Computer Facts 3

Rare Facts That You Never Heard Before

• According to BBC report , the Creation of a desktop PC usually requires ten times the PC's weight in fossil fuels and chemicals, most of them toxic.

• Another crazy thing : Open notepad in XP and type "Bush hid the facts", save the document and reopen it. You will see the text garbled. Dont jump immediately to conspiracy theories. The bug has something to do with ANSI encoding.

• Recycles.org is a website that can match you up with nonprofit agencies that use old equipment. Freecycle.org is another network with few India chapters.

• An interesting Google post talks about the use of quantum computing to recognise and sort images, videos and objects. Several research teams have been working on the development processors that can store data as quantum bits. These qbits can represent both the 0 and 1 simultaneously allowing for much more effiecient processing and information storage. To consider an example given by Google, an average computer requires 500,000 peeks to find a particular object hidden in one of a million drawers on an average. But such a quantum computer could locate the position the ball by just peeking into 1000 out of the million drawers.

• According to a study paper on RescourceSaver.org, one metric tn of electronic scrap from personal computers could get you more gold than that recovered from 17 tonnes of gold ore!

• The QWERTY keyboard was designed to prevent jams on a keyboard. The early typewriters used arms to impress a letter on paper. If neighbouring keys were used in rapid sucession, then the arms were likely to jam, which was a serious issue. The keyboard was designed to prevent commonly used key combinations from being next to each other. It is widely believed that the keyboard was designed to slow down typists, which is not true.

• Grace Hopper, a woman Admiral in the navy, was the inventor of COBOL. Admiral Hopper wrote COBOL to be a programming language for general business use. It was supposed to be easier to understand than either Fortran or assembly language.

• The name 'worm' appeared in the 1970 movie 'Shockwave Rider' to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network.

• Apple based their Lisa(later Macintosh) operating system on work done on graphical user interface at PARC which was run by Xerox. It was here that idea of the desktop and the mouse as we have it today was created.

• Estimates suggest as much as 50 percent of the power used in desktop PCs is wasted as heat and expelled through fans on the power supply.

• All the three founders of Apple Inc - Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne - worked at Atari before creating Apple.

Share the facts that you know via comments.