Computer Facts 18

Computer Facts That You Never Heard Before

• A blogger Kyle MacDonald made history in 2006 by trading his way to glory. Starting out with a paper clip, he traded his way to increasingly costlier items and of value included a years rent and an afternoon with Alice Cooper. He eventually traded a film role for a two-storey farmhouse Kipling, Saskatchewan.

• After Microsoft purchased 2% of facebook for $30 million, it gained a value of $15 million in 2007.

• Despite IPv4's 4.3 billion unique addresses, it is forecasted that by 2011, the address space will be consumed. A newer scheme called IPv6 is slowly replacing IPv4 in some countries. IPv6 has the capability to address 2^128 computers. To give perspective to this very big number, the world's population of 6.5 billion people as of 2006 can be given 295 unique addresses.

• Open source technology dominates the web. The most common software used for web serving is called LAMP standing for the Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP scripting language.

• Over 20 million copies of Super Mario World were sold, and it went on to become the bestselling game of it's generation. This made the staggering 20,000 hours that went into developing it totally worthwhile.

• The maximum score possible in Pac-Man is 3,333,360.

• UK actress Rhona Mitra was the first official Lara Croft model.

• A whopping 11.5 million subscribers play World of Warcraft - that's more or less the population of Goa.

• George Boole published his Mathematical Analysis of Logic, inventing Boolean algebra in 1854. This became the basis for computer design.

• Almost 150 billion spams mails are sent out everyday, a carbon footprint of 17 million tons of CO2 every year. One in 12 million spam mails are replied to.

• The microprocessor to make a real splash in the market was the Intel 8088, introduced in 1979 and incorporated into the IBM PC.

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Computer Facts 17

Rare Computer Facts That You Never Heard Before

• Mario, one of the most popular video game characters was named after Nintendo's landlord.

• Sony released the first matte black version of its Playstation in 1997, which enabled programmers to create their own games in the C programming language, called Net Yaroze.

• William Higginbotham created what might have been the first video game in 1958. His game called 'Tennis for Two', was created and played on Brookhaven National Laboratory oscilloscope.

• The first coin operated machine ever designed was a holy-water dispenser that required a five drachma piece to operate. It was the brainchild of the Greek scientist Hero in the first century AD.

• Around 75 per cent of the music that is available for download has never been purchased and it is costing money just to be on the server.

• The blue coloured links on a web page is just a browser default because way back on the days when monitors only had 16 colours, blue was the darkest colour that did not affect text legibility.

• In 1977, the RIAA started their first crackdown on 'pirates' who shared .mp3 files. Many teenagers lost their computers in the crackdown.

• 1981 was the year that PCs began, when IBM distributed the IBM PC. Microsoft shipped it with BASIC. The operating system too was developed by Microsoft.

• Optical chips were first introduced in 1988, as a faster way to make information travel on processors. However, they have not yet managed to replace electricity.

• In 1988, the StrangeBrew virus became the first to infect Java files.

• Recycling 100 million phones would recover 3.4 metric tons of gold - gold that would not have to be mined.

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Computer Facts 16

Rare Computer Facts That You Never Heard Before

• PlayStation 2 hit the shelves in Japan on March 4, 2000 and sold 98,000 units in four hours.

• Daphne Bavelier at the University of Rochester, New York, exploded the myth that video gaming is bad for your eyes, when her experiments clearly showed that video games improves a person's ability to perceive contrast, a skill we rely on in dark conditions. In other words, playing first person shooters may actually make you a better night driver.

• The longest phone cable is a submarine cable called FLAG (Fiber -Optic Link Around the Globe). It spans 16,800 miles from Japan to the United Kingdom and can carry 600,000 calls at a time.

• Hotwired was the first Web site to feature a banner ad.

• The chairman of IBM Thomas Watson infamously predicted that there was a total world market of only 5 computers!!!!!!!!

• All the three letter word combinations from aaa.com to zzz.com are already registered as domain names.

• The microprocessor was invented in 1971. The creation was considered a computer on a chip.

• Jim Knopf is known as the 'father of shareware'. The first shareware program was PC-FILE, in 1982 which Knopf published under the pseudonym Jim Button.

• The first digital camera was designed by a Kodak engineer by the name of Steven Sasson. It weight 3.6 kg and was the size of a toaster.

• In 1995, Iomega Corp went from $3.5 a share to $48.63 for a gain of 1396%. This made it the company to have the greatest percentage gain of all NASFAQ high-tech stocks ever.

• The online population of Facebook, 250 million users worldwide and MySpace, which had 100 million accounts by 2007, are bigger than the population of many nations worldwide. On April 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace in terms of montly visits.

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Computer Facts 15

Rare Computer Facts That You Never Heard Before

• Notice the logos appearing on your Google homepage around major events or holidays? This is known as the Google Doodle. The first one was dedicated to the Burning Man festival in 1998. You can check out past Google doodles at google.com/logos.

• The infamous "I feel lucky" is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it to be kept. It was like a comfort button.

• The Dilbert Zone was the first comic website on the Internet.

• Sixteen times a second is the fastest a key can be pressed on a keyboard or controller. Toshuyuki Takahashi, a Japanese, is the record holder.

• A PlayStation 3 Blu-ray disc can hold up to 20 GB of data or the equivalent of about 2000 Nintendo 64 game catridges.

• Nintendo was originally founded in 1889 as a maker of playing cards.

• In 1971, Intel launched the world's first single-chip microprocessor, the Intel 4004. The Pioneer 10 spacecraft used the 4004 microprocessor.

• The first computer to use a GUI was the 1982 Xerox 8010 Star. It introduced Windows, Icons and the mouse pointer, forming the basic elements of modern operating systems. A year later, Apple introduced Lisa, the first personal computer with a GUI.

• Intel's project on the first processor to use the new 64-bit architecture was under the code name Merced.

• The first name for Electronic Arts was actually Amazin' Software, but company founder Trip Hawkins wanted the title to reflect software as an art form, so it was subsequently changed to Electronic Arts.

• According to AT&T vice president Jim Cicconi, 8 hours of video is uploaded into You Tube every minute. This was on April 2008. On May 21,2009, You Tube received 20 hours of video content per minute.

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Computer Facts 14

Rare PC Facts That You Never Heard Before

• In 1988 Electronic Arts became the first major publisher to release an 'online' multiplayer game. Dan Bunten's Modem Wars allowed two players to sit at their own computer and play over a telephone line.
  

• While games such as Doom, Marathon, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D and GoldenEye 007 may have defined the first-person shooter genre, the first documented 'first person shooter 3D multiplayer networked game' was called Spasim (space + simulation = Spasim). It appeared in 1974 and could be played by up to 32 people.
  

• It is believed that Subash Ghai's film Taal was the first Bollywood movie to be widely promoted on the internet.
  

• The first internet worm was created by Robert Morris, Jr, and attacked more than 6,000 internet hosts.
  

• Lee Stein invented the first online electronic bank in 1994 entitled, "First Virtual Holdings".
  

• Official statistics in the UK say that 29 per cent of women have never used the internet, but only 20 per cent of men.
  

• WorldWideWeb was programmed with Objective C.
  

• In Britain on January 1st 1985, the first call on a mobile phone was made by Ernie Wise, comedian and one half of the famous duo Morcambe and Wise.
  

• If you want to sell your book on Amazon.com, you can set the price, but then they will take a 55 per cent cut and leave you with only 45 per cent.
  

• The Lehigh virus, was one of the first file viruses back in 1987 that infected command.com files.
  

• Money for Nothing by the Dire Straits was the first music video to use computer generated graphics in 1985.
  
  

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Computer Facts 12

Rare Computer Facts That You Never Heard Before

• YouTube's bandwith requirements to upload and view all those videos cost as much as 1 million dollars a day and growing. The revenues generated by YouTube cannot pay for its upkeep.

• The first ever camera took 8 hours to take a photograph. It consisted of bitumen(tar) over a metal plate. The exposed parts of the tar would harden and the soft part cleaned away. Got patience???

• Sara Lhadi logged 16,799 hours grinding away in Runescape between November 2004 and October 2009 . That's nearly 700 days, which is nearly two solid years of game time!!!! Also, that averages out to 9 hours 20 minutes a day.

• One million domain names are registered every month!!!

• In a recent survey conducted by security specialist Symantec of the 100 most unsafe and malware infested web sites, 48 per cent of them feature adult content.

• Bit torrents, depending on location, are estimated to consume 27 to 55 per cent of all internet bandwidth as of February 2009.

• Domain registration was free until the National Science Foundation decided to change this on September 14th, 1995.

• Naked women make up 80 per cent of all the pictures on the internet.

• Employees at Google are encouraged to use 20 percent of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.

• Someone is a victim of a cybercrime every 10 seconds, and it is on the rise.

• The first software to be imported from Soviet Union to the US was Tetris, developed by Alexey Pazhitov in 1985.

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Computer Facts 11

Rare Computer Facts That You Never Heard Before

• The prime reason Google home page is so bare, is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact, the submit button was a later addition and initially, hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

• Spam accounts for over 60 per cent of all email, according to MessageLabs. Google says at least one third of all Gmail servers are filled with spam.

• Mr Tomlinson was the first person on records to have sent an email. His email address was : tomlinson@bbn-tenexa. He had invented this software that allowed messages to be sent between computers. He is also credited with the use of the @ in email address.

• Before they can read, almost one four children in nursery school(US) are learning a skill that evensome adults have yet to master: using the Internet. About 23 per cent of children in nursery school - kids age 3, 4 or 5 - have gone online.

• Did you know that www.symbolics.com was the first ever domain name registered online?

• Sweden has the highest percentage of its population i.e 76.9 per cent hooked on to the Internet. In contrast, the world average is 11.9 per cent and India has a poor 7.2 per cent.

• In June 1980, The VIC-20 became the first computer to sell over a million units. It just had 3.5 KB of usable memory.

• The first successful high level programming language, IBM FORTRAN was developed in 1954.

• Wintel computers, PCs with an Intel processor and running a Windows operating system, account for 80 per cent of PCs in use today.

• The Morris worm is the first worm to break into the wild, and infect a large number of machines in 1988.

• The Babyoanians were the first to come up with Algorithms for mathematical operations like factorization of numbers, in 1600 BC.

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Computer Facts 10

Rare Facts That You Never Heard Before

• Pacman got its name from the Japanese word 'pacu' meaning 'to munch'. Since pacu is pronounced the same as 'f*** you' only with a p sound, its name was Pacman.

• In February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth (of users) of over 1300 % - several times more than Facebook.

• The inspirationt for the brand name Yahoo! Came from a word made up by Jonathan Swift in his book Gulliver's Travels. A Yahoo was a person who was ugly and not human in apperance.

• The first ever search engine was called "Archie" and was created way back in 1990 by a Canadian student Alan Emtage.

• In 1999, new fiber was being installed at a rate of 2800 miles or 4500 kilometers per hour !

• Tom Vendetta is the youngest Google employee ever hired. He was hired by Google when he was just 15 years old. Vendetta used to fool his friends by sending fake press releases and news. Vendetta was employed because he was young and would know how young hackers thought. His job was to help address security flaws in Gmail.

• More than a billion transistors are manufactured.....every second!!!!!!!!

• Heard of Mentaplex? It was an April fools joke that Google could read peoples minds and search the Internet for what they were thinking of.

• On average, only 24 songs on each ipod are paid for directly. The rest are either illegally downloaded or ripped from CDs.

• In 1982, Andrew Fluegelman created the first ever shareware, known as PC-Talk. It was a communications software.

• Sasser was the first mass spread worm virus that didn't need to utilise email for delivery. Globally Sasser's effects were devastating. It grounded aircraft, blocked satelite communications and closed down banks. In May 2004, an 18 year-old German computer science student was arrested for authoring the virus.

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Computer Facts 9

Rare Facts That You Never Heard Before

• The first virus to use the lure of social engineering did it through a digital picture of famous Sports celebrity Anna Kournikova. Millions of people in 2001 could not resist the temptation of a free picture of the beautiful tennis star Anna Kournikova, but they got more than they bargained for.

• Google's search engine alone leaves behind a carbon footprint of 200 tons of CO2 every day. The footprint of a single search is 0.2g of CO2.

• Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the first subscriber to India's first private ISP, Satyam Infoway.

• The Palm OS fits in less than 100K, which is less than one per cent the size of Windows 98 or the Mac OS.

• Boeing was reportedly the first company to detect the Y2K glitch way back in 1993. Remeber the Y2K glitch????

• Google earns 97per cent of its revenues from advertising alone. This amounts to $20 billion.

• If Youtube was Hollywood, they have enough material to release 60,000 new films every week!!!!

• Since Google's centerpiece in search technology was patented by Stanford University (on behalf of the founder Page & Brin), Google gave Stanford 1.8 million shares for exclusive right to the patent that university later sold for a staggering $336 million.

• Leonardo Da Vinci's sketches of a mechanical calculating device that used an elaborate assembly of wheels and chains was the first computing device to be planned.

• Vorbis is an open source audio compression format. Audio encoding formats, such as mp3, VQF and AAC. Vorbis files compress to a smaller size than MP3s. According to many, Vorbis file provides better sound quality.

• Lynx was the first web browser to be released in 1993. Opera and Netscape followed soon after in 1994.

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Computer Facts 8

Rare Facts That You Never Heard Before

• ICQ was the first instant messenger program, and that's notable because it's still running, although it's been bought by AOL.

• Sony's VAIO stands for 'Video Audio Integrated Operation'

• Stewardressess - the longest word you can type with your left hand using the usual two-handed typing method.

• The difference between CDRs and music CDs (or other commercially produced CDs) are that the former are burnt, while the latter are pressed. 'Pressing' is a manufacturing technique very different from burning.

• The incredible feat of a hard drive read/write head is like a 747 going 600 mph 3 feet of the ground counting blades of grass as it flies by!!!.

• Co-founder of Intel Gordon Moore is widely known for "Moore's Law," in which he predicted that the number of transistors the industry would be able to place on a computer chip would double every year.

• Windows ME was the operating system that started the technology called System File Protection that prevented applications overwriting key system files.

• LISP is a programming language written in LISP itself. When you defined functions is LISP, the entire language gets modified.

• The first product to have a bar code on its package was Wrigleys chewing gum.

• In computer slang, an ordinary, postal mail is called a snail mail.

• The netword 'ping' program gets its name from the sound of sonar. The creator, Mike Muuss, says he named it after the sound that a sonar makes, inspired by the principle of echo-location.

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Computer Facts 7

Rare Facts That You Never Heard Before

• A modern quarter inch square silicon chip has the power of the 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a full city block.

• If you happened to open up the case of the original Macintosh, you would find 47 signatures, one for each member of Apple's Macintosh division as of 1982.

• A fat Mac application is an application program for the Macintosh computer that works on a Mac running on a Motorola 68000 series chip.

• Intel's Flying Pentium Ads and the 'Intel Inside' logo were made on an Apple Macintosh.

• Intel,s code name for its effort to make the one GHz microprocessor was codenamed Project Foster.

• Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor and Federico Faggin designed the Pentium Chip that was launched on March 22, 1993.

• Andrew Grove, former Chairman, Intel corporation, was flooded with over 120 names to choose from for its latest processor. He finally settled on 'Pentium'.

• Stinger was the codename Microsoft used for its smartphone platform that was unveiled in 2001, now called Windows Mobile.

• Infosys was the first Indian company to release its annual report in CD-ROM format.
• IBM was incorporated in 1911 under the name Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.

• The computing for the Pioneer 10 spacecraft was done by the Intel 4004 microprocessor.

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Computer Facts 6

Rare Facts That You Never Heard Before

• A 'blue-bomb' is a technique for causing the Windows operating system of someone you are communicating with to crash.

• Alexander Graham Bell originally wanted the greeting for the telephone to be "Ahoy" but Thomas Edison voted for "Hello" a word he coined in 1877.

• Wake-on-LAN (WOL) is a technology that enables a computer motherboard to switch itself on (and off) based on signals arriving at the computer's network card.

• The idea of Bluetooth technology was born in 1994. The name Bluetooth is derived form a Danish Viking King, Harald Blatand translated as Bluetooth in English - who lived in the latter part of the 10th century. Blatand united and controlled Denmark and Norway, hence the inspiration for the name, as in 'uniting devices' through Bluetooth'.

• RDF (Resource Defenition Framework) is a set of rules for creating descriptions of information available on the World Wide Web.

• SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a protocol for client-server communication that sends and recieves information 'on top of' HTTP.

• Most intercontinental Internet traffic passes through underwater fibre-optic cables. The first such layout was across the Atlantic, in 1988.

• A typical fibre-optic cable five thousands of an inch thick can carry up to 2.5 billion bits of data per second, or 32,000 simultaneous telephone calls.

• In the mid-1980s, engineers at Apple Computer developed a high-speed method of transferring data to and from the hard drives in Macintosh desktops while simplyfying the internet cabling. They called it FireWire.

• The cellphone is actually a very complicated radio that communicates with the cell tower in the area.

• Programs that are small and un-useful, but demonstrate a point, are called 'Noddy' programs. Noddy programs are often written by people learning a new language or system. The archetypal noddy program is the "hello world" program, which is simply a program that outputs the phrase. In North America, this might be called a 'Mickey Mouse' program.

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Computer Facts 5

Rare Facts That You Never Heard Before

• Many Nokia phones come with a reserve battery. To activate the battery, key-in *3370# your cell will restart with this reserve and your instrument will show a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged when you charge your mobile next time.

• The name Epson for the popular brand of printers was coined when the subsequent models of their first printer 'Electronic Printer 101' were called 'Sons of electronic Printers'

• A CD-RW disk can, in general, be-written about a thousand times. In contrast, a hard disk can be written over virtually an unlimited number of times.

• When desktop scanners were first introduced, many manufacturers used florescent bulbs as light sources.

• CD-ROM XA (Compact Disk-read-only memory, extended architecture) is a modification of CD-ROM that defines two new types of sectors that enable it to read and display data, graphics, video and audio at the same time.

• The first optical data storage disk, developed by Philips, had 60 times the capacity of a 5.25 inch floppy disk.

• Though the highest possible encryption in Windows 2000 was 128 bit, Microsoft only sent the 40-bit version to India, because India was under US sanctions after Pokhran.

• WinPad was Microsoft's failed handheld PC operating system, which it developed and killed before coming up with Windows CE, Microsoft scrapped the WinPad project reportedly because they couldn't figure out how to squeeze a variant of Windows into an affordable handheld size.

• MS-DOS was a rough imitation of CP/M, one of the first portable operating sytems. 'Portable' here means that the OS could run on different hardware.

• Finger' is an Internet tool for locating people on other sites. It gives access to non-personally identifiable information.

• The term 'petabit' is used in discussing possible volumes of data traffic per second in a large network.

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Computer Facts 4

Rare Pc Facts That You Never Heard Before

• David Bradley wrote the code for the [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Del] key sequence.
  
  
  
• The worlds most widely used operating system, Windows, was originally named interface manager.
  
  
  
• Consider this carefully: The Macintosh Business Unit, a division of Microsoft, is the largest software developer for long term rivals Apple. It's latest release is Office 2011 for Mac.
  
  
  
• The stair-step effect that can be seen in diagonal lines of some computer graphics is called 'the jaggies'.
  
  
  
• The first patent for the bar code - US Patent #2,612,994 was issued to inventors Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver on October 7,1952.
  
  
  
• Possibly, the first known example of biometrics in practise was a from of finger printing being used in China in the 14th century, as reported by explorer Joal de Barros of Portugal.
  
  
  
• When the CD was being designed, Sony and Philips were instrumental in deciding how long each CD could play. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was used as a standard, the performance of which lasted for 74 minutes.
  
  
  
• When Windows 3.1 was launched, 3 million copies were sold in the first two months.
  
  
  
• Windows 95 can officially run on a 386DX at 20MHz with just 4MB of RAM.
  
  
  
• The Japanese version of MS Office has a character you can't find in any other version. The 'Office Lady' is a virtual assistant that bows and serves tea.
  
  
  
• The Windows 95/98 logos were created with Freehand on a Macintosh.
  
  
  

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