Geek Facts

In 1818, Maria Mitchell, America’s first woman astronomer, was born. In 1847, she discovered a comet now known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet”. She later became the first woman member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Association for the Advancement of Science. […]

In 1980, 
Radio Shack introduced the TRS-80 Pocket Computer. Manufactured by Sharp, the PC-1 featured a twenty-four character display, a QWERTY keyboard and 1.9 KB of programmable memory, all for $230. Learn more at http://oldcomputers.net/trs80pc1.html. In 1964, NASA’s space probe Ranger 7 transmitted the first

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/