Learn an interesting fact to share with friends and increase your Geek Cred!
In 2005, astronomers announced their discovery of the dwarf planet Eris. Eris was discovered by the team of Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz on January 5, 2005, from images taken on October 21, 2003. A dwarf planet is a celestial body in direct […]
In 1981, IBM announced its first desktop computer, the System/23 Datamaster, just one month before the IBM PC. A full-function data processing installation, with a single computer workstation and an 80 character-per-second printer, cost $9,830. At the time, that was IBM’s lowest-priced small business system.
In 1993, Microsoft released the Windows NT 3.1 operating system. Windows NT 3.1 was the first version of Windows NT. Unlike Windows 3.1, Windows NT 3.1 was a 32-bit operating system written from the ground up. Learn more at http://toastytech.com/guis/nt31.html. In 1988, Radio Shack announced
In 1989, Robert Tappan Morris became the first person to be indicted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Morris was prosecuted for creating and releasing the Morris worm, generally considered to be the first Internet worm. Learn more at http://timelines.com/1989/7/26/first-indictment-under-computer-fraud-and-abuse-act.
In 1984, Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space. Her spacewalk lasted 3 hours and 35 minutes. Of the sixty Soviet/Russian space walkers, she is the only woman. Learn more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svetlana_Savitskaya.
In 1847, Richard March Hoe received a patent for a rotary-type printing press. The rotary printing press placed the type on a revolving cylinder, making it much faster than the flatbed printing press. It was sometimes called the “Hoe lightning press”. Learn more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_March_Hoe.
In 1829, William Austin Burt received a patent for his typographer, an early forerunner of the typewriter. The typographer was a rectangular wooden box 12 inches wide, 12 inches high, and 18 inches long. It mechanically worked by depressing a rotating lever so that an
In 1784, German astronomer and mathematician Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was born. Bessel was the first to measure stellar parallax, an apparent change in a star’s position as a result of the Earth orbiting the Sun. Learn more at http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/famous-scientists/astronomers/friedrich-wilhelm-bessel-info.htm
In 2011, NASA’s Space Shuttle program ended with the landing of Space Shuttle Atlantis. NASA’s shuttle fleet – Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour – flew a total of 135 missions. Learn more at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/launch/
In 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the Moon. At 10:56 PM EDT, with more than half a billion people watching on television, Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder of the lunar module and proclaimed: “That’s one small step for a
In 1988, International Business Machines (IBM) shipped version 4.00 of the PC-DOS operating system. PC-DOS 4.0 had an optional text-based file manager shell (DOSSHELL) with pull-down menus called by typing the F10 key, optional mouse support, a text-based user interface and support for hard disk
In 1968, Andy Grove, Gordon Moore, and Robert Noyce found microprocessor manufacturer NM Electronics. The name was taken from Noyce (N) and Morse (M). They quickly changed the name to Intel, formed from the first syllables of “integrated electronics”. Learn more at http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/84/Intel-Corporation.html
In 1850, The Harvard Observatory photographed a star for the first time in history. The star was Vega in the constellation Lyra. Lyra is a small constellation, quite easily identified as it appears to consist of an equilateral triangle attached to a parallelogram. Its brightest
In 1951, Dan Bricklin, “the father of the spreadsheet”, was born. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created Visicalc, the first spreadsheet program for personal computers. Visicalc was first released for the Apple II in November of 1979. Priced at $100, it sold so well that
