The Great Geek Manual

1787
Clause 8 of Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution governing copyrights and patents is adopted by the constitutional convention.

1831
Charles Darwin first meets Captain Robert Fitzroy, commander of HMS Beagle, who would be his cabinmate on a the historic five-year expedition during which Darwin will visit the Galapogos Islands.

1857
Charles Darwin sends a letter to Harvard botanist Asa Gray, discussing his theory of evolution. The encouragement that Darwin will receive from Gray and other colleges will prompt him to finally publish his theory after twenty years of indecision.

1916
The epic motion picture Intolerance directed by D. W. Griffith opens in New York City.

1921
The first radio transmission license in France is granted to Meisseur Riss of Boulogne-sur-Mer.

1958
On WBTV-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina, “The Betty Feezor Show” becomes the first color television program to be broadcast from a videotape.

1961
Authorization for NASA to acquire the land necessary for additional launch facilities at Cape Canaveral is approved by the US Senate.

1971
Canada’s first private French-language television network, Les Télédiffuseurs Associés, opens with member stations in Montréal, Québec City and Chicoutimi.

1977
Voyager 1 is launched aboard a Titan IIIE Centaur rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida on a mission to explore space outside our solar system. Read more at the probe’s official NASA website.

1980
At Brigham Young University in Utah, the last IBM 7030 STRETCH mainframe still in active use is decommissioned. The system was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 to 1964.

1981
According to Twin Galaxies, Lonnie J. Cancienne, age 19, scores a record-setting 30,000,000 points on Atari’s Asteroids after playing the game for fifty-two hours and one minute at Mr. Ice Cream Parlor in Westwego, Louisiana. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

1983
Neal Patrick of the infamous hacking group The 414s appears on the cover of the September 5th issue of Newsweek magazine, which features the cover story “Beware: Hackers at play.” The issue marks the popularization of the term “hacker” after the release of the film Wargames and a series of high profile hacking incidents perpetrated by The 414s. It is also marks the first use of the word “hacker” by the mainstream media in the pejorative sense.

1984
The Space Shuttle Discovery lands after its maiden voyage.

1985

Brothers Ted Waitt and Norman Waitt along with their friend Mike Hammond found computer manufacturer Gateway 2000 in a farmhouse in Siox City, Iowa with a ten thousand dollar loan from the Waitts’ grandmother, a rented computer, and a three-page business plan. The company will become of the first successful direct sales computer companies in the world by imitating Dell’s business model and playing up its Iowa roots with low-tech marketing. On October 31, 1998, the company will drop the “2000″ from its name. Visit the official Gateway website.

1989
Soyuz TM-8 is launched on a mission to the Russian Mir Space Station, marking the beginning of the longest human presence in space to date. It also marks the beginning of Mir’s second expansion, as installing the Kvant-2 and Kristall modules is part of the mission.

1993
The Autumn European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) is held September 5 – 7, at the Business Design Centre in London, England. 5,789 people attend the event.

1996
Gordon Lyon, better known by his web handle “Fyodor,” releases a slightly modified version of the Nmap security scanner first released as printed code in the September 1st edition of Phrack. It’s released as version 1.25 in a 28KB gzipped tarball to satisfy a torrent of reader requests.

1998
The European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) Interactive Entertainment Awards is held. Nintendo is named Publisher of the Year. GoldenEye 007 is named Console Game of the Year. PlayStation is named the best console. Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft is named the Best Personal Computer title of the Year.

1999
The European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) is held September 5 – 7 at the Olympia in London, England.

The website of the C-Span cable network is defaced by the “United Loan Gunmen”.

2000
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) unveils the 750 MHz Duron processor, featuring a 64KB level-2 cache, a 200MHz front side bus. Price: US$181 each in 1000-unit quantities

Compaq Computer discontinues the ProSignia line of personal computers, expanding the DeskPro and Armada lines in its place.

Raymond Torricelli (”rolex”), age 21, of New Rochelle, New York is sentenced to four months in prison for hacking into two computers owned by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1998 and using one of them to host Internet chat rooms devoted to hacking. Rolex was a member of the hacking group #conflict, which is best known for electronically altering the results of the annual MTV Movie Awards. In addition to the unauthorized use of a government computer, over 76,000 discrete stolen passwords are discovered on Raymond’s personal computer.

Version 1.6 of the Python programming language is released.

2003
Dan Diobanu, age 24, of Romania is arrested by the Iasi Centre for Combat Against the Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement for creating and releasing the Blaster-F worm. According to Romanian antivirus vendor BitDefender, the student followed in the footsteps of Jeffrey Lee Parson, the alleged creator of the Blaster.B worm, by inserting his nickname and other personal information in the worm’s code prior to its being released. Read more about the worm at Symantec.

Microsoft settles the lawsuit brought against it by operating system developer Be alleging that Microsoft destroyed its business for US$3.25 million but no admission of fault.

The popular anime series InuYasha premieres in Canadian on the YTV cable television channel.

THINKFilm releases the documentary Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine, directed by Vikram Jayanti and starring Joel Benjamin, Michael Greengard, Anatoli Karpov, Garry Kasparov, and Jeff Kisselhof. The film examines the chess match between World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, the highest rated chess player in history, and IBM’s chess-playing computer, which defeats him. Deep Blue. IMDB listing Running Time: 1 hr 27 mins

2004
Bill Zeller releases myTunes Redux which allows users to download music through iTunes, overcoming the restrictions built into program by Apple Computer, which only allows music to be streamed. It also adds a few features to iTunes, such as the ability to search everything on the network at once, keyboard shortcuts, and cover art searches. Visit the application’s official website.

The Japanese animated fantasy film Howl’s Moving Castle, directed by Hayao Miyazaki and starring the voice talents of Christian Bale, Jean Simmons, Emily Mortimer, Lauren Bacall, Billy Crystal, Blythe Danner, Josh Hutcherson, Crispin Freeman, and Jena Malone, is premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It is based on the Diana Wynne Jones novel of the same name. The film will be released in Japan on November 20th and in the US on June 10, 2005. It will go on to be one the most financially successful Japanese films of all time, grossing US$231,710,455 by 2007. Visit the film’s official website. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG) Running Time: 1 hr 59 mins

2006
The first of ten Battlestar Galactica webisodes is released online. The webisodes chronicles the efforts of Colonel Tigh, Chief Tyrol and others to form an effective resistance movement against the Cylon forces that have occupied New Caprica. Visit the series’ official website.

Microsoft releases the beta version of the Microsoft Expression Web, a WYSIWYG HTML editor and general web design program, as part of the Expression Studio suite. The application is intended to replace Microsoft’s previous WYSIWYG editor, FrontPage. Expression Web is focused on the needs of professional Web designers seeking to build high-quality, standards-based Web sites for companies. It provides support for integrating XML, CSS 2.1, ASP.NET 2.0, XHTML, XSLT and JavaScript into sites. It requires the .NET Framework 2.0 to operate. The application’s pre-beat release was May 14, 2006, and it’s final release will come on December 4, 2006. Visit the application’s official website.

Roxio releases version 9.0 of the Easy Media Creator optical disc authoring software for Windows. Visit the application’s official website.

Sega releases Yakuza for the PlayStation 2 in North America. According to Sega, developing the game and its sequel together cost ¥2.4 billion ($US21 million), making it one of the most expensive video games ever created. The game follows Kazuma Kiryu, a former Yakuza member who is released from prison after a ten-year sentence. He returns to his life to find his girlfriend is missing and the clan which he belonged to, the Tojo Clan, has had ten billion yen stolen from them. The game is heavily acclaimed in Japan for being the first game to explore Yakuza culture in such depth and authenticity. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: M (Mature)

Version 1.0 of Iron Python, an implementation of the Python programming language, for Mono and .NET development created by Jim Hugunin, is released as part of Microsoft’s Shared Source initiative. IronPython is written entirely in C#, although some of its code is automatically generated by a code generator written in Python. Visit the project’s current official website.

Warner Bros. releases a digitally remastered edition of the 1992 Director’s Cut of the science fiction film Blade Runner in the United States. It is the second release of the seventh version of the film.

2007
At an event called “The Beat Goes On” held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Apple releases new line of iPods, including the “iPod Touch” and updates on its iPod Nano series. The iPod Touch adds a multi-touch graphical user interface and the ability to surf the internet to the Apple iPod. The Touch is available with 8, 16, or 32 GB of flash memory. Visit the official Apple iPod Touch product page.

Gregory Thomas Kopiloff of Seattle, Washington is arrested on a charge of mail fraud, a charge of accessing a protected computer, and two counts of aggravated identity theft in what the US Justice Department describes as its first case against someone accused of using filesharing computer applications to commit identity theft. According to prosecutors, Kopiloff used LimeWire and Soulseek to troll other users’ hard drives for inadvertently shared financial data such as bank statements, credit reports, and tax returns with which he obtained credit cards over the course of two and a half years. According to prosecutors, Kopiloff victimized eighty-three people, mostly teenagers, and purchased more than US$73,000 of merchandise such as iPods and laptops with the credit cards he fraudulently obtained in order to resell the items at a discount to support a gambling addiction. If found guilty, Kopiloff faces up to twenty-five years in prison and a half million dollar fine.