The Great Geek Manual

1923
Edwin Hubble identified the first Cepheid variable star.

1934
The premiere of Hollywood Hotel on CBS becomes the first US radio network program to originate from Hollywood.

1936
The first intercity telecast in the US using coaxial cable is transmitted between New York City and Philadelphia over an AT&T coaxial cable landline.

1962
United Artists releases the first installment in the James Bond film franchise, the spy film Dr. No, directed by Terence Young and starring Sean Connery, Joseph Wiseman, Ursula Andress, Jack Lord, and John Kitzmiller to UK theaters. In it, an agent of the British Secret Service, James Bond (007), is sent out to the West Indies in order to find out why another of his number was killed. His arrival is not welcomed by everyone, but it is not long before he is on the trail of the killer. The trail leads to a secretive scientist, Dr. No, but the discovery has wider implications… Produced on a budget of US$1 million, the film will gross US$109.6 million worldwide. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: PG Running Time: 1 hr 50 mins

1969
The comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus premieres on the BBC with the episode “Whither Canada?” IMDB listing

1970
The PBS television network is launched.

1982
According to Twin Galaxies, David Plummer, age 14, scores a record-setting 2,175,743 points on Atari’s Tempest after playing the game for two hours and twenty-three minutes at Midtown Amusements in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

Sony begins marketing pocket televisions with two inch diagonal flat screens.

1984
Marc Garneau becomes the first Canadian in space, aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. (STS-41G) It is also the first NASA mission to carry a crew of seven.

1991
Linus Torvalds announces the release of the first official version of the Linux kernel, version 0.02. The announcement is made on Usenet. In the announcement, Torvalds writes, “Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?” and goes on to invite fellow hackers to join in the project’s development. Visit the software’s official website.

1992
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) introduces the IBM ThinkPad line of laptop computers. The ThinkPad 300, manufactured by Zenith Data Systems, features a 25 MHz 386SL processor. The ThinkPad 700 features a monochrome 9.5-inch display, a 25 MHz 486SLC, a 80/120 hard drive, and 4MB RAM. The ThinkPad 700C features the 25MHz 486SLC, a 10.3-in TFT active-matrix VGA color.

1994
Williams Entertainment announces that they have begun developing Doom for Nintendo’s forthcoming Ultra 64 video game system.

1997
Hackers crack the www.pentagon-ai.army.mil home page.

1998
Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) reveals plans to cut 2,500 of their 127,000 worldwide employees by offering a voluntary severance package. HP’s last employee buyout took place in 1991.

Veritas Software Corporation, a data protection software developer, reveals plans to acquire the Network and Storage Management Group of Seagate Software for about US$1.6 billion in stock.

Version 4.07 of the Netscape Communicator Internet suite is released.

1999
According to a report published by MmWire, the results of a recently concluded Fairfield Research study shows that Sega’s Dreamcast sales figures appear to be significantly cutting into Nintendo’s N64 sales. However, PlayStation sales appear to be unaffected.

Apple Computer unveils a new line of iMac computers with prices starting as low as US$999. The new computers include a new iMac, iMac DV, and iMac DV Special Edition that is housed in a graphite-colored case. Apple also begins offering version 9 of its Macintosh operating system for US$99.

At the Microprocessor Forum is held in San Jose, California, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announces the first details of its own x86 64-bit architecture, as well as its future system bus, Lightning Data Transport. Both will be implemented in AMD’s eighth-generation microprocessor, which will be backward-compatible with Intel 32-bit x86 architecture processors. Code-name: Sledgehammer

Del Rey publishes the science fiction novel Vector Prime by R. A. Salvatore as a hardcover. (ISBN-13: 978-0345428448) Its the first book in the New Jedi Order series. Length: 387 pages

Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Wallet.

2000
Microsoft accuses the Federal government of attempting to “short-circuit the appellate process” while Microsoft seeks more time to appeal a ruling by a federal judge to break up the company.

2002
In the ten years since introducing the first ThinkPad computer, IBM has sold fifteen million units.

2003
Microsoft releases a wireless network adapter for the Xbox. Price: US$140

2005
ATI introduces the Radeon X1000 series of graphics cards, the first to use the Radeon R520 core referred to by ATI as an “Ultra Threaded Dispatch Processor”. This new core employs a strategy of attempting to streamline the Radeon line, rather than simply increasing its number of processing unit, as previous models had.