We posted an article one month ago that invited readers to do a little thought exercise. Here's what we said:

On the 5th of November we're going to post an article or two about video games, gadgets, technology, and general geekness ... the things about video gaming and technology that ought not be forgotten. We invite you to plan ahead and consider what you want to remember on that day - because our articles obviously can't be the final word. We look forward to your thoughts.

Some of you know that November 5 is Guy Fawkes Night when people in the United Kingdom burn "guys," effigies of Guy Fawkes, some "guy" who tried to blow up the Parliament building centuries ago. Many more of QJ.NET's readers know of this day thanks to the DC Comics / Vertigo graphic novel (comic book) series V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and its movie adaptation.

Well, it seems that we're the "guys" today. And QJ.NET will probably be burned at the bonfire too, because an article that apparently promises to be a summary of "great moments in video game and technology history" is a death sentence: no list will please everybody, and this list may even be flamed.

Still, we know of no reason why the following should ever be forgot...

World Wide Web: making the Internet a public place

Let's start with an easy one. Remember August 6, 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This was the public debut of the World Wide Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.

You should also remember that J.C.R. Licklider proposed a global computer network in 1960 in his paper Man-Computer Symbiosis, and that the World Wide Web (the "www" that you and I use) was "born" on Christmas morning in 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau of the CERN research lab in Geneva, Switzerland, communicated with info.cern.ch (the world's first web server) using WorldWideWeb (the world's first web browser and WYSIWYG HTML editor).

Apple and Microsoft change the way people viewed computers

We'll skip the usual applause for the all-powerful microprocessor and focus on the how of personal computing instead of the what.

The Apple Macintosh was announced on January 22, 1984, in an ad that aired during the 1984 Super Bowl. The ad, directed by Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator), showed a woman throwing a sledgehammer at a "Big Brother" screen. It was a clear challenge to the dominant text-based computers (especially those from IBM) of that era.

Was the hype worth it? Well, the Apple Macintosh is remembered by many as the "first" to introduce a mouse and graphical point-and-click interface. That's incorrect (other computers like the Apple Lisa and the earlier Xerox Star used a mouse), but it's what people remember that defines history, and this ad started it all:



Microsoft launched Windows 1.0 in 1985. This meant that both Apple and Microsoft were generating more public awareness for graphical user interfaces, and this introduced "easy" personal computing to more people. However, Windows eventually dominated the market, beating Apple's OS. Some estimates say that over 90% of all personal computers in the world today use some version of Microsoft Windows (Vista, XP, etc.), although recent news suggests that some disgruntled Vista users are switching to Apple's Leopard OS.

The mid-1980s enshrined "window and mouse" as the way of the future, and it's a paradigm that hasn't really changed: most of you are reading this article in a window that you manipulate with a mouse.

MECC's Troggles: games also worth remembering

How about we ignore the obvious and go for something "forgotten"? After all, that's the whole reason for making this article - to dredge up those things that may have been forgotten.

So here are some video game titles that some of our American readers may remember: Number Munchers and Word Munchers from the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC). If you were an elementary school student in the 1980s and 1990s, and if your school had computers, chances are your class got dragged to the computer lab to play these games where you had to avoid the nasty Troggles while collecting words or numbers that fit the bill (e.g., you grab just the verbs).

The "cool kids" thought the Munchers series was stupid, but we bet they enjoyed these award-winning games anyway. By the way, does anybody else remember MECC's The Oregon Trail?

Aldus and Abobe: the birth of desktop publishing

Desktop publishing (using desktop computers to make everything from party invites to neighborhood newsletters, school newspapers, and multinational glossy magazines) was born in 1985 when the Aldus Corporation released PageMaker for the Apple Macintosh. Aldus PageMaker was later released for the PC. In 1994, Aldus and PageMaker were acquired by Adobe Systems Incorporated. You may remember that Adobe brought us Illustrator and Photoshop in the 1980s and that Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005 to become the king of Flash.

Andy Sudduth, Robert Morris Jr., and the Morris worm

On November 23, 1988, Andrew "Andy" Sudduth at Harvard was the first (or among the first) to alert the world that something was wrong: "There may be a virus loose on the Internet." A Cornell student, Robert Morris Jr., had released what many now remember as the first major worm to be spread on the Internet.

The Morris worm didn't damage hardware or delete software, but it put such a strain on servers that it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost Internet connections and downtimes. Morris was convicted, received probation, and became a professor at MIT. Andy Sudduth is more remembered for winning a silver medal in the 1984 Olympics (he was a rower).

Buckyballs and Buckytubes: microscopic robots coming soon?

Nanoengineering, nanorobotics, and other forms of nanotechnology-fun inspired the geek world in 1985 when Robert Curl, Harold Kroto, and Richard Smalley at the University of Sussex and Rice University revealed a family of carbon molecules named after Richard Buckminster Fuller. These fullerenes can be hollow "buckyballs" (either round like a basketball or ellipsoid like an egg) or cylindrical "nanotubes" or "buckytubes."

Fullerenes are remarkably strong, they can hold other molecules inside them, and research shows that they're not toxic. And they're beautiful and elegant!

Remember the fullerenes, because the future of medicine, exploration, and engineering may be built on them.

Mars Pathfinder: small, cheap alternatives to space exploration

The Mars Pathfinder mission of 1996 was a "proof-of-concept" mission. We saw an airbag-mediated touchdown and a successful mission that cost a heck of a lot less than other unmanned space missions. It cost "only" US$ 150 million to develop and implement the Mars Pathfinder mission in only three years, whereas "old school style" missions (like the Viking missions of the 1970s) would have cost at least three billion US dollars to design and implement in 1996.

The Sojourner robot explored Mars as part of this mission, and it is remembered by geeks for its little-engine-that-could achievements. The Pathfinder mission was supposed to last a week to a month, but it ran for three months. The mission achieved its objectives in the first month; the other two months were data-rich icing on the cake of exploration.

We also remember that Sojourner was "posthumously" inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in 2003 (because Sojourner is way cooler than the Aibo or the ASIMO). We also remember Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934 - December 20, 1996); the Pathfinder, sitting on its landing site on Mars, is now remembered as the Sagan Memorial Station.

And how about that International Space Station (ISS). Remember looking up at the night sky to see it? (By the way, Tabula Rasa's Richard Garriott wants to go to the International Space Station.)

Lucasfilm and LucasArts: changing entertainment for good

George Lucas created Lucasfilm Ltd. in 1971. We remember it for the following contributions:

• The company produced the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones films, and then some.
• It created the merchandising monster: the product tie-in. It transformed the economics of cinema by introducing toys, curtains, underwear, breakfast cereals, etc. as merchandising tie-ins.
• It changed the technology used in special effects and computer animation. And it made the technology cheaper or easier to use.
  

Lucasfilms Games eventually became LucasArts, and we remember it for its SCUMM programming language, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the Lego Star Wars series, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (a game that has too many awards to mention, and last year, we fell in love with it all over again when the "Best of" compilation came out).

Great comets of the 1990s: Shoemaker-Levy, Hyakutake, and Hale-Bopp

The fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9, D/1993 F2) collided with Jupiter between July 16 and July 22, 1994, at nearly 60 kilometers per second (about 37 miles per second). Evening news shows all over the world generated a lot of hype for the event, and it also generated good media attention for the Galileo unmanned space exploration platform that was on its way to Jupiter at that time.

Comet Hyakutake passed close to Earth in March of 1996. It was very bright in the night sky and could be seen throughout the Northern Hemisphere with only the naked eye. Many of us remember a bright white smudge (some remember it as blue or green); its length was several times the width of the full moon (our friends in dark rural areas reported lengths of up to forty to eighty times the width of the full moon).

Comet Hale-Bopp (C/1995 O1) was the comet to watch in 1996 and 1997. It was visible to the naked eye for 18 months (that's a new record), twice as long as the Great Comet of 1811. In the Northern Hemisphere, we were blessed with a glorious sight: in March of 1997, Hale-Bopp spanned a length of sky that was nearly 60 times the width of the full moon, and even those living in brightly-lit cities could see a fuzzy cloud several times the size of the full moon.

These three comets caused cases of "comet panic," including rumors of alien crafts and the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult. It also brought attention to comets and asteroids that may one day strike the planet Earth (which reminds us of the recent attention on Apophis).

A random sampling of video game moments

And since we're a video game site, we've thrown together this list. This is the easiest part: there's no need for long paragraphs because a lot of this is part of our "common" history.

We should probably throw out some obvious ones: Pong (nostalgia arcade title), Space Invaders (another "nostalgia" title), Halo: Combat Evolved (graphics, gameplay, and a commercial success), The Legend of Zelda (one of Nintendo's flagship franchises), Street Fighter (for many of us who were teenagers in the 1990s, this was our first real addiction), and Super Mario Bros. (side-scrolling, quirky bad guys and traps, secret shortcuts, and putting the princess in another castle).

And you know that today's fans are so passionate about Resistance: Fall of Man,Halo 3, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Gears of War, the new Sony PlayStation Portable Slim & Lite, Folding@Home on Sony's PlayStation 3 (a personal favorite of this author), and everything else.

And here are some more:

• Finding the suitless Samus moment in each Metroid game (except for Metroid Prime Pinball, which doesn't really count, right?). And how about the jaw-droppingly successful way that the Metroid Prime games for the Nintendo DS and for the Nintendo Wii transformed a beloved 2D game into a stunning 3D one?
  
• Playing Grand Theft Auto 3 for the first time. If you're like the majority of people, you did not play to finish the campaign - at least not right away. The first two days were spent just grabbing cars and driving off ramps. Right?
  
• Teaching your creature in Black & White (remembered as one of the "most-loved and most-hated" popular games in history) to not eat people (or to eat people, if you're that kind of god).
• Getting stuck in Myst.
• Blizzard goodness: scrambling when you hear "nuclear launch detected" in StarCraft, seeing the cinematics for Diablo 2 for the first time, and watching Grom Hellscream fight Mannoroth in Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos (yeah, that scene got us choked up; it was like Tassadar and the Gantrithor against the Overmind in StarCraft), and finally, seeing the trailer for StarCraft 2 (don't you just love those new Protoss units?).
• Finding out that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was being applauded as one the greatest platformers. Ever. But you knew that since day one, right? And that's why we ate up Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow.
• Reticulating splines.
• Finding out that your gaming buddies bought Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty because they thought Solid Snake would be the main character. D'oh. And then getting into a shouting match about how it was (or wasn't) the best cyberpunk game out there. Please. It wasn't cyberpunk, it was just postmodern, right?
  
• Halo 2's ending. Most of us got in trouble for screaming at the screen at 2 a.m. demanding more. And speaking of endings, we here at QJ.NET play a lot of games, but The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker also got several votes for nice ending [spoiler!]: how Ganon dies: Link buries a sword into his head, and Hyrule is destroyed!
• Bragging that Resident Evil 2 was "obviously" a cool game because it came in two discs. Yes, some of us were such noobs back then. Some of us still are.
• Being a PSP fan in the "bad old days" when being a PSP fan was something "dirty." Buying Tekken: Dark Resurrection, Lumines (many of use loved it since day one, and the rest of us bought it for the Lumines exploit), and the ubiquitous Grand Theft Auto. (The PlayStation Portable is not just for homebrew. Although, with Dark AleX's custom firmwares and the Pandora Battery, homebrew is definitely here to stay.)
• And last but not least, a lifetime of skipping class, work, and social events in order to stay home to play god: Utopia (Intellivision, 1982), Populous (Peter Molyneux for Bullfrog, 1989), ActRaiser (Enix, 1990), the SimCity games (Maxis), and, more recently, Viva Piñata (Rare, 2006).
  

And that's what we have so far. We could keep going on and on for hours, but maybe it's better if you told us what you remember and wish that the world will never forget.

Keep playing. Stay happy. Like this kid (yeah, we've seen this millions of times, but it's still fun)...