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.

Your comments are welcomed. Post the facts that you know by commenting.