Jesse Eisenberg, left, and Joseph Mazzello play Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz in The Social Network.

In the long-running battle between gritty hacker realism and Hollywood’s fantastical depiction of computer programming,

1846: Dentist William Morton uses ether to anesthetize a patient in Boston. It was not the first such use, but it began a train of events leading to the widespread adoption of ether for surgical anesthesia.

Dr.