printed: the greatest second In Geek historical past

a long time in the past, in a galaxy some distance, some distance away…

well, actually, last Monday, fast company offered you with a listing of 32 geek moments and requested you to choose the very best one of all of them. more than 10,000 of you spoke back.

The “moment” used to be summary, after all. The bracket included Wikipedia and Nintendo, open source instrument and the Wright brothers. If it can be summed up in a sentence or much less, and argued over, then it counted.

there have been some very surprising early exits: The mouse bested Apple. Einstein’s thought of relativity beat the moon landing. both in the first spherical.

Then there used to be the epic superstar Wars versus superstar Trek smackdown in spherical three. After being down early within the day—and due to a timely plea on social media by means of the writer of How celebrity Wars Conquered the Universe—the drive gained the day.

the ultimate 4 got here right down to famous person Wars, the internet, DNA, and Ada Lovelace (the world’s first programmer). Any of them would had been worthwhile of the crown. there were passionate arguments to be made for every of the four.

As Limor Fried, founding father of the do-it-your self hardware purveyor Adafruit Industries put it, Lovelace’s emergence as the first to software what would end up referred to as computer systems “set a lot in movement. The very idea of people being able to command machines along with just arithmetic started with this very early and profound ‘geek second’ in the 1800s.”

star Wars, too, had cred. The launch of the first famous person Wars, in 1977 “did more to launch geek culture as we know it nowadays than some other single experience within the historical past of geekdom,” mentioned Steve Sansweet, the founding father of Rancho Obi-Wan, a celebrity Wars museum in Petaluma, Calif. “It had—and continues to have—a unique pull on three generations and millions of individuals global. It helped trade ‘geek’ from a pejorative to, in the eyes of Hollywood and the licensing trade, any individual to courtroom.”

The web? it is “the most important gadget we have ever constructed,” insists culture blogger Rusty Blazenhoff. “The human race has created this superb device of super magnitude that connects the sector—if truth be told, the universe as we know it—and it is important to all dwelling beings in methods we will not even fully be aware of yet.”

Then it came all the way down to big name Wars towards the internet.

voting for a winner began Friday morning, and it was once a seesaw combat. The internet took an early lead, and regarded primed to win. but every other social media push by superstar Wars proponents lured extra would-be voters, and George Lucas’s world-altering franchise took the lead—simplest to provide it up rapidly after.

regardless of which second you were pulling for, you needed to benefit from the concept of settling as soon as and for all (we’d like to suppose) the kinds of arguments you and your mates (and us and our chums) have always.

but that is George Lucas’s universe, and we best live in it. smartly, unless you’re Disney or J.J. Abrams.

And so, we right here at fast company are proud to announce that, in the end, there may also be just one champion. And it’s, emphatically, famous person Wars.

although a workforce of tech-trade leaders and cultural icons chose the internet over megastar Wars, it wasn’t sufficient to overcome superstar Wars’ 58% to forty one% domination over the internet in the public balloting.

So, congratulations, megastar Wars, for being the greatest Geek moment in historical past. as a minimum until next year.