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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