The Great Geek Manual

1522
Ferdinand Magellan’s ship, the “Victoria,” returns to Spain, becoming the first ship to successfully circumnavigate the globe.

1879
Telephone Company, Ltd. opens the first public British telephone exchange on Lombard Street in London using Edison’s telephone system. The service will be, in effect an exclusive club, to which members will pay a subscription. At first, the exchange serves just eight subscribers. By the end of the year, there will be about two hundred subscribers, and two more exchanges will open on Leadenhall Street in the City, and at Westminster.

1947
The aircraft-carrier Midway becomes the first US vessel to launch a long-range rocket. The test, which is a part of Operation Sandy, fires a captured German V-2 rocket from the flight deck several hundred miles off the east coast of the US.

1952
CBFT-TV, Canada’s first television station, opens in Montreal, broadcasting programs in both English and French.

1954
A ground-breaking ceremony is held in Shippingport, Pennsylvania for the first full-scale atomic electricity generating station in the US devoted exclusively to peaceful uses. Televised from Denver, Colorado, President Eisenhower remotely signals a radio-controlled bulldozer.

1968
The General Electric Company, plc (GEC), a major manufacturer of consumer and defense electronics, merges with English Electric, incorporating Elliott Bros., The Marconi Company, Ruston and Hornsby, Stephenson, Hawthorn & Vulcan Foundry, Willans and Robinson and Dick Kerr.

Larry Robert and Jerry Elkind finish writing a proposal for building the first Interface Message Processors (IMP) a little over two hundred pages long to submit to ARPA. The propose creating the series of IMPs from Honywell DDP-516 systems.

1978
US scientists announce that they have successfully created human-type insulin with a a strain of Escherichia coli bacteria that had been genetically engineered after months of creative gene-splicing techniques. The work was a joint effort by research teams in California at the Genentech Inc. biochemical firm in San Francisco and the City of Hope National Medical Center in Los Angeles. In 1982, the artificial insulin, Humulin, will become the first recombinant DNA drug to be marketed, when it is distributed by Eli Lilly & Co.

1985
Franklin Computer introduces the ACE 2000 series of Apple-compatible computers. Price: US$700 – US$1,000

1989
About 41,000 Parisians receive letters in the mail charging them with crimes such as extortion, murder, and prostitution. The mailings should have been traffic violation notices and were allegedly caused by a “computer error.”

1992
The Autumn European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) is held September 6 – 8 at the Business Design Centre in London, England. The event is attended by 4,345 people.

1995
Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) unveils the PlayStation game console at Sony Plaza in New York City. The launch is publicized with a demonstration of Ridge Racer on an enormous screen in Times Square.

1996
An anonymous attacker uses a single computer to launch a DoS attack against Panix.com, the world’s third oldest internet service provider (ISP), which is located in New York. The attack consists of thousands of copies of a simple message that computers use to start a two-way dialog. The Panix machines receiving the messages are forced to allocate so much processor capacity to handle the dialogs that they use up their resources and crash.

Version 0.1 of the GNU operating system is released. Visit the official GNU website.

1997
The US Navy commissions the U.S.S. Grace Murray Hopper, named for the Rear Admiral who developed the first programming language compiler, in San Francisco, California.

Version 4.03 of the Netscape Communicator internet suite is released.

1998
The European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) is held September 6 – 8, at the Olympia in London England. This is the first ECTS show for VM Labs, which is giving private demonstrations of Project X, a code-name for Nuon technology. Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) again occupies the greatest amount of space and promotes its PlayStation.

PC Data releases game industry statistics at the annual European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) in London. According to PC Data, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) has sold 83.8% of all United Kingdom (UK) game consoles in July compared to Nintendo’s 15.2%. Electronics Arts is the number one publisher in the UK with 10.3% of all revenues in the year-to-date.

1999
Bloomberg News reports that Intel and Microsoft are cooperating to develop a stand-alone video game console to compete in the US$15 billion worldwide video game market.

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) hosts an exclusive London party for the video game industry. An estimated 4,500 guests attend the event, which features an extensive selection of alcohol, a mechanical bull, finger sandwiches, and entertainment provided by the British band, Faithless.

2000
DigiScents, Inc., based in Oakland, California, announces its intention to acquire Israel-based SenseIt in a stock-for-stock arrangement. Both companies have developed odor-sensing technologies.

The eDonkey2000 peer-to-peer file sharing application, created by Jed McCaleb, is first released. The eDonkey client supports both the eDonkey2000 network and the Overnet network. eDonkey2000 brings one notable improvement to the filesharing community – the “swarming download,” the ability to download files piecemeal from multiple peers rather than a single peer. The improvement has the effect of using the full bandwidth of all of the peers for each file, which is a vast improvement in terms of speed over the model used by the more popular filesharing network, Napster.

Patrick W. Gregory (”MostHateD”), age 20, pleads guilty to charges related to his role as a founding member of a hacking ring known “GlobalHell” and is sentenced to twenty-six months imprisonment, three years supervised release, and US$154,529.86 in restitution. GlobalHell allegedly caused at least US$1.5 million in damages to various US corporations and government systems. Gregory, a high school dropout who claims to have wanted to start his own computer security business, admits in a plea agreement to stealing telephone conferencing services from AT&T, Latitude Communications, and MCI and to holding conference calls between 1997 and 1999 with other hackers around the country.

RSA Security Inc. releases their RSA algorithm for public-key cryptography into the public domain, a few days before their patent is set to expire on September 20. (US No. 4,405,829) The relaxation of the US government restrictions earlier in the year removed one of the last barriers to the world-wide distribution of cryptographic software systems.

US District Judge Jed Rakoff orders MP3.com, Inc. of San Diego to pay Universal Music Group up to US$250 million in damages for the willful infringement of copyright. MP3.com is a service that permits the public to register their privately owned music, then listen to copies over the Internet at any time without further authentication. Visit the MP3.com website.

2001
HDNet, a general interest television channel in the United States that broadcasts exclusively in high-definition format, is launched by Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire Mark Cuban and Phillip Garvin from studios in Colorado. The channel is available both through cable and satellite television. HDNet will pioneer experimental and innovative coverage of both news and sports programming. In December 2001 and January 2002, the channel will air exclusive HD coverage of the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Microsoft introduces the Pocket PC 2002 at the DEMOmobile Conference in San Diego. The Pocket PC upgrade is aimed at business users, touting improved wireless networking and added support for virtual private networks (VPN) and an updated Windows Media Player for mobile entertainment, allowing users to watch video clips and listen to music stored on the device. Code-name: Merlin

The US Department of Justice announces it will no longer pursue the breakup of Microsoft, or the claim that Microsoft illegally integrated its browser with Windows. Read more at CNN.

2002
Version 4.2.3 of the PHP programming language is released. Visit the language’s official website.

2005
Microsoft unveils its first wired laser mouse, the Laser Mouse 6000, as part of its new Game Precision Series. Read the official press release. Price: US$54.95

2006
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases 2600MHz Athlon 64 X2 5200+ processor featuring two 1024KB Level-2 caches.

Apple releases slightly revised model of the Mac mini. The new models upgrade the processor of the US$599 model to a Core Duo T2300 1.66GHz and the US$799 model to a Core Duo (T2400) 1.83GHz. The systems already feature 512MB DDR2 SDRAM, four USB 2.0 ports, and a FireWire 400 port.

The Gpl-violations.org project prevails in court litigation against D-Link Germany GmbH regarding D-Link’s alleged copyright infringement in the use of parts of the Linux Operating System Kernel. The judgment finally provided a legal precedent proving that the General Public License (GPL) is valid and legally binding, and that it will stand up in German court. Read the judgment as a pdf.

The Mozilla Corporation hires Window Snyder, former Microsoft security strategist. Visit Snyder’s blog. Visit the Mozilla security blog.

Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) announces it will have four hundred thousand PlayStation 3 systems available for the North American launch in November, with one hundred thousand units available in Japan. Sony also announces that there will be a delay in the release of the PlayStation 3 in Europe, Australia, and other parts of the world until March.

Version 5.5 of the OmniWeb web browser for the Mac OS X. This version includes several major new features, including: the ability to save pages as web archives, FTP folder display, improved ad-blocking, a new customized WebKit core, a “Select Next Link” feature, support for user defined style sheets, updated localizations, universal binary support, and several bug fixes. Visit the application’s official website.

Zimmy releases the alpha preview version Swift web browser for Windows under a GNU General Public License. It utilizes Apple’s WebKit, based on the KHTML browser rendering engine. Visit the application’s official website.

2007
After Apple reduced the price of its 4GB iPhone by a third following its discontinuation, Steve Jobs writes in an open letter to iPhone customers who purchased an iPhone at the the higher initial release price promising a US$100 credit redeemable at any Apple retailer or website.

Blizzard Entertainment releases the expansion pack World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft for personal computers in China.

The People’s Republic of China begins blocking the English-language version of Wikipedia, likely in anticipation of protests during the upcoming Communist Party Congress.

A study published in the journal Nature by United States and Czech researchers reveals that there is roughly a ninety percent chance that the object that caused the Chicxulub crater on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and is sometimes credited with causing the extinction of the dinosaurs originated the Baptistina family of asteroids.