The Great Geek Manual

1633
Galileo Galilei is tried before the Inquisition of the Catholic Church on charges of heresy for teaching his theory that the Earth orbits the Sun.

1891
The first gasoline-powered car is debuted in in Springfield, Massachusetts.

1938
The Radio Manufacturers Association adopts standards for a US television system and submits proposals to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

1940
Genevieve Grotjan completes the decryption of the Japanese Purple code diplomatic cryptographic machine. The information uncovered from decryptions was eventually code-named Magic within the US government. Read more about The Purple Machine.

1951
Production of the first receivers for the CBS Broadcasting, Inc. (CBS) sequential color system begins at the Air-King electronics manufacturing subsidiary of Hytron Radio and Electronics Corporation, which is owned by CBS. CBS bought Hytron, according to president Frank Stanton, “to assure at least some source for colour receivers to the public.” The sets go on sale at Gimbels store in New York, priced at US$499.95. Rival manufacturer Allan B DuMont will later claim that only two hundred units were manufactured and that only half of them were sold.

1952
Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase publish a report confirming that DNA holds hereditary data.

1954
The first program written in the FORTRAN programming language is run. FORTRAN, which is an acronym for “FORmula TRANslator,” was invented at IBM for technical and scientific applications by a group led by John Backus. The purpose of FORTRAN is to simplify the programming process by allowing programmers to use simple algebraic expressions in their code.

1967
The Marine, Etc., Broadcasting Act comes into force, effectively banning pirate radio in UK.

1968
The Star Trek episode “Spock’s Brain” first airs. In it, Captain Kirk travels to a strange planet to track aliens who have stolen Spock’s brain. It is the fifty-sixth episode, production number sixty-one, and the first episode of the third season. Memory Alpha entry

1977
NASA launches the Voyager 2 spacecraft on a mission to fly past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Visit the official NASA Voyager website.

1979
The science fiction television series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century premieres on the NBC network in the US with the episode “Awakening.” Inspired by the massive success of Star Wars two years earlier, a pilot film was released to theaters earlier in the year. Box office success led NBC to commission the series. The pilot episode is a modified version of the theatrical release, which omits some scenes, including a popular reference by Twiki to his “freezing his ball bearings off” and the death of the evil henchman “Tiger Man,” who would later appear in the series. The series and the film that acts as its pilot are based upon the Buck Rogers character that had been featured in comic strips and novellas since the twenties. It will run for thirty-seven episodes across two seasons, the second of which was abbreviated by an actor’s strike. TV.com entry

1984
Data General introduces the Data General/One Personal System portable computer, featuring MS-DOS, CP/M-86, Unix, 128KB RAM, and one floppy drive. It is the first portable computer with a full-size LCD display. Price: US$2,895 Weight: 10lbs

1987
The first e-mail message sent from China is sent to Germany.

1988
Apple Computer and Quantum Computer Services announce AppleLink, a graphical online service for Apple computer users.

1989
Apple Computer releases version 6.0.4 of the System 6 operating system for the Macintosh IIci and Macintosh Portable.

Apple Computer unveils the Macintosh Portable, featuring a 16MHz Motorola 68000 CMOS processor, 1MB RAM, a 40MB hard drive, a 3.5-inch 1.4 MB SuperDrive floppy drive, a keyboard, a trackball, and a 9.8-inch active matrix 640×400 monochrome LCD screen. The system runs for about 8 hours on a lead-acid gel battery pack. Price: US$6,500 Weight: 17lb

1993
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Descent (Part 2)” first airs. (No. 701) In it, the Borg are being led by Lore, who controls Data by feed him negative emotions. Memory Alpha entry

1995
AT&T announces that it will split into three companies over the course of the next fifteen months. The three companies will be: AT&T, which will provide communication services, Lucent Technologies, a systems and technology company that will manufacture communications products, and the NCR Corporation, which will create financial and retail systems.

Version 2.0 of the Red Hat Linux operating system is released. Visit the system’s official website.

1996
Version 2.0.21 of the Linux operating system is released.

The website of the CIA is hacked by the hacking group “Power Through Resistance”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

1998
The website of Docklands is hacked by “Safety^, Ez|ne & Bug^”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

1999
Microsoft announces plans to discontinue the “Modem BBS” option within LiveUpdate Wednesday, December 1, 1999.

Microsoft announces an alliance with a network of electronic commerce Internet websites to create an auction site to compete with eBay, Inc. According to Scott Randall, founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of FairMarket, Inc., the firm that created the alliance, the new auction system will function like a virtual warehouse for almost one hundred sites that will link their own auctions.

Wal*Mart Stores, Inc. reveal plans to open computer-repair centers in ten of its stores under a lease agreement with Computer Doctor, a franchiser and owner of thirty-eight stores in the United States. The combined stores generate almost ten million dollars in sales annually.

2000
Microsoft hosts a press conference in San Francisco, California to reveal that the official marketing name for their forthcoming Xbox game system will also be Xbox. Also released is a list of 156 Xbox developers including Activision, Eidos, Namco, and Sierra.

2001
Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) releases the racing game Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec for the PlayStation 2 in Europe. It will become the best selling game for the PlayStation 2. Visit the game’s official website. PEGI: 3+

2002
Walt Disney Pictures releases the anime film Spirited Away, directed by Hayao Miyazaki and featuring the vocal talents of Daveigh Chase, Jason Marsden, and Suzanne Pleshette, to 26 US theaters in a limited release. The film will go on to become the first anime film to win an Academy Award. Produced on a budget of USUS$ 19 million, it will gross US$449,839 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG) Running Time: 2 hrs 4 mins

International Business Machines (IBM) announces that it has shipped ten million “Gekko” PowerPC processors for Nintendo’s GameCube.

Microsoft acquires the British game developer Rare for US$375 million.

The science fiction series Firefly, created by Joss Whedon, premieres on the Fox network with the episode “Serenity.” (No. 1) In the episode, Captain Malcolm Reynolds of the Serenity and his crew of smugglers pick up passengers to make additional money, but one of the passengers turns out not to be what they seem to be. The series will run for only one season of fourteen episodes before being canceled due to low ratings. TV.com entry.

2004
The BBC reports that more than thirty thousand computers a day are being recruited into “bot nets” that spread spam and viruses.

2005
In the case of Rodney L. Joffe v. Acacia Mortgage Corporation, an Arizona Cour of Appeals affirms a lower court’s ruling that Acacia violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 by “delivering unsolicited advertisements, in the form of text messages, to Joffe’s cellular phone.” Read the decision at the Internet Library of Law.

Opera Software releases version 8.0 of its Opera web browser. This version no longer displays ad banners or requires a licensing fee, effectively leaving the browser available free of charge for the first time. The browser will be downloaded over a million times in the next two days, gaining it a notable increase in marketshare. Visit the official Opera website.

With the release of Opera 8.5, Opera Software announces that all future version of the Opera browser will be available free of charge without advertisements, although the company still sells support contracts. Version 8.5 includes automatic client-side fixing of websites that don’t render correctly and a number of security fixes. Visit the application’s official website.

2006
Microsoft holds a conference before the Tokyo Game Show, at which they announce the Platinum Hits line of games for the Xbox 360 in North America. Price: UK£24.99 US$29.99

Version 2.9.0 of phpMyAdmin, a tool written in PHP to administrate MySQL over the Internet, is released. Visit the application’s official website.

Yale University announces that it will offer digital videos of a selection of its courses on the Internet for free, complete with syllabi and lecture transcripts available in several languages, in a concerted effort to make the school more accessible. Though several other Ivy League schools offer free courses online, Yale is the first program to emphasize on video content. The cost of attending the school is estimated at US$46,000 a year. Visit the official Open Yale Courses website.

2007
NASA announces plans to establish a base on the Moon featuring a habitat and a pair of rovers with a range of 600 miles each by the year 2020.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) announces that it has filed the first copyright infringement lawsuit ever to be based on the alleged violation of a GNU General Public License (GPL) on behalf of the developers of BusyBox, an application that provides many of the Unix tools that have become standard among more popular Linux distributions for embedded system under GPL version 2. The suit, filed against Monsoon Multimedia, Inc. in Manhattan Federal District Court, alleges that the company has failed to provide recipients of its firmware, which implements BusyBox, with access to its underlying source code as stipulated in the GPL governing BusyBox. Erik Andersen, one of the two principal developers of BusyBox, stated at the time of the filing that, “If companies will not abide by the fair terms of our license, then we have no choice but to ask our attorneys to go to court to force them to do so.” Read a copy of the original complaint. Visit the official Software Freedom Law Center website.