The Great Geek Manual

1683
Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek sends a report of his discovery of microscopic living animalcules (live bacteria) to the Royal Society. He describes observations made on the plaque between his own teeth, “a little white matter, which is as thick as if ’twere batter.” Leeuwenhoek reports, “I then most always saw, with great wonder, that in the said matter there were many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving. The biggest sort… had a very strong and swift motion, and shot through the water (or spittle) like a pike does through the water. The second sort… oft-times spun round like a top… and these were far more in number.”

1789
William Herschel discovers Mimas, a moon of Saturn.

1822
At the French Academie Royale des Inscriptions, Jean-François Champollion reads a paper, Lettre a M. Dacier, describing his solution to the mystery of the triple inscriptions of the Rosetta Stone which was unearthed by Napoleon’s army near the Rosetta branch of the Nile on July of 1799. Read more about the Rosetta Stone. Read the English translation of the Rosetta Stone.

1844
The first US patent is issued for a printing press with different colors of ink applied in one impression. (US No. 3,744) The inventor, Thomas F. Adams of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, calls the process “polychrome printing.” The process uses several ink fountains feeding different color rollers operated in parallel on the same axle, to produce stripes of different colors of ink.

1908
Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge becomes the first airplane fatality when he and Orville Wright crash during a flight in the Wright Flyer.

1931
The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) demonstrates an early version of 33-RPM long playing (LP) record format for the first time at the Savoy Plaza Hotel in New York City. The format will ultimately fail due to the prohibitive cost of its record players, however, with a capacity of fourteen minutes of music per side, the format is an important milestone. It will be another seventeen years before the LP format would be mass-produced.

1956
The first television programming is broadcast in Australia.

1959
Transit 1A, the first navigational satellite in history is launched, but it fails to reach orbit. The following April 4th, Transit 1B will be successfully launched, becoming the first operative navigational satellite in history.

1964
United Artists releases the spy thriller Goldfinger, directed by Guy Hamilton and starring Sean Connery as James Bond, premieres in UK theaters. The movie will become the first movie in the franchise to become an official box office blockbuster, and it will set records for recouping its production costs in record time, despite its budget being equal to twice that of its predecessors. Goldfinger was also the first Bond movie to feature an opening theme sung by a pop star, which would become one of the series’ hallmarks. However, the movie made cinematic history for being the first to feature a laser, capturing imaginations across the globe. In the novel the movie is adapted from, the villain, Goldfinger, uses a buzzsaw to attempt to execute the captured Bond, but filmmakers used a laser to give the film a fresher feel. The laser beam itself was an optical effect added in post-production. In close-ups where the laser cuts through the metal table Bond is strapped to, the table was heated with a blowtorch from below. Running Time: 1 hr 48 mins

1971
The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) officially withdraws from the business of computer manufacturing, US$490 million in the process.

1976
NASA unveils the first Space Shuttle, the Enterprise, amid great fanfare. The first complete orbiter was originally going to be named Constitution, but a massive write-in campaign from fans of the Star Trek television series convinced the White House to change the name to Enterprise.

1983
The animated television series Dungeons & Dragons premieres on the CBS network. The series, which is a co-production of Marvel Productions and TSR, is based on TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. In it, Hank, Presto, Eric, Diana, Sheila, and her younger brother Bobby take a ride on a rollercoaster, from which they are sucked into another world. There they are attacked by various monsters and entities. When all seems lost, they’re greeted by a short, mysterious man known as Dungeon Master. He gives each one of them a magical item that they can use to fight monsters and defend themselves. Hank, who has been transformed into a Ranger, is given a bow that creates arrows of energy. Presto who has been transformed into a Magician, is given a hat of magic spells. Eric who has been transformed into a Cavalier, is given a shield that can deflect any attack against it. Diana, who has been transformed into an Acrobat, is given a extendable javelin that allows her to do feats of acrobatics. Sheila, who has been transformed into a Thief, is given a cloak that makes her invisible. Bobby, who has been transformed into a Barbarian, is given a club that can crush anything. But once they have the weapons, they’re pursued by the evil Venger, a man who’s history is somehow tied with the Dungeon Master. His ultimate goal is to possess all six magical items, to defeat his mortal enemy, a five-headed dragon named Tiamat. The series will be a critical and commercial success, spawning more than a hundred different product licenses and leading its time slot for two years before going the series will pass into syndication. The level of violence was controversial for children’s television at the time, and the script of one episode, “The Dragon’s Graveyard,” was almost shelved because the characters contemplated killing their nemesis, Venger. TV.com entry

1984
The animated series television The Transformers premieres in the US. Written and recorded in America, the series is based on the line of transforming toys originally created by Japanese toy manufacturer Takara, which were developed into the Transformers line by the American company Hasbro. The toyline owes its existence to a spin-off of the Microman Japanese toyline called Diaclone, released in 1980 to cash in on the robot craze of the late seventies. The line features inch-tall humanoid figures which fit into small vehicles, which could transform into humanoid robot bodies. In 1983, the line evolved into a new sub-line, MicroChange, which featured “actual size” robots that transformed into life-sized microcassettes and guns or toy cars. The Diaclone and MicroChange toys were discovered at the 1983 Tokyo Toy Fair by Hasbro product developer Henry Orenstein, who presented the concept to Hasbro’s head of R&D, George Dunsay. Enthusiastic about the product, Hasbro decided to release toys from both Diaclone and MicroChange as one toyline in the US markets. It is from this decision that the Transformer toys were developed. Hasbro marketed the toy line with the animated series, The Transformers. The series follows in the footsteps of the highly popular anime series, Tekkaman: The Space Knight, which was released 1975, and its release is accompanied by a flurry of other robot-themed animated television series, including Challenge of the GoBots, which was first released on September 8, 1984, Voltron, which was first released on September 10, 1984, and Robotech, which will be first released in March of 1985. Read more about the history of The Transformers. TV.com entry

Thorn EMI’s Swindon Cable Services becomes the first UK broadband cable network.

1985
Following his forced resignation from Apple Computer, Steven Jobs distributes his letter of resignation to several major media outlets. He takes five other Apple employees and begins work on a new venture, NeXT computer.

Donald Kingsborough, a former Atari Inc. marketing manager, reveals plans to launch a talking toy bear using the same technology that Disneyland uses for their Abraham Lincoln and It’s A Small World attractions. The founder of Worlds of Wonder, Inc. in Fremont, California announces that the 2.5 pound toy bear, called Teddy Ruxpin, will sell between US$60 and US$80 and feature eyes that open and close and a mouth that moves with pre-recorded dialoge.

1989
The Washington Post causes major panic when it reports that a computer virus, “that springs to life destructively on Friday the 13th is on the loose.” The virus, which will later be dubbed the “DataCrime” virus, infects .COM and .EXE files and will format the first eight tracks of cylinder 0 of its host’s hard drive, effectively destroying its boot record, File Allocation Table (FAT), master boot track, partition table, and root directory, on or after October 13th. Despite its extreme media visibility, DataCrime will is ultimately a minor security issue matter, with fewer than fifty reported incidents in Europe and seven in the entire United States.

1990
Microsoft launches its largest marketing campaign to date for the Microsoft Windows Computing Marketing Program.

1991
AT&T switching stations in New York City simply run out of electrical power and shut down cold. Their back-up batteries fail. Automatic warning systems that should warn of the loss of battery power fail as well. The AT&T phone crash affects New York City as well as Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark airports, which loose all voice and data communications. Over five hundred flights are subsequently canceled and another five hundred are delayed, affecting approximately eighty-five thousand passengers, including the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In his book, The Hacker Crackdown, Bruce Sterling will write of the failure, saying, “This horrifying event was particularly ironic, as attacks on airport computers by hackers had long been a standard nightmare scenario, much trumpeted by computer- security experts who feared the computer underground. There had even been a Hollywood thriller about sinister hackers ruining airport computers — Die Hard II.” Fortune will list later the crash among the “Biggest Business Goofs of 1991.” Read more in The Hacker Crackdown.

Linus Torvalds publicly releases the first version of the Linux kernel, version 0.01 onto the Internet. While a computer science student at the University of Helsinki, Linus created the Linux operating system, which was originally named Freax. The source code of the kernel is 64KB.

1992
Apple Computer recalls sixty thousand PowerBook 100 units due to a number of potential safety problem. Specifically, in three of the sixty thousand notebooks manufactured between October and March, an electrical short melted a hole through the laptop’s case, and the power adapter socket on the notebooks’ motherboard was found to be prone to cracks. Apple’s shares close down US$1.25 at US$47 following the announcement of the recall.

1995
David Wagner and Ian Goldberg, PhD students in the computer science department at the University of California, Berkeley, crack the pseudo-random number generator in the SSL implementation of Netscape Navigator 1.1, exposing its weakness. The pair discover the session key within a few hours using only a single workstation. An article discussing the exploit will be published in the January 1996 issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal.

1996
Motorola announces its entry into the Power Macintosh clone market, unveiling the StarMax series of desktop computers, which use a version of Apple’s Tanzania motherboard, featuring the PowerPC 603e and 604e processors, operating at 166 MHz and 200 MHz. Apple will terminate the Macintosh clone license program in 1997.

1997
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) licenses the PalmPilot design from 3Com.

1998
Acorn Computers announces the end of its workstations division, which manufactures RISC OS computers, canceling plans to manufacture the Phoebe computer despite thousands of pre-release orders.

Aaron Blosser, age 28, a contract programmer and self-described “math geek,” harnesses over 2,585 US West computers by installing a program that will utilize their idle time to find Mersenne prime numbers. Their combined computational power in theory surpasses that of most supercomputers. Blosser enlists 2,585 computers to work at various times during the day and night and quickly runs approximately 10.63 years of computer processing time in his search for a new prime number. “I’ve worked on this (math) problem for a long time,” said Blosser. “When I started working at US West, all that computational power was just too tempting for me.” US WEST is a Regional Bell Operating Company, one of seven telephone companies spawned by the antitrust breakup of AT&T in 1983. Blosser intended to configure the software to run in the background, but instead he misconfigured the machines so that they checked for network activity every two seconds – flooding the system with packets in the process. When the error disrupts the network, US West fires Blosser and urges the FBI to prosecute him.

1999
Amiga, a unit of Gateway Inc., notifies its customers that it is changing its strategy yet again, and that it will not bring to market a much-anticipated multimedia computer.

Compaq Computer unveils the Aero 1530 handheld computer, featuring Windows CE, 16MB RAM, fourteen hours of battery life, an MP3 audio player, and a PC Card Type I slot. Price: US$299 Weight: five ounces

The French finance ministry reveals that they are investigating complaints about the actions of the United States software company Microsoft, but it has not yet determined grounds for an antitrust trial.

On eBay, bidding closes for item number 159779699, the 16mm camera that was used in the movie Blair Witch Project. The camera sells for US$11,500.00 to a bidder listed as “nishizaki”. The DVD release of the film makes a reference to selling this camera for US$30,000, however that was an earlier auction on which the transaction was never completed. This was the second attempt to auction the camera, which was re-listed Tuesday, September 7th.

On eBay, bidding closes for item number 159791423, the production slate used in the movie Blair Witch Project. The slate sells for US$1,525 to a bidder listed as “nishizaki”.

Microsoft announces that nearly one hundred independent Internet sites have agreed to share auction listings for their new auction service. The move enables Internet surfers to view and bid on items by visiting any one of the entire consortium of sites. A formal announcement will be made Monday, September 20.

The San Diego, California-based law firm Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes and Lerach files suit against 4Kids Entertainment, Nintendo, and Wizards of the Coast demanding that they return the profits made on the sale of the Pokemon trading card game. Because the cards can be used in games referred to as “battles” which are won through a process of purchasing new cards, the firm asserts that it constitutes illegal gambling.

Version 3.3 of the FreeBSD operating system is released. Visit the official FreeBSD website.

2000
Version 4.75 of the Netscape Communicator web browser is released. Visit the application’s official website.

2001
The Dow Jones Industrial Average opens for the first time after the September 11 attacks. The stocks plummet throughout the trading session, and the market posts its biggest point drop in its history when it closes down 684.81 points to 8920.70.

Handspring introduces the Handspring Visor Neo handheld computer, featuring a monochrom display, a 33MHz processor, 8MB RAM, and the Palm OS 3.5.2H3. Two AAA batteries power the unit for six to eight weeks. Price: US$199, US$299 for an upgrade to Handspring Visor Pro with 16MB RAM

2002
Samir Rana, age 21, of London, England, known by the web handle “Torner”, is arrested on suspicion of being a member of the infamous hacker group “Fluffy Bunny” following a year-long investigation into the creation of the Linux rootkit program called Tornkit. A Scotland Yark spokesman will later explain in a public statement that Torner essentially confessed by brazenly announcing when he was about to launch a DDoS attacks and posting pictures of himself with other hackers on the Web. In addition, a CD-ROM containing chat log files, Web pages, photos and other evidence was recovered during the course of the arrest. It will also later be revealed that Rana owned the pink stuffed toy depicted in photos left as a signature on websites defaced by Fluffy Bunny.

The Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Anomaly” first airs. (No. 302) In it, the crew of Enterprise encounters the anomalies of the Delphic Expanse first-hand and first learn of the giant spheres that seem to be behind its existence. Memory Alpha entry

2004
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the 2GHz Sempron 3000+ processor, featuring a 512KB Level-2 Cache and a 333MHz Front Side Bus.

Paramount Pictures releases the science fiction film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, directed by Kerry Conran and starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Angelina Jolie, to 3,170 US theaters. The film is one of the first to be shot entirely on a digital backlot with live actors. It took nearly a hundred animators, artists, compositors, and modelers to create the multi-layered backgrounds after the entire movie had been sketched out via hand-drawn storyboards and then re-created as a series of 3D animatics. Produced on a budget of US$70 million, it will gross US$15,580,278 domestically in its opening weekend. Though the film will be a financial failure, it will largely be critically lauded for its innovation. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG) Running Time: 1 hr 47 mins

2007
AOL officially announces that it will refocus its business on advertising and that it will relocate corporate headquarters from Dulles, Virginia to New York City.

Microsoft loses its appeal against a European Union ruling forcing it to pay a €497 million (US$689 million) fine for antitrust violations.

2008
Apple Inc. releases version 9.5 of the Darwin operating system.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) classifies Haumea as the fifth dwarf planet in the Solar System and names it after the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth and fertility.