The Great Geek Manual

1604
Supernova 1604, the most recent supernova to be observed in the Milky Way.

1701
The Yale University is chartered

1876
The first two-way telephone conversation over outdoor wires takes place between Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson over the telegraph line linking Boston and East Cambridge. Three days earlier, in Boston, Bell’s two-way telephone test of conversation with Watson had been the world’s first two-way telephone conversation in doors.

1890
Though there will never be any conclusive evidence of the event, this is reportedly the date on which French electrical engineer Clément Ader becomes the first person to successfully fly an airplane, though it bears little resemblance to later airplanes. His steam-powered plane, “Eole,” will only fly for a fifty meter length, and unlike the Wright Brothers’ future flight, it rises only a few inches off the ground. The flight ends when the bat-like contraption collides with trees at the end of the testing field. It is certain that Ader coined the French word “avion” for aircraft. Some believe it to be an acronym for “Appareil Volant Imitant les Oisaux Naturels” (Flying Machine Imitating Natural Birds).

1894
The first “magic lantern” feature is shown at the Carbon Studio in New York City. Magic lanterns are early precursors to latter-day cinemas.

1928
John Logie Baird first demonstrates his television system to BBC officials, who aren’t impressed.

1933
An unpredicted meteor shower is seen from Europe. A hundred “shooting stars” a minute are reported by the Soviet Pulkovo Observatory, near Leningrad. Dr. W.J. Fisher, a Harvard astronomer, identifies the Giacobini-Zinner comet as the source of the shower. This minor periodic comet only caused sparse meteor showers in the past and was otherwise of little note to astronomers.

1936
The BBC officially announces that it will begin television service on November 2.

1938
The radio altimeter is first demonstrated in New York by Bell Labs. The device gives pilots an accurate altitude reading of an aircraft above the local terrain by bouncing radio signals off the ground, thus changing aviation forever.

1947
Eckert-Mauchly Computer Co. signs a contract to develop the first electronic digital computer with the ability to store programs, BINary Automatic Computer (BINAC), for the Northrop Aircraft Company. Will also be the first computer built commercially, though it will be the only computer that will ever built by the company before it becomes a division of the Remington Rand Corp. The system will feature capacity of 512 words and will cost US$278,000.

The first telephone conversation made between a telephone on an aeroplane and a telephone in a car is place in Wilmington, Delaware.

1952
Raphael Robinson discovers the 687-digit Mersenne prime M_2,281, which can be expressed as 2^2,281 – 1, using the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC). The number is the fifth discovered by Robinson in 1952 (one of which he discovered two days earlier), and it will remain the largest prime number to be discovered for more than four years.

1973
In the case of Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, Judge E. R. Larson issues a decision invalidating the patents granted on February 4, 1964 to John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert for their work on ENIAC, thus placing electronic computers into the public domain. In his decision, Larson cites the prior work of John Atanasoff and a paper written by John von Neumann, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. The decision is one of the fundamental legal decisions in the history of the computer industry.

1974
The Data Processing Division of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) introduces the IBM 3850 mass storage system.

1980
The First Tennessee Bank, the largest bank of Knoxville, becomes the first home banking computer system used by consumers. By September 1983, there will be four banks accessible through the CompuServe Information Service. Visit the official First Tennessee website.

1989
An official news agency in the Soviet Union reports the landing of a UFO in Voronezh.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Survivors” first airs. (No. 303) In it, The Enterprise investigates the last two survivors of an annihilated world, as the entire surface has been transformed to dust except their one little garden and house. Memory Alpha entry

1991
Apple Computer settles a lawsuit originally filed in February 1989 by Apple Corps, the corporate face of The Beatles, for US$26.5 million. The case alleges that Apple Computer continued to infringed on the label’s trademark by marketing a line of hardware with the ability to synthesize music in violation of an agreement reached between the two companies in 1981.

1992
A falling meteor, seen from Kentucky to New York, is observed at 7:50pm EDT. The 12.37kg stone meteorite crashes into a parked Chevrolet Malibou belonging to Michelle Knapp of Wells Street in Peekskill, New York at a velocity of about 80m/s. It is only the fourth meteorite recovered for which detailed trajectory data exists. After being hit by the meteorite, the car will tour France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the US.

1994
Minor Threat and Mucho Maas release version 1.10 of the popular wardialing program ToneLoc (an amalgam of the words “Tone Locator”) for MS-DOS. The program scans dial tones in order to search out private branch exchanges (PBX) or modems.

1995
In the Monday, October 9 issue of Newsweek, an article written by Katie Hafner and Adam Rogers entitled, “How Now Voyager?” appears on page 67. It features a profile of a start-up CD-ROM company that claims to prioritize quality over profits. The article highlights the founding of Voyager Co. in 1984 by Bob Stein and states that Stein once worked “briefly at Atari, the now defunct video game manufacturer.” Atari Corporation’s PR firm is notified and begins to take corrective measures at once.

Time Warner Interactive releases the racing game Power Drive Rally for the Atari Jaguar. Power Drive Rally will be the only Jaguar title with a users manual featuring a color cover.

1996
The website of Mark Kommun is hacked by “ivil h4×0r”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

1998
478 domains are hacked by the Chaos hacking group and redirected to the same defaced website. View an archived version of the defaced website.

The Hayes Corporation, a manufacturer of computer communications hardware, files for Chapter 11 protection in US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. This is the second time the firm has filed since 1994.

1999
The New York Times reports in an interview with Paul Packan, a scientist working for Intel Corporation, that semiconductor engineers have reached an impasse in regard to downsizing silicon transistors. Meanwhile Intel executives are quick to caution that they fail to see the problem as insurmountable.

Philips Electronics announces that it is discontinuing its line of Nino 200 and 500 Palmtop computers.

2001
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduces the 1.33GHz Athlon XP 1500+ processor, featuring a 64KB Leve-1 data cache, 64KB Level 1 instruction cache, 256KB Level 2 cache, three pipelined FPUs, a 4GB address space, and a 266MHz system bus. It supports MMX, 3DNow!, Enhanced 3DNow!, and 3DNow! professional instructions. “XP” stands for “extreme performance.” It incorporates 37.5 million transistors in a 0.18-micron process. It is the first of the Athalon XP processors to be released. Code-name: Palomino Price: US$160 in 1000-unit quantities

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the 1.4GHz Athlon XP 1600+ processor. Price: US$160 in 1,000 unit quantities

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the 1.467GHz Athlon XP 1700+ processor. Price: US$190 in 1,000 unit quantities

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the 1.53 GHz Athlon XP 1800+ processor. Price: US$252 in 1,000 unit quantities

The US Supreme Court rejects Microsoft’s request to hear an appeal of its antitrust case.

2002
The Supreme Court of the United States hears oral arguments in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, which challenges the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which had extended the terms of US copyright protects by an additional twenty years years. The case is argued by copyright activist Lawrence Lessig. On January 15, 2003, the Supreme Court will hold the CTEA constitutional by in a 7-2 decision.

The Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Dead Stop” first airs. (No. 204) In it, Enterprise is repaired by an unmanned and automatic repair station with a mind of its own. Memory Alpha entry

2003
Van T. Dinh, age 19, of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania is arrested on the campus of Drexel University on charges of hacking and identity theft committed last July in an elaborate scheme to dump worthless options for Cisco Systems stock. It is the first time computer hacking and identity theft have both played a part in a fraud prosecution brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The teenager allegedly lured victims in an online stock-discussion group to download a key-logging program that he claimed was a stock-charting tool. After using the program to monitor his victims’ machines, Dinh allegedly obtained the log-in and password information for a TD Waterhouse Investor Services online brokerage account owned by a Westborough, Massachusetts, man. With the victim’s account information in hand, Dinh used his own online brokerage account to create orders to sell worthless option, then hacked into the victim’s online account and created corresponding buy orders for the options, to the tune of approximately US$46,986. SEC official don’t comment on the teen obtained the money to buy the put options he erroneously sold, but they do note that the SEC investigation is ongoing.

2006
Google officially announces that it will acquire video host YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock. The agreement comes just hours after YouTube unveiled three separate agreements with major media outlets in response to threats of copyright-infringement lawsuits. YouTube was launched in February 2005 and quickly grew to become one of the most visited sites on the internet.

Version 4.4 of the Scientific Linux operating system, “Beryllium,” is released. Visit the system’s official website.

2007
Google acquires the micro-blogging service Jaiku. Visit the official Jaiku website.

Sony announces that it will reduce the price of its PlayStation 3 video game console in Japan to ¥44,980 for the 20GB model and ¥54,980 for the 60GB.

2008
Version 2.6.27 of the Linux operating system is released. Visit the official Linux website.

2009
Google announces that the number of books scanned into its Google Book Search service has exceeded ten million. Less than a year prior, on October 28, 2008, Google had scanned seven million books. Visit the Google Books website.