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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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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