The Great Geek Manual

1822
The College of Cardinals reverses the church’s condemnation of the ideas of astronomer Galileo Galilei, stating that “publication of works treating of the motion of the Earth and the stability of the sun, in accordance with the opinion of modern astronomers, is permitted.” However, Galilei’s book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, won’t be removed from the Vatican’s list of banned books.

1831
Charles Darwin and Captain Robert Fitzroy travel from London to Plymouth to inspect the HMS Beagle. This is Darwin’s first sight of the ship on which he would sail during the voyage which will lead to his famous theory of evolution.

1928
General Electric makes the first simulcast in Schenectady, New York, broadcasting a play over radio and TV at the same time. The program is The Queen’s Messenger.

1940
Dr. George R. Stibitz, a Bell Telephone Labs engineer, demonstrates the first example of “remote computing.” Having created built the “Model 1 Complex Number Calculator” a year before at Bell Laboratories, he leaves it in New York City and travels to New Hampshire with a teleprinter, where he allows attendees of the American Mathematical Society at Dartmouth College to enter equations that are transmitted down phone lines and calculated remotely, before the answers are returned to what will later be described as an astounded audience. Wiremen had arranged the hookup between the college and the computer in the Bell Labs building on West Street in New York, New York a day before the demonstration. It took about one minute for the computer to respond accurately via teletype to problems sent to it.

1946
The first long-distance mobile car-to-car telephone conversation in held between Houston, Texas and St. Louis, Missouri.

1982
According to Twin Galaxies, Steve Sanders scores a record-setting 3,151,800 points playing the Nintendo arcade game Donkey Kong at the U-Totem arcade in Kansas City, Missouri. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

1985
The International Cometary Explorer (ICE) flies relatively unscathed through the gas tail of comet P/Giacobini-Zinner, at a speed of 21km/sec at its closed approach, some 7,800km downstream from the comet’s nucleus.

1995
Golle Cushing, age 22, known by the handle “Alpha Bits”, is arrested for selling stolen credit card numbers and cell phone information.

US Secret Service sting operation “Operation Cybersnare,” results in the arrest of six people and the seizure of at least twenty machines across several states. The basis of the sting is evidence collected through “Celco 51,” a dummy bulletin board system (BBS) operated by the United States Secret Service.

1997
The Mars Global Surveyor, which was launched in November 1996, goes into an elliptical orbit around Mars, where it was intended to spend two years mapping the surface of Mars. To drop into a lower orbit the original mission plan was to use a braking effect by dipping into the upper Martian atmosphere. The lower orbit was a better position for mapping purposes. However, the aerobraking method which should have dropped the probe into a lower orbit fails to deploy correctly.

Midway Amusement Games releases the versus fighting game Mortal Kombat 4 to arcades in the US.

The Motorola Computer Group publicly announces that it is abandoning the Macintosh market, due to a breakdown in negotiations with Apple Computer over licensing for the Mac OS. The company also announces that it won’t ship its previously announced StarMax 6000 systems.

1998
A 445-page report generated by Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr outlining grounds for the impeachment of the President of the United States, President William Clinton, is published on the Internet. The report describes numerous intimate encounters over eighteen months between Clinton and a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky near the Oval Office. The report details eleven possible offenses made by the President including abuse of power, witness tampering, and obstructing justice in an effort to conceal the affair. The House voted 363-63 in favor of releasing the material just hours before the text was published on the Internet. The move marks the increasing importance of the Internet in US politics.

Mindspring Enterprises Inc. agrees to purchase the Sprynet subscriber base and assets for US$35 million from America Online (AOL). AOL had originally acquired Sprynet base when it took over CompuServe Interactive Services Inc. in February 1998.

2000
The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) releases a report entitled, “”Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children: A Review of Self Regulation and Industry Practices in the Motion Picture, Music Recording and Electronic Gaming Industries,” which concludes that children are targeted by entertainment industry advertising for violent movies and video games. The topic becomes a presidential campaign issue. Read the report online as a PDF file.

2001
Almost 3,017 people die in a series of coordinated plane hijackings that result in the collapse of both towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the destruction of a western portion of The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and an plane crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The attack will shake the nation, and it will widely be considered the first foreign terrorist strike on US domestic soil in history.

2002
After a significant effort to locate it, the original post in which Scott Fahlman proposes the use of emoticons in online forums on the CMU CS general bboard is retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x). Here is the original post:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman : – )
From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: : – )
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use : – (

2006
The Apple Store of New York City receives its one millionth visitor. The visitor is Elizabeth Rodriguez, who receives a prize package, including an Apple ProCare membership, iPod, iPod Hi-Fi, and a MacBook.

Microsoft announces that they will launch a Live Search product in an attempt to recapture marketshare from search giant Google.

2008
The Big Champagne peer-to-peer research firm releases a report revealing that the video game title Spore had been downloaded illegally 171,402 times since it was released onto bittorrent networks September 1st. Though six-digit download figures are not unusual on torrent networks, the firm reports that the game is unusual in that the number of users expressing the opinion that the piracy is justified due to its heavy-handed use of DRM are rapidly increasing. “By downloading this torrent, you are doing the right thing,” wrote one user with the web handle “deathkitten” on the popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. “You are letting [Electronic Arts] know that people won’t stand for their ridiculously draconian ‘DRM’ viruses.” In a similar spirit of protest, the game has received over two thousand negative reviews on Amazon.com, out of only 2,100 reviews total, all mentioning the game’s DRM. The game raised widespread controversy for its restrictive use of SecuROM copy protection which requires users to authenticate a game upon installation, again every ten days, and once each time the game accesses the internet. In addition, each copy of the game was restricted to three installations, after which users would be granted installations on a case-by-case basis.