The Great Geek Manual

1837
Professor Daubeny, Professor Torrey, and Alfred Vail attend a demonstration of Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph at New York University. Vail becomes interested. Vail and Morse will be the first two telegraph operators on Morse’s experimental line between Washington, DC, and Baltimore

1890
Guglielmo Marconi demonstrates radio transmission at Three Mile Hill in Salisbury Plain, England for officials from the General Post Office, the Navy, and the Army present.

1930
The first non-stop airplane flight from Europe to the US is completed by Captain Dieudonne Coste and Maurice Bellonte of France when they arrive in Valley Stream, New York, aboard the Question Mark after a thirty-seven hour flight.

1963
The CBS Evening News becomes US network television’s first half-hour weeknight news broadcast, when the show is lengthened from fifteen to thirty minutes.

1969
At University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) , the first Interface Message Processor (IMP), built by BBN, is first connected to its SDS Sigma-7 mainframe, thus establishing the first node of what will become the ARPANET, the first wide area packet switching network. On October 29, the node will be used to send the world’s first long-distance host-to-host communication.

The first automatic teller machine (ATM) in the United States is installed in Rockville Center, New York.

1970
NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine announces the cancellation of two Apollo missions to the Moon, Apollo 15 (a designation which will be re-used by a later mission), and Apollo 19 due to congressional cuts in FY 1971 NASA appropriations. The Apollo budget will be reduced by US$42.1 million, to US$914.4 million, within the total NASA US$3.27 billion budget.

1980
California Pacific Computer Co. releases the roleplaying game Ultima I only for the Apple II computer, though many ports will follow. Ultima revolves around a quest to find and destroy the Gem of Immortality, which is being used by the evil wizard Mondain to enslave the lands of Sosaria. Players step into the role of “The Stranger,” an individual summoned from another world to end the rule of Mondain. The game is one of the first commercial computer roleplaying games and the first commercial games to feature tile graphics to represent the environment. The tile graphics system was programmed in machine language by Ken W. Arnold, a friend of Richard Garriott, the game’s developer. The rest of the game is coded in interpreted BASIC. Due to its use of illegal opcodes, the game can’t be won on an enhanced Apple IIe, IIc, or IIGS system;, an Apple II, II+, or an un-enhanced IIe is required. It will come to be considered an important and influential turning point in the evolution of the genre in the years to come.

1983
A prototype camera cassette recorder (CCR), based on the VHS-C compact videocassette format, is shown at the Berlin Funkausstellung by JVC.

1985
It is announced that a US and French expedition have located the wreckage of the Titanic about 560 miles off Newfoundland, seventy-three years after the British luxury liner sank.

1987
Former English Major Paddy Roy Bates formerly claims the World War II installation Roughs Tower, situated in international waters seven nautical miles off the British coast, as his own, settles his family there, proclaims the artificial island to be a micronation, and declares himself Prince, claiming jus gentium. The island will subsequently be named the Principality of Sealand. Though the move is largely ignored, the small nation will eventually arouse global discussions as to what constitutes a nation in the modern day, especially after the popular bittorrent website The Pirate Bay attempts to purchase the nation in January of 2007.

Philips introduces the CD video format.

1992
Version 2.0 of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption program is released outside of the US for the first time. It’s the first really widely distributed version of the program, and it will soon become the defacto standard for encryption. It is released simultaneously in English, French and Spanish.

1993
The United States and Russia formally end decades of competition in space by agreeing to a joint venture to build the Mir space station, which will become the world’s first constantly inhabited long-term research station in space.

1997
At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs announces that Apple Computer would acquire the direct marketing customer database and certain key employees of Power Computing, the largest Mac clone manufacturer, as well as buying back the company’s license to distribute the Macintosh operating system, effectively putting an end the production of Mac clones. The acquistion will cost Apple US$100 million in stock and another US$10 million in cash. In an internal memo, Jobs rationalized the acquisition by explaining that, “the license fee Apple receives from the licensees does not begin to cover their share of the expenses to engineer and market the Mac OS platform. This means that, in essence, Apple is giving a several hundred dollar subsidy with each licensed copy of the Mac OS.” Power Computing will stop selling Macintosh systems as of December 31st.

International Business Machines (IBM) announces that the performance of its RS/6000 SP model parallel supercomputer is now fifty-eight percent faster thanks to a new microprocessor and a number of software refinements. The announcement is of particular note because Deep Blue, the computer that defeated chess champion Gary Kasparov in May, was an early RS/6000 SP.

1999
Anti-virus experts predict that the threat posed by the Thursday macros virus (WM97) that infects Microsoft Word documents and can erase computer hard drives on Monday, December 13. On September 6, Network Associates will issue a “High Risk” warning, placing the virus in the same category as Chernobyl, Explore.zip, and Melissa viruses.

eBay stops an auction for a human kidney as bids reached US$5.7 million. EBay’s decision is based on their policy against allowing the auction of human body parts in accordance of United States federal law that considers such actions a felony punishable by up to five years in prison or a US$50,000 fine. An eBay spokesperson explains that the company believes the auction was only a prank.

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) launches a new programmable processor designed specifically for communication applications such as hubs, routers, and switches that can be enhanced by way of software upgrades.

2000
Version 5.7.0 of the Perl programming language is released. Visit the official Perl website.

2001
The European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) is held September 2 – September 4, at a new venue, the ExCel, in London, England.

2002
Internet2 now includes two hundred academic, sixty corporate, and forty affiliate members. There are an estimated 605 million people online.

Sony releases the Clié PEG-SJ30 handheld computer, featuring a 16-bit color 320×320 resolution screen, 16MB RAM, rechargeable lithium-ion battery, a Memory Stick slot, and version 4.1 of the Palm OS. Price: US$300

2003
Algenta Technologies releases DNSMax is a proprietary-licensed Domain Name System (DNS) server for Unix-like systems. Visit the DNSMax’s official website.

Version 1.1 of the OpenOffice.org cross-platform open source office suite. Visit the application’s official website.

2005
Jeremy Arendt releases the G3 Torrent open source bittorrent client under an MIT License for Windows. It was written in Python and bears a close resemblance to the Azureus bittorrent client. Visit the application’s Sourceforge page.

The Register publishes the news that “DVD Jon” has defeated the encryption in Microsoft’s Windows Media Player by reverse engineering a proprietary algorithm that was ostensibly used to protect Media Player NSC files from engineers sniffing for the files’ source IP address, port or stream format. Johansen has also released a decoder. Visit DVD Jon’s official blog.

2008
Google launches the beta version of its Chrome web browser in 43 languages for Windows. The browser will rapidly seize a one percent share of the web browser market, but it will ultimately fail to live up to pre-release expectations that the browser would change the way people used the internet in the face of competition from Firefox. Visit the official Chrome website.