Geek Facts

In 1897, 
Guglielmo Marconi received a patent on the process of “Transmitting Electrical Signals”. This eventually lead to the development of a wireless telegraph system, for which Marconi received a patent in 1901. Learn more at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1909/marconi-bio.html

In 1982, Hewlett-Packard (HP) introduced the HP-86 microcomputer. In addition to an interface for a 9” or 12” external monitor, the HP-86 also had built-in interfaces for two HP 9130A disc drives and a Centronics-compatible printer. The HP-86 came standard with 64K ROM and 48K

In 2008, Apple’s iPhone 3G went on sale. Apple sold more than 1 million devices in its first three days, a feat that, according to Steve Jobs, took the original iPhone 74 days to accomplish. Learn more at http://www.thestreet.com/s/apples-iphone-3g-passes-1-million-mark/newsanalysis/techtelecom/10426218.html In 1979, Skylab entered the atmosphere

In 1989
, Intel publicly demonstrated the first EISA 82350 chip set. Intel’s 82350 Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) family was the industry’s first set of devices to implement the new 32-bit EISA bus. Learn more at http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102652375

In 1802, Thomas Davenport, inventor of the first commercial electric motor, was born. While experimenting in 1834, Thomas Davenport developed what is known today as the DC motor. It took him three years to patent his motor. At first, the U.S. Patent Office denied his

In 1957
, Control Data Corporation (CDC), a firm which pioneered the field of supercomputers with Seymour Cray, was incorporated. CDC was one of the nine major US computer companies through most of the 1960s. The others were Burroughs Corporation, DEC, General Electric, Honeywell, IBM, NCR,

In 1988, the unmanned Russian spaceprobe Phobos 1 was launched on a mission to study Mars and its moons, Phobos and Deimos. The Phobos 1 spacecraft was lost enroute to Mars after a faulty command sequence sent from Earth caused the spacecraft to shut down.

In 1854, German physicist Georg Ohm died. Georg Ohm is best known for Ohm’s Law which states that the flow of electric current (I) through a conductor is directly proportional to the voltage (V) and inversely proportional to the resistance (R), or I = V

In 1996
, the first known Excel macro virus, Laroux, was discovered in Africa and Alaska. Written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Laroux was able to operate under Excel 5.x and 7.x under Windows 3.x, Windows 95 and Windows NT. It was the first macro

In 1956
, the Whirlwind at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the first computer to use a keyboard to allow direct user input. Other computers accepted instructions issued using dial, punch cards, and switches. The Whirlwind was also the first computer to display real time

In 1953, IBM announced the IBM 650, the world’s first mass-produced computer. Over 2,000 systems were produced between the first shipment in 1954 and its final manufacture in 1962. The IBM 650 ran programs from punch cards and stored numbers up to ten digits long

In 1977, 
FORTRAN-80, Microsoft’s second language product, was released at a cost of $500 for an individual license. The name FORTRAN is an acronym for FORmula TRANslation, because it was designed to allow easy translation of math formulas into code. Learn more at http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Cassini-Huygens/SEMVOZ1VQUD_0.html In

In 1948, three scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories demonstrated the transistor. Besides explaining that the transistor could probably replace the vacuum tube, little was said of the transistor’s future applications.  The scientists, John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley, were awarded a Nobel Prize