alpha entry

1996
Apple Computer, Inc. unveils the MessagePad 2000, a new handheld computer based on the Apple Newton Operating System (OS).

Microsoft and Intel announce plans to develop the NetPC specification.

1998
Microsoft announces that it has signed a US$90 million Internet advertising agreement with First USA Inc., a unit of the Bank One Corporation. Microsoft describes the arrangement as the “biggest cyberspace advertising agreement ever signed”.

President William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton signs the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law. The bill criminalizes reverse-engineering any product with the intention of circumventing Copyright protection.

SNK releases the NeoGeo Pocket handheld video game system in Japan. The system features a 6 bit TOSHIBA TLCS-900H high performance core CPU. Price: US$68

A statement by an American Online, Inc. (AOL) official is offered as testimony in a suit against Microsoft stating that AOL would be inclined to offer Netscape as their default browser but that they fear retaliation from Microsoft if the switch support away from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

United States Vice President, Al Gore, unveils Pacific Blue, a computer that is capable of making 3.9 trillion calculations per second, the fastest to date. The computer is to be used by the Department of Energy at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. It is developed by International Business Machines (IBM) under a US$96 million research contract. The system consists of 5,800 processors, 25 trillion transistors, and more than five miles of cables and wires.

2002
Palm introduces the Palm Tungsten T handheld computer, featuring a 175 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP1510 chip (ARM 925 processor), 16MB RAM, a voice recorder, Bluetooth wireless support, a 320×320 pixel 65,536 color TFT display, a Secure Digital slot, and Palm OS 5.0. Price: US$499

Palm introduces the Palm Tungsten W handheld computer, featuring a 33 MHz Dragonball VZ processor, a built-in keyboard, the General Packet Radio Service network, the Palm OS 4.1.1, and a 320×320 screen. Price: US$549

2003
Palm shareholders vote to merge with Handspring, to form a new company called palmOne Worldwide, and to spin off PalmSource as a separate company.

2004
Yahoo! launches a version of its search engine for mobile users, mobile.yahoo.com. Visit the official Yahoo! Mobile website.

2005
Sun Microsystems releases OpenSolaris Desktop 01 for Linux and Solaris. The system is based on GNOME 2.10. Visit the official OpenSolaris website.

2008
Google settles the Book Search lawsuits for $125 million and announces plans to start sharing search profits with authors. Announcing the settlement, Google states that they have made 7 million books searchable through Google Book Search, including 1 million with a “full preview” available through agreements with publishers. Visit the official Google Books website.

At its Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft delivers a pre-beta release of Windows 7 to developers. The company also announces plans to release a full Windows 7 beta early in 2009.