25 Geeky Silver Anniversaries to Celebrate in 2010

The release of Citizen's AM/FM Watch in 1985 redefines cool. No, really, it was cool back then … in a Dick Tracy kind of way.

Commodore rents New York's Lincoln Center to debut its Amiga 1000 personal computer, which features 256KB of RAM and a price tag of $1,595. A decade later, Byte magazine called the Amiga 1000 "the first multimedia computer... so far ahead of its time that almost nobody -- including Commodore's marketing department -- could fully articulate what it was all about."

What remains of AOL will be celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, even though the brand now seems as distantly quaint as a Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks romantic comedy.

The first laser printer for the Mac, Apple LaserWriter featured a resolution of 300 dpi and speed of 8 ppm. The price tag would be presumed to be a typo today: $6,995.

Opening July 3, the first of three "Back to the Future" films will be the year's top box office draw. Marty McFly travels to 1955 and brings back $380 million in ticket revenue.

The first Blockbuster store opens in Dallas on Oct. 26. The first late fee is collected two days afterward.

Perhaps foretelling the demise of the pay phone, British Telecom announces on Jan. 17 that it will begin phasing out its iconic red telephone kiosks. That phase-out has taken its sweet time since more than 12,500 remain in use from a high of 75,000.

Formally known as buckminsterfullerene C60, the buckyball -- a molecule composed entirely of carbon -- is discovered by Robert Curl, Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley, who will win the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their efforts. Spherical fullerenes look like the large gray object in the image … or a soccer ball.

Yes, this is a Canadian organization but how can it not make this list? The chess club and the math club get together in a marriage made in geek heaven. This year you can send its members silver.

On April 23, the 100th anniversary of Coca-Cola's debut, the company commits a product launch that has come to define failure: New Coke. How big of deal was this change? Surveys showed 80% of Americans knew of it within two days. After a firestorm of protest, the original formula returned July 10 as Coke Classic.

A supercomputer unveiled by Cray Research in 1985, the Cray-2 toppled the same company's X-MP from the top spot on the list of the world's fastest computers. Capable of 1.9 GFLOPS, the Cray-2 would remain champ for five years.

Backed by $5 million from the BBC and American investors, John Hendricks launches The Discovery Channel. Twenty-five years later it's difficult to imagine life without Mythbusters.

Beginning with Symbolics.com on March 15, the year would see the registration of the first half-dozen dot-com domain names. The other five: BBN.com, Think.com, MCC.com, DEC.com and Northrop.com.

In March, Richard Stallman publishes his GNU Manifesto in Dr. Dobb's Journal of Software Tools and on Oct. 4 he founds the non-profit Free Software Foundation.

Yes, the original Jetsons cartoon was a child of the '60s, but roughly two-thirds of the 75 episodes knocking around syndication were created during the show's second production run, which began in 1985 and ended two years later.

The series debuted in 1985 and had run its course by 1992. Yet even people who've never seen the show and couldn't pick Richard Dean Anderson out of a lineup today know that MacGyver was the master of making something out of nothing, with that something often as not spelling the difference between life and death.

From its Web site: "The MIT Media Lab applies an unorthodox research approach to envision the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life — technologies that promise to fundamentally transform our most basic notions of human capabilities." Founded in 1985, you don't get much geekier than the MIT Media Lab.

Forced out at Apple in September, Steve Jobs founds NeXT, Inc., a maker of computer workstations -- that would not make all that many of them -- before the company was bought by Apple in 1996.

The Nintendo Entertainment System hits U.S. stores on Oct. 18 after making its American debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in June. Super Mario Bros. is among 18 game titles released that fall.

A trio of British Antarctic Survey scientists published a paper in the May issue of Nature in which they described a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Fortunately, the hole was patched by MacGyver and there's nothing to worry about today.

A battery-assisted recumbent tricycle that tops out at 15 miles per hour. Who wouldn't want one? Well, it was Sir Clive Sinclair's baby and took Great Britain by … only 12,000 were sold.

Aboard the R/V Knorr and on the Navy's dime, Robert Ballard and his team discover the wreck of the R.M.S. Titanic on Sept. 1.

Unabomber Ted Kaczynski is at his most prolific in 1985, sending four bombs over the course of the year. On Dec. 11, one of them kills Hugh Scrutton, a computer rental store owner, who is Kaczynski's first murder victim.

Developers at Broderbund Software decide there's no better way to learn about geography than through a computer game. Or they just figured the series would make a boatload of money. Right on both counts.

Microsoft releases Windows 1.0 (actually it was Windows 1.01) on Nov. 20, a full two years after the "operating environment" was introduced to industry watchers.

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