Computer Facts 21

Computer Facts That You Never Heard Before

• The day after Internet Explorer 4 was released, a few Microsoft employees left a 10 by 12-foot Internet Explorer logo on Netscape's front lawn with a message that said "We love you" at the height of the browser wars in the late 90s.

• Google logs each search queries into its systems to enhance future search.

• All the three founders of YouTube Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim were working for Paypal when they started YouTube.

• The domain name www.youtube.com was registered on Valentines Day (February 14, 2005).

• One of the biggest leaps in Google's search engine usage came about when they introduced their much improved spell checker giving birth to the "Did you mean..." feature. This instantly doubled their traffic.

• The first ever video that was uploaded on Youtube is by Jawed Karim (one of youtube founders) titled "Me at zoo" on April 23rd, 2005. This video is all of 18 seconds long.

• Anthony Greco, aged 18, became the first person arrested for spim (unsolicited instant messages) on February 21,2005.

• The 80's arcade game Phoenix was the first game ever, to introduce the concept of end-level bosses. The game had players shoot their way through an alien mothership's defences.

• The first game to incorporate real time audio effects, or basically, the difference in the same sound in different physical environments was Duke Nukem 3D. When the player shot his gun in the water, the sound would be muffled and gurgly.

• The GNU license was around since 1976, the GNU Emacs were the first machines to be released with this license.

• Sony introduced the 3.5 inch floppy in 1981.

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Computer Facts 20

Computer Facts That You Never Heard Before

• In 2003, a 14-year old Romanian boy collapsed and was hospitalised because he had been playing Counter Strike for nine days in a row.

• On June 17,1980 Atari's 'Asteroids' and 'Lunar Lander' were the first two video games to ever be registered in the Copy right office.

• In 1968, International Master David Levy made a $3,000 bet with McCarthy a researcher in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University that no chess computer in the world would beat him. He won his bet.

• The first all-computer chess championship was held in New York in 1970, and was won by CHESS 3.0 - a program written by Slate, Atkin and Gorlen at Northwestern University, Illinois.

• Starcraft is the first computer game to be played in space. It was sent on shuttle mission STS-96 back in 1999 by Daniel T. Barry, a mission specialist.

• April 30, 1993 is an important date for the Web because on that day, CERN announced that anyone may use WWW technology freely.

• Microsoft released Internet Explorer in 1995. This event initiated the browser wars. By bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. By 2002, Internet Explorer became the most dominant web browser with a market share over 95 per cent.

• The minimum number of satellites needed to show your position on the GPS device is 3. A signal from one GPS satellite will just tell your distance from that particular satellite. If you know your approximate latitude and longitude, you can figure out which point you are at. Four satellites are necessary to accurately determine altitude.

• The concept of stylesheets was already in place when the first browser was released.

• The first web site was built at CERN. CERN is the French acronym for European Council for Nuclear Research and is located at Geneva, Switzerland.

• Although many teenagers were involved in hacking before 2000, it was the year the first underage hacker was actually sent to jail. Jonathan James spent time for Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

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Computer Facts 19

Computer Facts That You Never Heard Before

• Wii Sports is the biggest selling game of all time with over 46 million copies sold.

• In Spring 1967, MacHACK VI became the first chess program to beat a human at the Massachussets State Chess Championship.

• Deep Blue's chess playing program is written in C and runs under AIX operating system. It is capable of evaluating 10 crore positions per second.

• The first computer book to sell one million copies was 101 BASIC Computer Games which was published by Creative Computing in 1978 in the US.

• The "www" part of a web site (www.google.com) is optional and is not required by any web policy or standard.

• The first White House website was launched during the Clinton-Gore administration on October 21, 1994. Coincidentally, the site www.whitehouse.com linked to a pornography web site.

• As of July 2009, Microsoft Internet Explorer accounted for 67.68 per cent of all browsers used. Mozilla Firefox was used by 22.47 per cent of all users.

• By July 2008, Google had indexed an astounding 1 trillion (1000000000000) pages on the Internet.

• In 1966, Xerox invented the Telecopier - the first successful fax machine.

• In 1983 Fred Cohen first defined a computer virus as a "program that can affect other computer programmes by modifying them in such a way as to include a (possibly evolved) copy of itself

• The first DEFCON, an annual conference of penetration testers, security experts and hackers was held for the first time in 1993. The original idea of the conference was a send off party to the bulletin boards.

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