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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