This is the sixth in a series of articles looking back over ‘Geek Facts’. Today’s topic is the Geekiest Year.
Each day last year, I posted a Geek Fact for that day. A Geek Fact is something geeky that happened on that day in history. I have to say that it was a pretty interesting exercise. I learned many things that I ordinarily wouldn’t have. For the 366 days of 2012, 464 Geek Facts were posted. On average, that’s roughly one each day with an extra posted each 4th day.
The geekiest year was 1983 with eleven Geek Facts. While computers were had a definite presence, space actually ruled 1983 in terms of Geek Facts.
• March 2nd – Compact Disc recording was introduced to U.S. and European markets.
• March 8th – IBM released PC DOS version 2.0. I remember using DOS and thinking how cool it was. Sure you had to memorize DOS commands but it was still a significant improvement from the mainframe terminals I used in college.
• April 7th – The first spacewalk of the Shuttle program occurred.
• June 13th – Pioneer 10 became the first man made object to leave our Solar System.
• June 18th – Sally Ride became the first U.S. woman in space. I think it’s pretty surprising that it took until 1983 for the U.S. to put a woman in space.
• June 28th – NASA launched the Galaxy 1 satellite.
• August 30th – NASA astronaut Guion S. Bluford Jr. became the first African American to go into space. OK, I’m being redundant but I think it’s pretty surprising that it took until 1983 for the U.S. to put an African American in space.
• September 9th – Radio Shack announced the Color Computer 2.
• September 26th – Cosmonauts Vladimir Titoy and Gennady Strekalov were saved from an exploding Soyuz T-10 launch.
• September 29th – Microsoft released a word processor called Word for MS-DOS 1.00. Crazy, right? Here we are still using Word thirty years lager.
• November 30th – Radio Shack announced the Tandy TRS-80 Model 2000 computer.
To read earlier installments in the Geek Facts Retrospective series:
Part 1 – Geek Facts Retrospective – My Favorite Geek Facts
Part 2 – Geek Facts Retrospective – The Geekiest Topic
Part 3 – Geek Facts Retrospective – The Geekiest Day
Part 4 – Geek Facts Retrospective – The Geekiest Week
Part 5 – Geek Facts Retrospective – The Geekiest Month
