The Great Geek Manual

1822
Jean-François Champollion announces that he has successfully deciphered the Rosetta stone, a stone slab dating from the Ptolemaic era.

1825
The first locomotive to haul a passenger train is operated by George Stephenson’s Stockton & Darlington line in England. The engine “Locomotion No. 1″ pulls thirty-four wagons and one solitary coach on its journey of twenty-one miles from Shildon, via Darlington to Stockton in County Durham.

1854
The steamship Arctic sinks with three hundred people on board, becoming the first great disaster in the Atlantic Ocean.

1905
The journal Annalen der Physik publishes the physics paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?” by Albert Einstein, which first introduces the famous mass–energy equivalence equation E=MC².

1908
The first production model Ford Model T is built at the Piquette Plant in Detroit, Michigan.

1922
The principle behind military radar is first demonstrated by two researchers at the US Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory conducting high-frequency radio tests across a river near Washington, DC. The researchers, Dr. Albert Hoyt Taylor and Leo Clifford Young had noticed that ships on the river interfered with their radio signals. Realizing the value of their discovery, they proposed that Navy ships could bounce radio waves to one another and watch for unexpected interference the would indicate enemy vessels.

1937
The last Balinese Tiger is killed.

1938
The BBC starts its European Service with news broadcasts in French, German and Italian.

1946
CBS petitions the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) to adopt its color television standard.

1950
The telephone answering device (TAD), the first answering machine, is invented by Benjamin Thornton in the UK. It will later be independently invented in Switzerland by Willy Mueller. Thornton’s device could be attached to a telephone and set to record a voice message from a caller. By utilizing a clock attachment, the machine is also able to forward messages and keep track of the time the calls were made.

1960.
The first Planar Integrated Circuit is successfully fabricated.

1961
The science fiction film The Day the Sky Exploded (also known as Death Comes from Space and Death From Outer Space), directed by Paolo Heusch and starring Paul Hubschmid and Fiorella Mari, is released to US theaters. In it, an atomic rocket has crashed into the sun, causing a massive explosion. The resulting solar meteors hurtle on a collision course toward Earth, where, if they strike, the Earth will be destroyed. The United States and Russia begin firing rockets in an attempt to destroy the meteors. IMDB listing

1963
The first version of the pilot episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, “An Unearthly Child” (also known as 100,000 BC), is shot at Lime Grove Studios in the evening, following a week of rehearsals. This initial recording is plagued by technical problems and errors made by actors during the performance. In particular, an issue with the doors leading into the TARDIS control room left them randomly opening and closing through the early part of the scene. The second attempt at the opening episode will later be shot on October 18. As with most British television series of the era, the episodes are predominantly videotaped “as live,” with little opportunity re-takes or breaks in recording. BBC episode guide

1968
The Star Trek episode “The Enterprise Incident” first airs. (No. 57) In it, the crew of the Enterprise attempts to steal a Romulan cloaking device. Memory Alpha entry

1973
The Concorde makes its first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in record-breaking time.

1979
A preliminary cost analysis reveals that, due to Apple’s standard four hundred percent markup, the five hundred dollar Macintosh computer proposed by Jef Raskin is entirely infeasible, even if the system were to be sold without a disk drive or a printer. In fact, it was determined that the closest Apple Computer could come was a US$1,500 system.

1983
Atari dumps a significant portion of its unsold 1982 inventory, dumping between ten and twenty (many sources claim that the exact number is fourteen) truckloads of game cartridges and other computer equipment into a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. A significant portion of the excess inventory consists of six million cartridges of ET: The Extraterrestrial, which has become a legendary flop. The out of the way dump was reportedly selected because scavenging was forbidden there and the dump’s garbage was crushed and covered every night. Nevertheless, one entire truckload of games is stolen and allegedly driven down to Mexico to be duplicated. Alamogordo teenagers will sneak into the landfill to dig out free games, and area stores will suddenly be besieged by people trying to sell them Atari’s worst-selling games. To stop the site from being looted further, many of the games will be crushed by D9 Caterpillars, and a layer of concrete will be poured over what is left.

Concerned by the growing commercialization of software development and the slow loss of the hacker ethic among programmers, Richard Stallman first announces the creation of the GNU computer operating system, a completely free UNIX clone, in the Usenet newsgroup net.unix-wizards. The Usenet message reads, in part, “Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete UNIX-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not UNIX) and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipments are greatly needed. … GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems. In particular, we plan to have longer filenames, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, filename completion perhaps, terminal-independent display support, and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen. Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages.” Read the full Usenet message.

1993
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Liaisons” first airs. (No. 702) In it, Worf and Troi reluctantly play host to two Lyraan ambasadors, and Picard travels to their planet on a shuttle, but the shuttle crashes en route. He is rescued from the wreckage by a human female who has been stranded on the planet for seven years. But before long, he begins to suspect that the woman is hiding something from him. Memory Alpha entry

1996
3DO publicly launches Meridian 59 for Windows, which is widely regarded as the first 3D graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), beating its next major rival, Ultima Online, by approximately a year. The Realm Online, an early 2D online game, will be commercially released within the year. 3DO will shut the game down on August 31, 2000, but it will be re-released by Near Death Studios, Inc. in 2002. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: T (Teen)

Kevin Mitnick, age 33, is indicted for an alleged two and half year hacking spree and the theft of millions of dollars worth of software from major corporations. The combined maximum sentence for all the charges is two hundred years.

1997
NASA looses contact with the Mars Pathfinder space probe at 10:23 UTC. It had returned 16,500 images over the course of its three month mission. Following five months of attempts to restore contact , the probe’s mission was officially terminated on March 10, 1998.

1998
This date is frequently marked as the birth date of the Google search engine, though the date has no clear significance. This is neither the date of Google’s incorporation or of the search engine’s actual launch. Indeed, in some years, September 7 will be celebrated as Google’s “birthday.”

1999
Intel releases the 533MHz and 600MHz Pentium III processor, featuring 133MHz bus speeds and a 512KB half speed Level-2 External cache.

2000
The FreeBSD Project releases version 4.1.1 of the FreeBSD operating system. Visit the official FreeBSD website.

Version 1.6.1 of the Ruby programming language is released.

2002
Andre Durand, the author of the popular Mindwire BBS client for Windows NT, which was developed from 1993 to 1996, “back when BBS’s were the Bomb!” releases the Mindwire Software as a free download from his website. Visit Durand’s official website.

2003
The Swedish-designed European Space Agency satellite Smart 1 satellite is launched aboard an Ariane-5 rocket along with two commercial satellites from the European Space Agency’s launch center in Kourou, French Guiana. “SMART” is an acronym for Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology. This satellite is the first European mission to the Moon. It will enter into a lunar orbit after a fifteen month journey, carried by a revolutionary new solar powered “ion drive,” which uses a Xenon propellant and an electrostatic field. Once there, it will begin its mission to probe some sixty-two million miles of the Moon’s surface for thirty months, collecting data on chemical chemical composition and seeking signs of water. Its mission will end on September 3, 2006 when the SMART-1 is deliberately crashed into the Moon’s surface. Visit the space probe’s official website.

The science fiction fan film The Fanimatrix: Run Program, directed by Rajneel Singh and starring Steven A. Davis, Farrah Lipsham, Fasitua Amosa, and Vaughan Beckley, is released on the Internet. The film was produced on a budget of only US$500, but draws rave reviews and a stagger amount of traffic from Slashdot. Its title is a play on the title The Animatrix. In it, two rebels working aboard the Zion ship Descartes enter the Matrix to retrieve top-secret information. In order to escape the unstoppable Agents of the Matrix, they devise a plan known as the “Run Program.” One rebel breaks into the target building and hacks their systems for the information while the other picks a fight in a bar and creates a distraction to draw the attention of the Agents. However, things don’t work out the way they had expected… Visit the film’s official website. IMDB listing Run Time: 16 min

2004
Version 2.6.0 of PhpMyAdmin, a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Internet, is released. This version introduces an improved character set and MySQL 4.1 support. Visit the application’s official website.

2005
Intel and Microsoft publicly announce their support for the high-definition DVD (HD-DVD) media format, which will be launches by Toshiba March 31, 2006.

Live Publishing, the publisher of the UK magazine Retro Gamer, enters into bankruptcy. The magazine’s official online forums describe the magazine as “finished” shortly before issue nineteen had been scheduled for release. However, the rights to Retro Gamer will be later purchased by Imagine Publishing in October 2005 and the magazine will be re-launched on December 8, 2005. Visit the magazine’s official website.

2006
Apple Computer releases version 7 of iTunes, again disabling the current version of myTunes.

On The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert advertises his fictional game “World of Colbertcraft” (a play on World of Warcraft’s name). At the end of the episode, he warns parents about a secret “adult-only” minigame that can be unlocked using a special code in reference to the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Hot Coffee minigame.

Lenovo releases its first desktop computer to feature Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) processors. The system, the Lenovo 3000 J115, is built on AMD’s socket AM2 platform, is powered by an Athlon 64 X2 dual-core chip. Price: US$599

Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) introduces the United States Truth in Video Game Rating Act (S.3935). If passed, the act would require the ESRB to have access to the full content of and hands-on time with the games it was to rate, rather than simply relying on the video demonstrations submitted by developers and publishers. This bill won’t be acted upon during its original session, and it will be reintroduced by Senator Brownback on February 13, 2007 under the same title, with session number S.568. Reading more at the Library of Congress.

Version 8.1.2 of the Netscape Browser is released. Visit the application’s official website.

Yahoo! acquires the Jumpcut video editing service. Visit the Jumpcut website.

2008
DreamWorks Pictures releases the action thriller Eagle Eye, directed by D.J. Caruso and starring Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Billy Bob Thornton, Rosario Dawson, and Michael Chiklis, to 3,510 US theaters. The film follows two strangers who are both coerced into obeying a series of orders given via cellphones by someone who is using the technology surrounding them to track their every move, leading them to become fugitives. Produced on a budget of US$80 million, it will gross US$29,150,721 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 1 hrs 58 mins