The Great Geek Manual

1887
Émile Berliner receives a patent for the gramophone, which is the first music playing device to use a flat disk record. (US No. 372,786) In 1898, he will founds the Berliner Grammophon Gesellschaft record company.

1891
Thomas Edison is issued a patent for a “Process of and Apparatus for Generating Electricity” and for a “Phonogram-Blank Carrier.” (US No. 460,122 and 460,123)

1914
Thomas Alva Edison is issued a patent for a “Phonograph-Record.” (US No. 1,111,999)

1915
A demonstration of a transcontinental radio telephone is given in New York City. Speech is transmitted over 2,500 miles via Arlington, Virginia to Mare Island in San Francisco, California. In a second demonstration the same night, speech is also transmitted to Honolulu, Hawaii.

1916
John D. Rockefeller becomes the world’s first billionaire.

1920
Ready-made wireless receivers are offered for the first time for as little as US$10 at the Joseph Home Company department store in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

1929
John Logie Baird launches daily experimental picture-only 30-line television transmissions from his studio at 133 Long Acre, in the presence of the President of the Board of Trade, William Graham, via the BBC’s 2LO transmitter.

1936
Radio broadcasts are used in a US presidential campaign for the first time.

1950
The US Bell Telephone Company tests the world’s first automatic telephone answering machine.

1954
The convention establishing Centre Européenne de Recherche Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research), better known later by its acronym, CERN, is ratified by the twelve founding Member States, which, as stated by CERN’s Director General Robert Aymar, “gave the new organization a mission to provide first class facilities, to coordinate fundamental research in particle physics, and to help reunite the countries of Europe after two world wars.” In 1952, the third session of the provisional Council chose Geneva, Switzerland, to be the home of the new CERN Laboratory, and the official ground-breaking will take place at the Meyrin site on May 17, 1954. In 1990, the World Wide Web will begin as a CERN project called ENQUIRE, initiated by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau. Visit the organization’s official website.

1962
Alouette 1, the first Canadian satellite, is launched.

1965
The National Security Agency (NSA) memorial lists ten agents lost on this date. No other information is publicly known about the incident.

1967
The first episode of the science fiction series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons premieres on ITV in the United Kingdom. The show uses puppetry and models, rather than live action in the tradition of Thunderbirds. The series will run for one season of thirty-two episodes.

1968
Cincom is founded by Thomas M. Nies, Tom Richley and Claude Bogardus on US$600 of capital in Thomas Nies’ basement. The company will go on to become a pioneering multinational computer technology firm best known for being one of the first companies to sell software separately from hardware. Visit the official Cincom website.

1977
Sega acquires arcade game manufacturer Gremlin Industries. Gremlin is the producer of such games as Blockade.

1983
Microsoft releases it’s first full-featured application, a word processor called Word for MS-DOS 1.00. The application marks a departure from its image of being a developer of operating systems. The company provides a free demonstration copy with every copy of PC World magazine. It’s the first time in history a magazine has included a floppy-disk.

1988
NASA resumes the Space Shuttle flight program, which was grounded after the Challenger disaster two years earlier, by launching the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-26).

1989
Four former employees of Atari Holdings, Inc. of Sunnyvale, California sue Warner Communications, Inc. as well as several executives for more than US$120 million in San Jose Superior Court. The class-action suit alleges that Warner, the parent company of Atari from 1976 through 1984, cheated more than three thousand employees out of more than US$23 million in bonuses earned during the peak selling years of 1981 and 1982.

1994
The first hearing on the matter of the Microsoft consent decree is held.

Programmers first demonstrate a prototype of HotJava to executives at Sun Microsystems. HotJava, a browser that uses Java technology, is an attempt to transfer Sun’s new programming platform for use on the World Wide Web. Java is based on the concept of being truly universal, allowing an application written in the language to be used on a computer with any type of operating system or platform. Visit the official HotJava website.

1995
Sony releases the 32-bit, CD-based PlayStation game console in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe.

1996
Nintendo launches the Nintendo64 video game system in Canada and the United States. The system, originally announced as Project Reality on Monday August, 23, 1993 and later known as Ultra 64, implements a 93.75MHz 64-bit microprocessor as it’s Central Processing Unit (CPU), thus taking the title as the world’s first true 64-bit system. It was jointly designed by Nintendo and Silicon Graphics. Nintendo will report having sold 350,000 units within the first three days. Visit the system’s official website. Price: US$199.95

1997
At the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, California, Microsoft releases the Windows CE 2.0 operating system, featuring support for 32-bit color and 16-gray-scale displays, TrueType fonts, Ethernet connectivity, and more processors. Code-name: Jupiter

The first DVD discs are released in Australia by Roadshow Entertainment, before DVD Video players become commercially available, which will occur in early in October.

Umax Computer unveils the J700 Macintosh-compatible computer, featuring the Mac OS 8, a 233MHz PowerPC 604e processor, 24MB RAM, a 2GB hard drive, 24X CD-ROM drive, and a 10 Base-T Ethernet networking card. Price: US$2,000

1999
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) announces that they have established a new venture capital company to create state-of-the-art commercial information technologies. Gilman Louie, age 39 and creator of Falcon, an air-combat simulator, is named as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of In-Q-It. The CIA has kicked started the operation with US$28 million.

The Intel Corporation reveals that they have discovered a glitch in two Pentium III Xeon versions for the server and workstation markets. The discovery will postpone shipments of servers that are based on those chips. A “blue screen of death” (total system shutdown) can be caused when these chips are pushed to their upper operating limits. Intel pledges to send a fix for the bug to customers as soon as it becomes available.

Internet traffic in the United States is interrupted and slowed when gas company workers in Ohio accidentally severs a fiber cable with a backhoe. Consequently, some transmissions take twenty to fifty times longer than normal.

Microsoft unveils a plan named Broadband Jumpstart to host video and music on the Internet.

2000
Mattel, Inc. sells its Learning Co. educational software division to Gores Technology Group. According to a Reuters news release written by Monica Sommers, the sell off “closes the book on one of the biggest blunders in recent US corporate history.” Mattel paid US$3.5 billion for the company in May 1999, and it has been a major financial drain since.

2001
Apple Computer releases the Mac OS X 10.1 operating system, “Puma.” New features included in this version include: DVD movie playback, the ability to burn DVD RW discs from Finder, and a significant decrease in the time required to launch programs. Most users will find Puma to be a disappointment. The consensus among Mac users is that OS 9 is preferable and that OS X is a superfluous upgrade. The Windows world is also largely unimpressed. Price: US$129 or US$19.99 (upgrade)

2003
Brett O’Keefe, the CEO of ForensicTec Solutions, a San Diego Computer Security Company, is arrested and indicted for a conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to military and government computers

Version 3.07 of the O’Caml programming language is released. Visit the official O’Caml website.

2004
The asteroid 4179 Toutatis passes within four lunar distances of Earth.

The Google server farm is thought to be the largest in the world, with a total calculation rate three times that of Earth Simulator, which has been the world’s fastest supercomputer since 2002, or Blue Gene, as of this date.

International Business Machines (IBM) announces that a Blue Gene/L prototype at IBM Rochester in Minnesota has overtaken the NEC computer, Earth Simulator, as the fastest computer in the world, with a speed of 36.01 TFLOPS on the Linpack benchmark, beating Earth Simulator’s 35.86 TFLOPS. The advancement was achieved with an eight cabinet system, each cabinet holding 1,024 compute nodes. Upon doubling this configuration to 16 cabinets, the machine reached a speed of 70.72 TFLOPS by November 2004, taking first place on the Top500 list. Visit Blue Gene’s official website.

In Mojave, California, the first Ansari X-Prize flight of the SpaceShipOne is successfully completed. It the first of two flights required to win the Ansari X-Prize. SpaceShipOne was developed by Scaled Composites, an aviation company founded by aerospace engineer Burt Rutany. The Ansari X PRIZE is a space competition in which the X PRIZE Foundation is offering a US$10 million prize for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. It is competing with a number of spacecraft, including Canada’s Da Vinci Project, and will go on to win the prize on October 4th. Visit the official X-Prize website.

Ubisoft releases Myst IV: Revelation for the Mac OS X and Windows in North America. It is the fourth installment in the Myst series It is the first PC game to be released exclusively on the DVD-ROM format. While previous games had been released on DVD-ROM in limited numbers, it was usually release after a CD-ROM version. In a similar pioneering move, the original Myst was released exclusively on CD-ROM at a time when most games were released on multiple floppy disks. Visit the game’s official website. (ESRB: T)

2005
Apple Inc. removes a warning from the company’s American website that warns users, “Do not eat iPod shuffle.” On the UK website, the warning reads “Do not chew iPod shuffle,” and it too will be removed sometime later. The warning had drawn a great deal of attention for its frivolity across the Internet.

Disney Electronics introduces Disney Mix Sticks digital audio MP3/WMA players. The audio players can download music files or copy audio tracks from CDs. The devices features a storage capacity of 128MB, enough to hold about sixty songs, a USB 2.0 connector, and a SD/MMC card slot. It is expected to be available in October. Prerecorded memory cards, called Mix Clips, can be purchased for about the same price as a CD. Price: US$50

The paranormal series Night Stalker premieres on the ABC network with the episode “Pilot.” In it, Carl Kolchak takes a job at the L.A. Beacon as a crime reporter and begins investigating a strange case in which a pregnant woman has gone missing. When her body is found, fingers point to the woman’s husband, but Kolchak believes in the man’s innocence, suspecting that there is a supernatural angle to the story. His investigations are frustrated when Perri Reed, the newspaper’s senior crime reporter, digs into Kolchak’s mysterious past. The series is a remake of the 1974 series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Because ABC owns the rights to the original television movies but not the original series itself, the two series bears little resemblance to each other. It will only run for ten episodes. TV.com entry

2006
Atari’s Duel Masters: Sempai Legends! becomes the last game to ever be released for the original PlayStation game console. The game is released in the UK.

The HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter takes its first low-orbit, high-resolution pictures of Mars.

Lenovo recalls 526,000 Sony laptop batteries due to a risk that the batteries may short circuit, triggering a chain chemical reaction that can melt the battery or cause the laptop to explode.

Soyuz TMA-8, with the Expedition 13 crew and Iranian-American space tourist Anousheh Ansari on board, lands safely on the Kazakh steppe.

Yahoo! hosts an Open Hack Day, held September 29 to September 30. The event is intended to promote the use of Yahoo’s APIs and open source libraries. The event features a musical performance by Beck. Visit the event’s official website.

2007
Google acquires mobile social networking start-up Zingku Inc. in a move intended to extend they company’s mobile services. Visit the official Zingku website.