The Great Geek Manual

1784
The Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, the first daily paper in America, is first published.

1897
The The New York Sun runs a letter sent in by Virginia O’Hanlon, asking, “I am eight years old. Some of my friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in “The Sun”, it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth. Is there a Santa Claus?” Along with the letter, the paper runs the famous response written by editor Frank Church. “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist. No Santa Claus? Thank God he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay ten times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.” Read the text of the original article and view digital images of the original newspaper.

1937
George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. publishes the first edition of the fantasy novel The Hobbit written (and illustrated) by J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor at Oxford University. The story, which draws strongly on mythology and Anglo-Saxon history, follows the adventures of a Hobbit named Bilbo Baggins, who will later be cited by literary historians as fantasy literature’s first bourgeois character. By introducing a character through which his middle class readers could relate to medieval archetypes, he transformed the genre forever. All 1,500 copies of the first print run will sell out by December 15, and the American edition will be published on March 1, 1938. It will eventually go on to become an international bestseller, available in forty languages. Length: 312pp Read Anne T. Eaton’s 1938 review of The Hobbit from the New York Times. Visit the official Tolkien website.

1970
This day’s issue of the The New York Times features the first modern op-ed page.

1972
The NASA robotic space probe Mariner 10 makes second pass of the planet Mercury.

Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI) enters the electronic calculator market with three new calculators. The TI-2500 or the Datamath offers four-function, full-floating decimal point with an eight-digit Light Emitting Diode (LED) display. The unit is also rechargeable and works with AC or DC power sources. The desktop models, the TI-3000 and TI-3500 sell for under US$85 and US$100 respectively. Both are four-function with gas-discharge displays. The TI-3000 has an eight digit display and the TI-3500 has a ten digit display. Dealers are required to order a minimum of 96 per model to stock them. They are the first patented calculators on the market. Price: US$119.95

1982
According to Twin Galaxies, Leo Daniels scores a record-setting 169,595,225 points playing the Vid Kidz arcade game Robotron at the Light Years Amuse arcade in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

1992
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Time’s Arrow (Part 2)” first airs. (No. 601) In it, an away mission follows Data into the past to prevent alien from interfering with Earth’s timeline. Memory Alpha entry

1994
Microsoft releases the Windows NT 3.5 operating system. It is released in two editions: Server and Workstation. The system was developed for the purpose of increasing the speed of the operating system. The project was given the codename “Daytona” as a reference to the Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida. View the system’s interface at GUIdebook.

1994
Cray releases version 9.0 of the Unicos operating system.

1996
A New York Times article reveals that an investigation into the crash of American Airlines Flight 965 in Colombia in December 1995 revealed that a programming error may have contributed to the disaster. The pilots apparently selected the first choice of a beacon to guide the plane’s autopilot to a landing without checking that it was the correct destination. As a result, the plane flew one hundred miles off course, with the devastating result of 159 deaths.

1998
3dfx Interactive files a suit in Northern California District Court against Nvidia, a competing 3D chip producer. The suit alleges patent infringements on its multi-texturing technologies.

Apple Computer releases the AppleWorks 5 software suite. Price: US$99 or US$79 (upgrade)

eBay goes public, more than three years after its founding on September 3, 1995. Both founder Pierre Omidyar and president Jeffrey Skolll became instant billionaires when the company’s stock price shoots past their US$18 goal to close at US$53.50 on the first day of trading.

Seven UCLA websites are hacked by “The BTF Team”. View an archived version of the defaced websites.

1999
Google takes its web search engine, its core service, out of beta.

A large earthquake registering 7.6 on the Richter scale strikes Taiwan, causing a two-week halt to regional manufacturing facilities, which supply a vast amount of computing components to the world. Analysts predict that world chip prices will rise sharply as a result. The quake will later be dubbed the 921 Earthquake.

Version 1.12 of the HydraBBS bulletin board system (BBS) is released

2000
After nearly five years of incarceration, Kevin Mitnick, age 36, is released from a Lompoc, California prison. Mitnick makes a statement to the reports who had assembled for the occasion in which he lambastes the prosecutors responsible for his sentence and The New York Times reporter John Markoff for his gross misrepresentation of the case. “My actions and my life have been manipulated and grossly misrepresented by the media since I was 17,” he said. “My case is a case of curiosity–I wanted to know as much as I could find out about how phone networks worked and the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of computer security. There is no evidence in this case whatsoever, and certainly no intent on my part at any time, to defraud anyone of anything.”

Researchers at F-Secure and McAfee.com researchers discover the first handheld computer virus “Phage”, which targets the Palm OS.

United States prosecutors reveal that Jason Diekman, age 20, is charged with allegedly hacking into computer systems at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and NASA computers at Stanford University. Additional charges allege the theft of over five hundred credit card numbers, which were used to make more than six thousand dollars worth of purchases.

Version 7.0 of Corel Paint Shop Pro, a bitmap and vector graphics editor, is released for Windows. Visit the application’s official website.

2001
Deep Space 1 passes within 2,200km of Comet Borrelly.

2003
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the 1917MHz Athlon XP 2600+ processor, featuring a 512KB Level-2 Cache and a 333MHz Front Side Bus.

Intel releases the 2667MHz Pentium 4 HT 2.66 mobile processor, featuring a 512MHz Level-2 cache and a 533MHz Front Side Bus.

The unmanned NASA space probe Galileo successfully completes its eight-year mission to Jupiter by entering the planet’s atmosphere, where it is crushed, then vaporized. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California directed the craft into Jupiter’s atmosphere to prevent the probe from contamination any of Jupiter’s moons. Contact with the satellite is lost at approximately 3:40pm EDT.

2004
The BBC launches the 20th Anniversary Edition of the Infocom interactive fiction game The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to coincide with the initial broadcast of the radio series Tertiary Phase. The game will go on to win the Interactive BAFTA Award for Best Online Entertainment on March 2, 2005.

The Star Wars trilogy is released on DVD for the first time. This re-release features extensive restoration and alteration. Many of the alterations to the films will become points of controversy among Star Wars fans, many of whom are outraged that the original version of the films, as first seen in theaters, are not available in the DVD format.

2006
Version 9.02 of the Opera Internet Suite is released. Visit the official Opera website.

2007
Screen Gems releases the sci-fi action film Resident Evil: Extinction, directed by Russell Mulcahy and starring Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Oded Fehr, and Mike Epps, to 2,828 US theaters. It’s the third film based on the popular survival horror game series Resident Evil. In it, Alice travels across the Mojave desert and through Las Vegas on a journey to reach Alaska, in the hope of escaping the zombie apocalypse. Though its opening weekend will out-gross both of its predecessors’ openings, Extinction received far worse reviews, largely for its predictability and a lack of plot complexity. Produced on a budget of US$50,648,679, it will gross US$23,678,580 domestically in its opening weekend. Visit this film’s official website. IMDb profile (MPAA Rating: R)
Running Time: 1 hr 35 mins