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1 | April 2010 mini

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More from less
D o you call your-
self a geek? Did
you know that Te-
while Tech-Firsts will
take you on a journey
interspersed with
tris (the game) was milestones in tech
the first software to history. If this isn’t
Agent 001 cross the iron curtain enough, you can ex-
after the cold war? ercise your grey cells
This book, which with our custom-
will be every self- made crosswords
respecting geek’s and word jumbles,
pocket companion, or just trip out on the
has this and hun- mind boggling opti-
dreds of other tech cal illusions.
facts, quotes, mind The most special
games, Digit trivia thing about this ex-
and more. You will clusive edition of
also enjoy sharing it Digit Mini is that
all with your friends. it’s for our loyal
We cover amaz- subscribers only.
ing facts from the This book will not
world of Computing be available on
to the arcane nu- news stands.
ances of the WWW. Keep reading and
The Gaming section expecting more from
will have you remi- Digit, your technol-
niscing about Mario, ogy navigator.
1 | April 2010 mini

© 9.9 Mediaworx Pvt. Ltd.
Published by 9.9 Mediaworx
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
April 2010
Free with Digit. Not to be sold separately. If you have paid
separately for this book, please email the editor at
editor@thinkdigit.com along with details of location of purchase,
for appropriate action.
mini 2 | April 2010

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
01
COMPUTING
05
TECH FIRSTS
39
WWW
61
GAMING
98
BITS & BYTES
123
3 | April 2010 mini
First DIGIT Anniversary issue
mini 4 | April 2010

COMPUTING
COMPUTING
E ver wondered where the ubiq-

uitous Laptop came from?
It is believed that the Laptop’s
great grandaddy was the Gavi-
lan SC, a truly portable
computer introduced back
in 1983
T he first 1 GB hard drive was sold in 1950s, weighed

250 kg and cost about $40,000. Imagine carrying
that bad boy in your back pack!
5 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING
T he first Apple II computers that went on sale in
1977 had 1MHz processor speed and 4kB of RAM
N amed after the McIntosh variety of Apples, the

first Macintosh was released in 1984. It was the
first commercially successful personal computer to
have a graphical user interface and a mouse
A ccording to the UNEP

(United Nations Environ-
mental Programme), each stupid
year, the
quotes
world gener- “I knew then
ates 20 mil- (in 1970) that a
lion to 50 4-kbyte mini-
million metric computer would
tons of e- cost as much as a
waste house. So I rea-
soned that after
college, I’d have to
Y ou’ve heard of computer
bugs right? Minor glitches
in code that hamper smooth
live cheaply in an
apartment and put
operation. But in 1947, when all my money into
a computer (Harvard Mark 1) owning a compu-
was running a test of it’s mul- ter.”
tiplier and adder function engi- [Apple co founder
neers noticed something was Steve Wozniak]
mini 6 | April 2010

COMPUTING
wrong despite rechecking eve- did You
rything. On further investigation
engineers found a moth in Panel
know?
F, Relay #70 of the system. The About 85% of
moth was trapped, removed and microwave radia-
taped into the computer’s log- tion emitted by
book with the words: “first actual a cellphone is
case of a bug being found.” absorbed by your
head.
I t’s surprising but Ethernet is a

registered trademark of Xerox, while Unix is a regis-
tered trademark of AT&T
A study by Dell some time

ago claimed that 12,000
laptops go lost, missing or
are stolen each week in the
US !
A lthough the iPod started

selling in 2001 it wasn’t
until 1.5 years later that Ap-
ple sold a Windows compat-
ible iPod – the second gen-
eration iPod
7 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING
did You
know? T
he worst MS-DOS virus ever,
Michelangelo (1991) was so
named because it activated itself
According to re- on March 6, the birth day of the
search by Sprint, famous renaissance painter. The
about 2/3rds of virus attacked the boot sector of
cellphone users hard drives and any floppy drive
use their back- inserted into a computer. Upon
lights as torches. activation it destroyed data.
T he most expensive laptop in the world costs a whop-

ping 1 milion dollars and is produced by Luvaglio,
the luxury technology makes from London. Reportedly
only one is ever going to be made and in typical fashion
is going to be encrusted with all sorts of precious met-
als and gems.
C o-founder of Intel Gordon Moore is widely known

for “Moore’s
Law,” in which he
predicted that the
number of transis-
tors the industry
would be able to
place on a com-
puter chip would
double every year.
mini 8 | April 2010

COMPUTING
The very first issue of Digit
9 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING
In 1995, he updated his predic-
tion to once every two years. In
our recent interaction with con-
sulting firm Deloitte, they predict-
ed the axiom will hold true for the
coming years.
B efore founding Microsoft, Bill

Gates was apparently count-
ing cars. His first business was Traf-O-Data, a company
that read raw data from roadway traffic counters to
create meaningful reports for
traffic controllers. Math
triv!a
C ontrary to popular belief
Apple wasn’t started in
a garage, it was started in a
bedroom at 11161 Crist Drive
in Los Altos.
A rude pick up line
I BM holds the record for

the most number of pat-
ents held by any company
for math geeks. The
question mark after the
answer is what makes it
rude. Solve the equation
or individual in the world. An to find out how.
astounding 29,021 patents in
the last 12 years !
mini 10 | April 2010

COMPUTING
did You
know? I
n the 1950s computers were
commonly referred to as
“electronic brains.”
South Korean
teenagers on
average text
an astounding
T he Burroughs B-5000 is re-
garded as probably the most
advanced computer of it’s time.
200,000 times a Designed back in 1961 comput-
year. That is 60.1 ers of today such as the Unisys
messages EVERY ClearPath MCP machines, still
day use its design principles.
L enovo stands for “new legend”. It’s an amalgama-

tion of the words “Le” for legend and “novo” for new.
T he DVORAK keyboard is said to be at least 70%

more efficient than a QWERTY keyboard.
11 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING
This is known as the Hermann-grid illusion, and
experts don’t have an explanation for the dark
spots that appear in the grid.

COMPUTING
A pple too had some
flop launches
in its time. Their fa-
mous Lisa line which
preceded Macintosh,
didn’t sell very well.
In 1989, Apple dis-
posed of approximate-
ly 2,700 unsold Lisas in a guarded landfill in Logan,
Utah, in order to receive a tax write-off on the unsold
inventory.
H ere’s an interesting computing easter egg: Type

=rand(200,99) into Microsoft Word and watch as
your document fills up with random text!
E ver wondered what browser

safe colors are? There are did You
certain colours that are rendered
the same way on both PC and
know?
The cellphone is
Mac. They are totally 216 colors actually a very
in all. complicated
radio that com-
I t is impossible to create a
folder with the name “Con” or
“con” on any Microsoft operating
municates with
the cell tower in
the area.
system

COMPUTING
First DIGIT Zero1 Awards

COMPUTING
did You
know? I ntel’s first microprocessor the
4004 was originally meant to
130 million cell be a pocket calculator
phones each year
go into retire-
ment D id you know that most of the
virus writers work for organ-
ised crime syndicates. And many
of these are controlled from eastern European countries.
I n all the years since the invention of the compu-

ter, none can take an input from a telegraph key in
morse code
A ccording to a BBC report, the Creation of a desktop

PC usually requires ten times the PC’s weight in
fossil fuels and chemicals, most of them toxic.
A nother Easter Egg for you: Open notepad in XP and

type ‘Bush hid the facts’ (without the quotes), save
the document and then reopen it. You will see the text
garbled. Before you jump to conspiracy theories, you
should know that this happens for many character
strings that follow the 4,3,3,5 word combination. The
bug has something to do with ANSI encoding.

COMPUTING
I n November 2004,
Blue Gene posted a
new record 70.72 Tera-
flops, or trillions of float-
ing point calculations
per second. To put this
processing power into
context consider this:
every person on Earth
would need to perform 100,000 calculations a second
in order to equal the power of IBM’s Blue Gene.
R ecycles.Org is a website that can match you up with

nonprofit agencies that use old equipment. Freecy-
cle.org is another network with a few India chapters.
A n interesting Google post talks about the use of

quantum computing to recognise and sort images,
videos and objects. Several research teams have been
working on the develop-
ment of quantum proces-
sors that can store data
as quantum bits. These
qbits can represent both
the 0 and 1 simultane-
ously allowing for much
more efficient process-

COMPUTING
Math
triv!a
Oskar’s Cube has a maze
ing and information storage.
To consider an example given
by Google, an average compu-
on each of the six sides ter requires 500,000 peeks to
of the cube and a six-
pronged brass star going find a particular object hidden
through all of them. The in one of a million drawers on
objective of the game is an average. But such a quan-
tum computer could locate the
position the ball by just peek-
ing into 1000 out of the million
drawers.
A ccording to a study paper

on ResourceSaver.org, one
metric ton of electronic scrap
to pass the brass star from personal computers
through all the mazes could get you more gold than
and get it out. Its now
available as an iPhone that recovered from 17 tonnes
app called Amazing of gold ore!
Cube Maze.
T he QWERTY keyboard was

designed to prevent jams
on a keyboard. The early typewriters used arms to im-
press a letter on paper. If neighbouring keys were used
in rapid sucession, then the arms were likely to jam,
which was a serious issue. The keyboard was designed
to prevent commonly used key combinations from being

COMPUTING
next to each other. It is widely
believed that the keyboard was stupid
designed to slow down typists, quotes
which is not true.
“A bit of tolerance
is worth a mega-
G race Hopper, a woman
Admiral in the navy, was
the inventor of COBOL. Admi-
byte of flaming”
[Henry Spencer,
ral Hopper wrote COBOL to be Canadian computer
programmer and
a programming language for
author of The 10
general business use. It was Commandments for C
supposed to be easier to un- Programmers]
derstand than either Fortran
or assembly language.
T he name ‘worm’ appeared in the

1970 movie ‘Shockwave Rider’ to
describe a program that propagates
itself through a computer network.
A pple based their Lisa (later

Macintosh) operating system
on work done on graphical user in-
terfaces at PARC which was run by
Xerox. It was here that the idea of the desktop and
the mouse as we have it today was created.

COMPUTING
Now for some personal computing with this Sudoku
E stimates suggest as much as 50 percent of the

power used in desktop PCs is wasted as heat and
expelled through fans on the power supply.
A ll the three founders of Apple Inc - Steve Jobs,

Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne – worked at Atari
before founding Apple.

COMPUTING
T he worlds most widely used
operating system, Windows,
was originally named interface
did You
know?
manager. The annual
revenue for the
C onsider this carefully: The

Macintosh Business Unit, a
division of Microsoft, is the larg-
telephone indus-
try is $210 billion,
almost 8 times
est software developer for long that of television
term rivals Apple. It’s latest re- and 23 times the
lease is Office 2011 for Mac. revenue of radio.
W hen the Science Museum in London, UK, built a

working replica of the Babbage machine, using the
materials and work methods
Math
triv!a available at Babbage’s time.
It worked just as Charles
Babbage had intended.
T he stair-step effect that

can be seen in diago-
nal lines of some computer
graphics is called ‘the jaggies’.
The ultimate gift idea for

math geeks – The Geek
Clock, available online
G eorge J. Laurer is con-
sidered the invetor of
the UPC or Uniform Product

COMPUTING
WORD SEARCH
B V R U I W E R T
A P P L E I P O D
L K I J T F I M G
D L N A S E X Y N
E T G N O M E V I
Q D E D T E L E C
R A U R A M G P E
E R M O T O S X Y
Q P F I P R D M C
R A I D F Y E L P
HINTS
User Interface Short for upload
The portable media player that redefined An Internet utility used to check the connec-
the product category tion with another site
The smallest discrete component of an A standard used by consumer electronics to
image allow entertainment devices to interact with
Graphical User Interface for Linux users each other over a home network
Short for electrical Redundant Array of Independent Disks
Gigabytes, Megabytes, Kilobytes – what is DDR, DDR3 are types of?
it? Intellectual Property Rights
The mobile operating system from Google A famous internet browser
Defence Advanced Research Projects Internal combustion engine
Agency Extensible markup language
A Google acquisition that rhymes with help Macs latest operating system

COMPUTING
Code, invented in 1973. The UPC symbol set for bar-
code recognition is still used in the USA.
T he inventor of the scanner is Robert S. Ledley, who

patented the whole-body CT (computerised tomo-
graphic) diagnostic X-ray ra-
diology, and he was the first
to do medical imaging and
three-dimensional recon-
structions.
T he first patent for the

bar code - US Patent
#2,612,994 was issued to inventors Joseph Wood-
land and Bernard Silver on October 7, 1952.
P ossibly, the first known exam-

ple of biometrics in practise
was a form of finger printing be-
ing used in China in the 14th cen-
tury, as reported by explorer Joao
de Barros of Portugal
W hen the CD was being de-

signed, Sony and Philips
were instrumental in deciding
how long each CD could play.

COMPUTING
The Digit 2009 collector’s edition was fully sold
out in record time

COMPUTING
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was did You
used as a standard, the perform-
ance of which lasted for 74 min-
know?
Your mobile bat-
utes.
tery is very low,
you are expecting
W
was
hen
dows
Win-
3.1
launched,
an important call
and you don’t
have a charger.
3 million copies
Many Nokia
were sold in the
phones come with
first two months.
a reserve battery.
To activate the
W indows 95 can officially run
on a 386DX at 20MHz with
just 4MB of RAM.
battery, key-in
*3370# your cell
will restart with
this reserve and
T he Japanese
version of MS
Office has a charac-
your instrument
will show a 50%
increase in bat-
ter you can’t find in
tery. This reserve
any other version.
will get charged
The ‘Office Lady’ is a virtual as-
when you charge
sistant that bows and serves tea.
your mobile next
time.
T he Windows 95/98 logos
were created with Freehand on a Macintosh

COMPUTING
D avid Bradley wrote the code did You
for the [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Del]
key sequence. know?
The original
name of the
T he name Epson for the popu-
lar brand of printers was
coined when the subsequent
telephone was
the harmonic
models of their first printer ‘Elec- telegraph.
tronic Printer 101 were called
‘Sons if 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.
W hen desktop scan-

ners were first intro-
duced, many manufactur-
ers used florescent bulbs as light sources.
C D-ROM XA (Compact Disk-read-only memory, ex-

tended 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.

COMPUTING
T he first optical data storage disk, developed by

Philips, had 60 times the capacity of a 5.25 inch
floppy disk.
T hough the highest pos-

sible encryption in Win-
dows 2000 was 128 bit, Mi-
crosoft only sent the 40-bit
version to India, because In-
dia was under US sanctions
after Pokhran.
W inPad 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.
M S-DOS was a rough imitation of CP/M, one of the

first portable operating systems. ‘Portable’ here
means that the OS could run on different hardware.
F inger’ is an Internet tool for locating people on oth-

er sites. It gives access to non-personally identifi-
able information.

COMPUTING
T he term ‘petabit’ is used in
discussing possible volumes did You
of data traffic per second in a
large network.
know?
Alexander Gra-
ham Bell origi-
R DF (Resource Definition
Framework) is a set of rules for
creating descriptions of information
nally wanted
the greeting for
the telephone
available on the World Wide Web. to be “Ahoy” but
Thomas Edison
S OAP (Simple Object Access

Protocol) is a protocol for cli-
ent-server communication that
voted for “Hello,”
a word he coined
in 1877.
sends and receives information
‘on top of’ HTTP.
W ake-on-LAN (WOL) is a technology that enables

a computer motherboard to switch
itself on (and off) based on signals arriv-
ing at the computer’s network card.
A ‘blue-bomb’ is a technique for caus-

ing the Windows operating system of
someone you are communicating with to
crash.

COMPUTING
C ertificate Revocation List (CRL) is a method of us-
ing a public key infrastructure for maintaining ac-
cess to servers.
S outh Pacific Railroad laid down telegraph wires

across tracks to help railway stations keep in touch.
T he high-speed data highways of the Internet are

called backbones. Sprint and AT&T own the major
backbones in the US.
S ilver is the most conductive material, but copper is

widely used in communications because it costs much
less and is better in terms of strength and flexibility.
M ost 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 thousandths of an
inch thick can carry up to 2.5
billion bits of data per sec-
ond, or 32,000 simultaneous
telephone calls.

COMPUTING
T he idea of Bluetooth technology was born in 1994.
The name Bluetooth is derived from
Danish Viking King, Harald Blatand -
a
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’.
C huq Von Rospach of Apple Com-

puter, circa 1983, coined the word ‘Netiquette’.
I n the mid-1980s, engineers at Apple Computer de-

veloped a high-speed method of transferring data to
and from the hard drives in Macintosh desktops while
simplifying the internal cabling. They called it FireWire.
P rograms that are small and un-useful, but dem-

onstrate a point, are called ‘Noddy’ programs.
Noddy programs are often written by people learn-
ing 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 Amer-
ica, this might be called a ‘Mickey Mouse’ program.

COMPUTING
U LSI stands for Ultra Large did You
Scale Integration, used in
microchips with over one million know?
transistors. The Emergency
Number world-
wide for Mo-
A fat Mac application is an ap-
plication program for the
Macintosh computer that works
biles 112.
on a Mac running on a Motorola 68000 series chip.
F C-PGA (Flip Chip-Pin Grid Array) is a microchip design

developed by Intel for its faster microprocessors.
V isiCalc, invented in 1979, was the first spreadsheet

program available for computers.
I BM was incorporated in 1911 under the name Com-

puting-Tabulating-Recording Company.
I ntel’s Flying Pentium Ads and

the ‘Intel Inside’ logo were
made on an Apple Macintosh.
T he computing for the Pioneer

10 spacecraft was done by the
Intel 4004 microprocessor.

COMPUTING
I n 1938, Claude Shannon first showed that electronic
switching circuits could perform logical operations.
T he CVAX is a chip used as a DEC Micro VAX II micro-

processor. A message was inscribed on the chip, in Rus-
sian, which said, “VAX, when you care enough to steal the
very best”!
A modern quarter inch

square silicon chip
has the power of the 1949
ENIAC computer, which
occupied a full city block.
A ndrew Grove, former Chairman, Intel Corporation,

was flooded with over 120 names to choose from
for its latest processor. He finally settled on ‘Pentium’.
T ed Hoff, Stan Mazor and Federico Faggin designed

the Pentium Chip that was launched on March 22,
1993.
I ntel’s code name for its effort to make the one GHz
microprocessor was codenamed Project Foster.
I ntel’s project on the first processor to use the new

64-bit architecture was under the code name Merced.

COMPUTING
I f you happened to open up the

case of the original Macintosh,
you would find 47 signatures, one
for each member of Apple’s Mac-
intosh division as of 1982.
I ntel created the Timna proces-

sor in 2001, a low-end product, but it was given a
hasty burial after problems cropped up with the mem-
ory translator hub.
T he first microprocessor to make it into a home com-

puter was the Intel 8080, a complete 8-bit compu-
ter on one chip, introduced in 1974.
T he Comptometer was invented

by Dorr Felt. IT was the first
entirely keyboard operated calcu-
lating machine - a practical adding
and listing machine.
T he Pentium 4 runs code about

5,000 times faster than the
8088.

COMPUTING
W intel computers, PCs
with an Intel processor
and running a Windows oper-
ating system, account for 80
percent of PCs in use today.
T he first microprocessor to make a real splash in the

market was the Intel 8088, introduced in 1979 and
incorporated into the IBM PC.
H ewlett Packard’s first order, for eight oscillators,

came from Walt Disney, while he was making the
film Fantasia in 1940.
H ewlett Packard introduced the

mopier in 1996, a printer that
offers a low-cost, high-quality alter-
native to photocopying.
I n 1984, Apple computer in-

troduced the Apple IIc model
laptop, which had an internal 5.25-
inch floppy drive.
T he Biztalk Server is a Microsoft Product. It unites

enterprise application integration (EAI) and b2b in-
tegration into a single product.

COMPUTING
S tinger was the codename Microsoft used for its

smartphone platform that was unveiled in 2001,
now called Windows
Mobile.
P ROM (Program-
mable Read Only
Memory) is memory
programmed at the
time of manufacturing.
T he incredible feat
of a hard drive read/write head is like a 747 going
600 mph 3 feet off the ground counting blades of grass
as it flies by
did You
know? A
hacker with benign intentions
is called a ‘white hat’
Recycling 100
million phones
would recover
3.4 metric tons of W indows ME was the operat-
ing system that started the
technology called System File
gold—gold that
would not have Protection that prevented appli-
to be mined. cations overwriting key system
files.

COMPUTING
did You
know? S tinger was the codename
Microsoft used for its smart
phone platform that was unveiled
back in 2001.
The first product

T he typical computer CRT
monitor boosts the voltage to
30,000 volts in parts of the cir-
to have a bar
cuitry
code on its pack-
age was Wrigleys
chewing gum.
T he Palm OS fits in less than
100K, which is less than one
per cent the size of Windows 98 or the Mac OS.
T he difference between CDRs and music CDs (or oth-

er commercially produced CDs) are that the former
are burnt, while the latter are pressed. ‘Pressing’ is a
manufacturing technique very different from burning.
L ISP is a programming language written in LISP it-

self. When you define functions in LISP, the entire
language gets modified.
I n 1995, Iomega Corp

went from $3.5 a
share to $48.63 for a gain

COMPUTING
of 1396 per cent. This made it the company to have
the greatest percentage gain of all NASFAQ high-tech
stocks ever. Iomega.jpg
T he network ‘ping’ program gets its name from the

sound of sonar. The creator, Mike Muuss, says he
named it after the sound that a sonar makes, inspired
by the principle of echo-location.
I CQ was the first instant

messenger program, and
that’s notable because it’s still
running, although it’s been
bought by AOL.
H DTV made its debut in

1989 in Japan
S ony’s VAIO stands for ‘Video Audio Integrated Op-

eration’
I nfosys was the first Indian company to release its

annual report in CD-ROM format.
S tewardesses – the longest word you can type with

your left hand using the usual two-handed typing
method.

COMPUTING
I n computer slang, an ordinary, postal mail is called

snail mail.
F ormer Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the

first subscriber to India’s first private ISP, Satyam
Infoway.
T he first fly-by-wire test flight was held in 1972 on a

NASA F-8 test plane. The first passenger aircraft to
do so was the Airbus 320 launched in 1988.

COMPUTING
Second DIGIT Anniversary issue

TECH FIRSTS
T he first ever computer that was general purpose

and controlled by programs was made by a German
called Konrad Zuse in the early 40’s. He wanted the Hit-
ler government to fund his computer for military use.
He was denied funding because they believed that war
would be over before the year ended.
T he silicon transistor, that transformed the history

of computers forever, was invented by John Bar-

mini
TECH FIRSTS
deen, Walter Brattain and Wiliam did You
Shockley in 1947.
know?
Google’s search
1 951 saw the first commercial
computer – the UNIVAC in-
vented by John Presper Eckert
engine alone
leaves behind a
and John W. Mauchly carbon footprint
of 200 tons of
CO2 every day.
T he first virus to use the lure
of social engineering did it
though a digital picture of famous
The footprint of
a single search is
Sports celebrity Anna Kournik- 0.2g of CO2.
ova. Millions of people in 2001
could not resist the temptation of a free picture of the
beautiful tennis star
Anna Kournikova, but
they got more than
they bargained for.
T he first success-
ful high level pro-
gramming language,
IBM FORTRAN was
developed in 1954.
T he Stanford Research Institute, Bank of America,

and General Electric developed MICR (magnetic ink

TECH FIRSTS
Math
triv!a
14th March is celebrated
character recognition) used in
banker’s cheques in 1955
as the Pi Day worldwide

as the date in the month/
day format comes to
3/14 which corresponds
B oeing was reportedly the
first company to detect
the Y2K glitch way back in
to 3.14 the approxima- 1993
tion upto two decimal
places of Pi (22/7)
and Robert Noyce in 1958

T he integrated circuit was
invented by Jack Kilby
I n the early 1800s, a French

silk weaver called Joseph- stupid
Marie Jacquard invented a quotes
way of automatically control-
A refund for
ling the warp and weft threads
defective software
on a silk loom by recording
might be nice,
patterns of holes in a string
except it would
of cards. This was the world’s
bankrupt the
first ‘program’
entire software
industry in the first
O n April 3, 1973, Martin
Cooper made the first cell
phone call outside research
year” [Andrew S.
Tanenbaum, pro-
fessor and author
labs and company facilities.
of MINIX]

TECH FIRSTS
SUDOKU
T he Arpanet, predecessor to today’s internet was de-

veloped in 1969.
S asser was the first mass spread worm virus that

didn’t need to utilise email for delivery. Globally,
Sasser’s effects were devastating. It grounded aircraft,

TECH FIRSTS
blocked satellite communica- did You
tions and closed down banks. In
May 2004, an 18 year-old German know?
computer science student was ar- By 2001, e-waste
rested for authoring the virus. already ac-
counted for 70
percent of the
E NIAC, the first electronic
computer that appeared over
50 years ago was about 80 feet
heavy metals
and 40 percent
long, weighed 30 tons, and had of the lead in U.S.
17,000 tubes. A desktop com- landfills.
puter today can store a million
times more information than an ENIAC, and is 50,000
times faster.
T he first dynamic RAM chip, Intel 1103 Computer

Memory was invented in 1970
T he world’s microprocessor, the Intel 4004 was in-

vented by Faggin, Hoff and Mazor in 1971.
T he good old floppy disk (floppy for its flexibility) was

invented by Alan Shugart and IBM in 1971
T he Ethernet computer network was invented by

Robert Metcalfe and Xerox in 1973

TECH FIRSTS
1 976-77 saw the first consumer computers - Apple I,
II, TRS-80 and Commodore Pet Computers
S preadsheets first appeared did You

with the VisiCalc developed
by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frank-
know?
ston in 1978 23% of all pho-
tocopier faults
worldwide are
T he first word processors ap-
peared a year after spread-
sheets in 1979 with Seymour
caused by people
sitting on them
Rubenstein and Rob Barnaby’s and photocopy-
WordStar ing their butts.
M icrosoft’s MS DOS operating system was devel-

oped in 1981
T he first virus program that spread outside a control-

led environment was “Rother J”. It was created in
1981 by Richard Skrenta as a practical joke. It spead via
floppy disk and displayed a short poem beginning “Elk
Cloner: The program with a personality.”
I BM is known for several tech firsts. Here’s some of

them: Magnetic storage (1955), DRAM - dynamic
random access memory (1962) Superconductivity
(1987)

TECH FIRSTS
T he first computer
mouse was invented
by Doug Engelbart in
around 1964 and was
made of wood. He called
it mouse owing to the ca-
ble that comes out of it.
Plus it was like a square cube! Talk about ergonomics.
I n 60 AD, Heron of Alexandria set up a machine that

could follow a series of instructions, in effect coming
up with the first program.
I n 1200 AD, an Arab clockmaker

by the name of Al-Jazari went
about creating the first mechanical
robots the world had seen. The pinac-
cle of his achievement was an elabo-
rate hybrid device that was both an
orchestra made up of animated man-
nequins (robots) and a clock.
T he classical Indian mathema-

tician Pingala was the first to
describe the binary number system
way back in 300 BC.

TECH FIRSTS
did You
D ifferential gears used in an-
tiquity from Ionia, to Greece,
know?
to China were the first devices Firms in devel-
used to compute time, and astro- oped countries
nomical movements. currently ac-
count for 96% of
royalties from
O bscure theoretical math-
ematician George Boole’s
work in the 1840s were instru-
technology
patents, or $71
mental a century and a half later billion a year.
in binary programming. He was
the first to develop binary algebra.
C omputer’s were nei-

ther real time nor in-
teractive, in a sense “live”
till 1951, when MIT stu-
dents crafted the Whirl-
wind.
T he first computer
game was developed
at MIT and was called
spacewar! The game
even had realistic star
charts. You can play the

TECH FIRSTS
original game in a Java emu-
lator for the original machine stupid
at http://spacewar.oversigma. quotes
com.
The only le-
gitimate use of
I n June 1980, The VIC-20
became the first compu-
ter to sell over a million units.
a computer is
to play games –
[Eugene Jarvis,
It just had 3.5 KB of usable
game designer and
memory.
programmer]
T he first computer to use a

GUI was the 1982 Xerox 8010 Star. It introduced
Windows, Icons, and the mouse pointer, forming the ba-
sic elements of modern operating systems. A year later,
Apple introduced Lisa, the first personal computer with
a GUI.
M ultitasking was something that computers did not

have till the Commodore Amiga came out in 1985.
T he first joystick was developed in 1944 in Germany

and was used for aiming bombs. It was used to con-
trol a variant of the V2 rocket as well.
T he Russian satellite Sputnik 1 was the first to make

it to space. It maintained a speed of 29,000 kmph

TECH FIRSTS
and was in orbit for 22 days be- did You
fore burning up during re-entry.
know?
Wearing head-
T he first digital camera was
designed by a Kodak engineer
by the name of Steven Sasson. It
phones for just
an hour will
weight 3.6 kg and was the size of increase the bac-
a toaster. teria in your ear
by 700 times.
N apster was the first P2P file

sharing network and it was only launched in 1999.
T he first modem was made in 1962 by Bell; it was

called the Bell 103. The maximum speed achieved
was 300 bytes per second.
T he first electronic game to be created was not Pong

as most think it to be, but a game called Tennis
for Two. It was de-
signed in 1958
I n 2000, Ericsson
gave a demo of
the first bluetooth
phone, the T36 at
the CommunicAsia
festival.

TECH FIRSTS
2nd street by Billy
5 Joel was the first
album to be released on
a CD in 1978, although
Abba’s The Visitors was
produced before that,
and a handful of CDs
were made.
M
oney for Nothing
by the Dire Straits
was the first music video to use computer generated
graphics in 1985.
did You
L ynx was the first web brows-
er to be released in 1993. Op-
know?
era and Netscape followed soon The average per-
after, in 1994. son’s left hand
does 56 per cent
of the typing.
T he first object-oriented lan-
guage was Simula. It was de-
veloped by Kristen Nygaard ad Ole-Johan Dahl in the
mid 1960s.
T he EDSAC ran its first program on May 6, 1949. It

wasn’t the first stored-program computer, but rath-
er, the first practical one.

TECH FIRSTS
did You
T he Nintendo 3DS, announced
in March 2010 is the first 3D
handheld gaming device.
know?
Vorbis is an
open source
I n December 1970, Gilbert Hy-
att filed a patent application
entitled “Single Chip Integrated
audio compres-
sion format.
Circuit Computer Architecture”, Audio encoding
the first basic patent on the mi- formats, such as
croprocessor. MP3, VQF, and
AAC. Vorbis files
compress to a
I n 1971, Intel launched the
world’s first single-chip mi-
croprocessor, the Intel 4004.
smaller size than
MP3s. According
The Pioneer 10 spacecraft used to many, Vorbis
the 4004 microprocessor. file provides bet-
ter sound quality.

TECH FIRSTS
How many legs does the elephant have?
T he floppy disk was invented did You

in 1971.
know?
For the first time
T he first commercial comput-
ers were sold in 1951. since 1996, TV
sales in 2006
outpaced PC
T he first cellular phone com-
munication network was
launched in Japan, in 1979.
sales, according
to the Consumer
Electronics As-
sociation

TECH FIRSTS
D r. Brent Townshend invented the 56K modem in
1996.
T he Lehigh virus, was one of the first file viruses back

in 1987 that infected command.com files
I n 1998, the StrangeBrew virus became the first to

infect Java files.
J ames Gosling created Java at Sun Microsystems in

1994. He came up with the name ‘Java’ while de-
bating over it at a coffee shop.
H ewlett Packard (HP) intro-

duced the mopier in 1996, did You
a printer that offers a low-cost,
high-quality alternative to pho-
know?
tocopying. Almost 150 bil-
lion spam mails
are sent out eve-
I n 1982, Andrew Fluegelman
created the first ever share-
ware, known as PC-Talk. It was a
ryday, a carbon
footprint of 17
communications software. million tons of
CO2 every year.
One in 12 million
S ony introduced the 3.5-inch
floppy in 1981. spam mails are
replied to.

TECH FIRSTS
T he Babylonians were the
first to come up with Al- stupid
gorithms for mathematical quotes
operations like factorization of
“Programming
numbers, in 1600 BC.
graphics in X is
like finding sqrt(pi)
O ptical chips were first
introduced in 1988, as
a faster way to make infor-
using Roman
numerals.” [Henry
Spencer, Cana-
mation travel on processors.
dian computer
However, they have not yet
programmer and
managed to replace electric-
author of The 10
ity.
Commandments
for C Program-
S ecure Sockets Layer (SSL)
was first introduced by
Netscape in 1994.
mers]
I d Quantique introduced commercial quantum cryp-

tography in 2004, with a quantum key distribution
service.
T he GNU license was around since 1976, the GNU

Emacs were the first machines to be release with
this license.

TECH FIRSTS
T he Morris Worm is the first worm to break into the
wild, and infect a large number of machines in 1988.
T he first DEFCON, an annual did You

conference of penetration
testers, security experts and
know?
hackers was held for the first People view
time in 1993. The original idea fifteen billion
of the conference was a send off videos online
party to the bulletin boards. every month.
I n 1997, the RIAA started their first crackdown on

“pirates” who shared .mp3 files. Many teenagers
lost their computers in the crackdown.
A lthough many teenagers were involved in hack-

ing before 2000, it was the year the first underage
hacker was actually sent to jail. Jonathan James spent
time for Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He would
kill himself eight years later.
1 981 was the year that PCs began, when IBM distrib-
uted the IBM PC. Microsoft shipped it with BASIC.
The operating system too was developed by Microsoft.
J im Knopf is known as the ‘father of shareware’.

The first shareware program was PC-FIle, in 1982,

TECH FIRSTS
which Knopf published under the pseudonym Jim But-
ton.
I n 1966, Xerox invented the

did You
Telecopier - the first success-
ful fax machine. know?
On average, only
T he microprocessor was in-

vented in 1971. The creation
was considered a computer on a
24 songs on each
iPod are paid
for directly. The
chip. rest are either
illegally down-
G eorge Boole published his

Mathematical Analysis of
Logic, inventing Boolean algebra
loaded or ripped
from CDs
in 1854. This became the basis for computer design.
I n 1983 Fred Cohen first defined a computer virus

as a “program that can affect other computer pro-
grammes by modifying them in such a way as to include
a (possibly evolved) copy of itself.”
L eonardo Da Vinci’s sketches of a mechanical cal-

culating device that used an elaborate assembly of
wheels and chains was the first computing device to be
planned.

TECH FIRSTS
First Digit Droolmaal: June 2001

TECH FIRSTS
Hardly drool worthy anymore...

TECH FIRSTS
Start by reading the text in each of the blocks as

fast as you can, then try reading out the colour at
the same speed
P lasma displays that are so common these days,

were first thought of long ago. The concept was
first conceived in July 1964 at the University of Illinois.
T he same is the case with the competing LCD tech-

nology. Shunsuke Kobayashi of Japan produced first
defect-free LCD way back in 1972.

TECH FIRSTS
ACROSS DOWN
3. A completely useless button that 1. Connections beneath the sea
almost even sees but is never used 2. Which PC manufacturer’s name is an amal-
6. A 1337 key board layout that is gamation of the words Legend and New?
supposed to be seventy percent more 4. Three of these together will tell you where
efficient than the most widely used one you are
right now 5. I am Shawn Fanning and I like to share
9. Light amplification by stimulated emis- files
sion of radiation 7. A 2001 virus that used the power of a
11. This virus was designed to infect DOS sports celebrity to spread across comput-
systems and like all boot sector viruses, ers
basically operated at the BIOS level 8. First music on the go
12. The first domain name ever registered 10. Dots, dashes and scribbling on sand inspired
13. The rudimentary telephone this technology used to represent data

TECH FIRSTS
DIGIT 2007 Anniversary issue

WWW
S ince Google’s centerpiece in search technology was

patented by Stanford University (on behalf of the
founders Page & Brin), Google gave Stanford 1.8 million
shares for exclusive right to the patent that the univer-
sity later sold for a staggering $336 million.
G oogle earns 97per cent of its revenues from adver-

tising alone. This amounts to $20 billion.

WWW
D id you know that Goog-
le logs each search
queries into its systems to
enhance future searches
T hey have found in user testing, that a small number

of people are very typical of the larger user base.
They run labs continually and always monitor how peo-
ple use a page of results.
did You
know? G oogle has the largest network
of translators in the world,
One million this is needed for continuously
threads of fiber integrating searches and indexing
optic cable can web pages into their engine
fit in a tube 1/2” in
diameter.
The reason Orkut doesn’t look
or feel like a Google applica-
tion was that the designer in-charge was given free
reign to do things his way without the usual company
procedures. Google is look-
ing to improve Orkut’s re-
source utilisation however.
G oogle makes small

changes on their products very often. They some-
times try a particular feature with a set of users from

WWW
a given network or region; for
example Excite@Home users
stupid
often get to see new features. quotes
They aren’t told of this, just
presented with the new UI and
“There is no need
observed how they use it.
for any individual
to have a compu-
ter in their home.”
T he infamous “I feel lucky”
is nearly never used. How-
ever, in trials it was found that
[Ken Olson, President
of Digital Equipment
Corp, in 1977]
removing it would somehow
reduce the Google experience.
Users wanted it to be kept. It was like a comfort button.
W hen Google was founded, Brin and Page, the

founders tossed a coin to decide what position
they would take.
N otice the logos appear-

ing on your Google
homepage around major
events or holidays? This is
known as the Google Doo-
dle. The first one was dedi-
cated to the Burning Man
festival in 1998. You can check out past Google doodles
at google.com/logos.

WWW
C R O S S
B y July 2008, Google had in-
dexed an astounding 1 trillion
(1000000000000) pages on the
Across
5. A confusing and
anthithetical term
that is both global and
local
Internet. 6. Information added
to a file that can be
used to locate the
H eard of Mentalplex? It was an document or resource

on a world map
April fools joke that Google 8. Search Engine Optimi-
zation
could read peoples minds and 10. A combination of
two or more Web 2.0
search the Internet for what they services
12. A single update on a
were thinking of. The joke also in- Twitter stream
cluded broadband access wires Down
coming out from people’s toilet 1. A snippet of code that
can be embedded on
bowls! Try it out @ http://www. many pages
2. Syndicated audio
google.com/mentalplex/ content delivered in
the style of blogs
3. User generated
content
L arry Page, the co founder of

Google once made an inkjet
printer out of Lego
4. The sum total of all
blogs and blogging
related activities
7. An online representa-
tion of yourself,
blocks when he commonly on forums
and social networkng
was in college. sites
9. A mechanism that
allows several web
2.0 and cloud services
T here are more

than 600 mil-
lion phones. Even
to interact with each
other
11. A mechanism for
verifying if a visitor is
a human
then, more than half the popula-
tion of the entire world hasn’t yet
made a phone call.

WWW
W O R D

WWW
A ll three founders of YouTube, did You
Steve Chen, Chad Hurley
and Jawed Karim were work- know?
ing for Paypal when they started The busiest tel-
YouTube. ephone exchange
was by BellSouth
at the 1996 Olym-
D id you know that the domain
www.Youtube.com was reg-
istered on Valentines Day (Febru-
pic Games, where
100 billion bits of
ary 14, 2005). information were
transmitted per
second
Y ouTube loves young Ameri-
cans? Here’s proof: 70 per
cent of YouTube’s registered us-
ers are from USA and half of Youtube users are under
20 years old.
I f Youtube was Hol-

lywood, they have
enough material to re-
lease 60,000 new films
every week.
O ne 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

67 | April 2010
Back then.... Thinkdigit.com 1.0 in 2001
WWW
mini
WWW
T he total amount of band- did You
width used by Youtube is
about the same as used by entire
know?
Internet in 2000. More than a bil-
lion transistors
are manufac-
O ne needs over 1000 years
of time to watch all videos
on Youtube (but there will be bil-
tured... every
second.
lion of more videos uploaded on
Youtube by then).
M ost popular category for uploaded videos is ‘Music’

having around 20per cent Youtube videos.
G mail was internally

used for nearly 2
years prior to launch
to the public. They dis-
covered there were ap-
proximately 6 types of
email users, and Gmail
has been designed to ac-
commodate all of these.
U nited States users upload most of YouTube videos

followed by UK. Americans are also the number-
one watchers of YouTube videos followed by Japan.

69 | April 2010
Yesterday.... Thinkdigit.com 2.0 in 2007....
WWW
mini
WWW
T he 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.
T here isn’t any restriction

for proper dress code in
the Google offices. This is to
ensure comfort and a produc-
tive working environment. So
one may dress up in pyjamas
or even as a superhero.
T om Vendetta is the young-

est Google employee ever hired. He was hired by
Google when he was just 15 years old. Vendetta used
to fool his friends by sending fake press releases and
news. Vendetta was employed
did You because he was young and would
know? know how young hackers thought.
His job was to help address secu-
In 1999, new
rity flaws in Gmail.
fiber was being
installed at a rate
of 2800 miles or
4500 kilometers
G oogle consists of over
450,000 servers, racked up
in clusters located in data centers
per hour!
around the world.

71 | April 2010
Today.... Thinkdigit.com 3.0....
WWW
mini
WWW
T he first ever search engine did You
was called “Archie” and was
created way back in 1990 by a
know?
Canadian student Alan Emtage. It took a year
to connect the
first line from
I n 2007, Google became the
most visited website with 700
million users. It beat the next
New York to San
Francisco. 14,000
popular website, Microsoft.com miles of copper
by over 200 million hits. In March wire and 130,000
2010, Facebook overtook Google! telephone poles
were needed to
link the country.
T he English once took it to be
an alphabet. The Chinese af-
fectionately term it ‘the little mouse’. The Dutch call it
an ‘elephant’s trunk’, the Germans a
spider monkey, the Italians a snail.
It is ‘&’ (ampersand)
The inspiration for the brand

name Yahoo! Came from a word
made up by Jonathan Swift in his
book Gulliver’s Travels. A Yahoo was
a person who was ugly and not human in appearance.
T he prime reason the Google home page is so bare, is

due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML

73 | April 2010
Tomorrow... Thinkdigit.com 4.0 coming soon to a browser near you...
WWW
mini
WWW
and just wanted a quick interface. did You
In fact, the submit button was a
later addition and initially, hitting
know?
the RETURN key was the only Globally, about
way to burst Google into life. $1 trillion is spent
annually on
telecommunica-
S weden has the highest per-
centage of its population i.e.
76.9 per cent hooked on to the In-
tions products
and services.
ternet. In contrast, the world av-
erage is 11.9 per cent and India has a poor 7.2 per cent
T he Dilbert Zone was the

first comic website on the
Internet.
A resident of Tonga could

have the rights to register
domains ending in .to as Tongo’s
Internet code is .to. Such possi-
bilities are fun to consider: travel.to or go.to.
T he day after Internet Explorer 4 was released, a

few Microsoft employees left a 10 by 12-foot In-
ternet 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.

WWW
T he word ‘e-mail’ has been banned by the French
Ministry of Culture. They are required to use the
word ‘Courriel’ instead, which
is the French equivalent of In- did You
ternet. This move become the
subject of ridicule from the cyber
know?
community in general The first Touch
Tone system,
id you know that www.sym- which used tones
D bolics.com was the first ever rather than
domain name registered online? pulses generated
by rotary dials,
ccording to a University of was installed in
A Minnesota report, research- Baltimore, US, in
ers estimate the volume of Inter- 1941. Touch Tone
net traffic is growing at an annual telephones were
rate of 50 to 60 per cent. invented by the
research team at
he terms Internet and World Bell Systems.
T Wide Web are often used in
every-day speech without much distinction. However,
the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and
the same. The Internet is a global data communica-
tions system. It is a hardware and software infrastruc-
ture that provides connectivity between computers. In
contrast, the Web is one of the services communicated
via the Internet. It is a collection of interconnected

WWW
documents and other re-
sources, linked by hyperlinks
and URLs.
I n February 2009, Twitter

had a monthly growth (of
users) of over 1300 per cent
- several times more than
Facebook.
T he first graphical Web browser to become truly pop-

ular was Marc Andreessen and Jamie Zawinski’s
NCSA Mosaic. It was the first browser made available
for Windows, Mac and Unix X Windows System with the
first version appearing in March 1993.
D atacenters produce around 0.3 per cent of the

world’s CO2 emissions. The airline industry pro-
duces 0.6 per cent, and the steel industry produces 1.0
per cent.
T he cost of transmitting information has fallen dra-

matically. A trillion bits of information from Boston
to Los Angeles from $1,50,000 in 1970 to 12 cents to-
day. E-mailing a 40-page document from Chile to Kenya
costs less than 10 cents, faxing it about $10, sending it
by courier $50

WWW
did You
know? T
he typical Internet user
worldwide is young, male and
wealthy – a member of an elite
”hello” wasn’t minority.
always the first
thing said over
the phone. The
first operating
T he average total cost of using
a local dialup Internet ac-
count for 20 hours a month in Af-
phone service rica is about USD 60 a month and
was established USD 22 a month in the US. The
in 1878 and the average African monthly salary is
formal greeting less than USD 60.
back then was
“ahoy”
B efore they can read, almost
one in four children in nursery
school are learning a skill that even some adults have
yet to master: using the Internet. About 23per cent of
children in nursery school -- kids age 3, 4, or 5 -- have
gone online
A t the end of the 20th century, 90 per cent of data on

Africa was stored in Europe and the United States.
F acebook now has 24 million users who spend an av-

erage of 14 minutes on the site every time they visit.
This is up from 8 minutes last September, according to
Hitwise, a traffic measuring service.

WWW
M ySpace has 67 million
numbers -- nearly 3
times as many as Facebook!
MySpace users spend an aver-
age of 30 minutes on the site
each time they visit.
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.
M r Tomlinson was the first person on records to

have sent an email. His email address was: tom-
linson@bbn-tenexa. He had invented this software that
allowed messages to be sent between computers. He is
also credited with the use of the @ in email addresses.
C ounting only domain name sites with content, Net-

craft has tracked the growth of the internet since
1995 and says of the 100m,
around 48 million are active sites did You
that are updated regularly. When
it began observing sites through
know?
the domain name system in 1995, The first GPS
there were 18,000 web sites in satellite was
existence. launched in 1978

WWW
O n the Internet, a ‘bastion did You
host’ is the only host compu-
ter that a company allows to be
know?
addressed directly from the pub- In Britain on
lic network. January 1st
1985, the first
call on a mobile
A round 1 per cent of the
world’s 650 million corpo-
rate e-mail accounts are plugged
(cell) phone was
made by Ernie
into hardware and software that Wise, comedian
forwards incoming messages to and one half of
a mobile device. And about the famous duo
3.65 million of them use Morecambe and
a BlackBerry. Wise.
A lmost half of people online have at least three e-

mail accounts. In addition the average consumer
has maintained the same e-mail address for four to
six years.
S pam accounts for

over 60 per cent of all
email, according to Mes-
sageLabs. Google says
at least one third of all
Gmail servers are filled
with spam

WWW
Y ahoo started out as “Jerry and David’s Guide to
the World Wide Web”. Jerry Yang and David Filo
were PhD candidates
at Stanford in 1994
when they started
the site.
T he first Web browser was already capable of down-

loading and displaying movies, sounds and any file
type supported by the operating
did You system.
know?
multiple inde-
pendent tests
‘C arnivore’ is the Internet
surveillance system devel-
oped by the US Federal Bureau
have measured of Investigation (FBI), who de-
up to four times veloped it to monitor the elec-
the radiation tronic transmissions of criminal
coming out of suspects.
the earpiece of a
cellular phone,
than out of the
antenna
A nthony Greco, aged 18, be-
came the first person arrest-
ed for spim (unsolicited instant
messages) on February 21, 2005.
A NeXT computer used by Tim Berners-Lee was the

world’s first Web server

WWW
T he first web site
was built at CERN.
CERN is the French
acronym for European
Council for Nuclear Re-
search and is located at
Geneva, Switzerland.
T he World Wide Web is the did You

most extensive implementa-
tion of hypertext but it is not the
know?
only one. A computer help file is GPS was origi-
actually a hypertext document. nally developed
for military use.
An executive de-
T he concept of stylesheets
was already in place when
the first browser was released.
cree in the 1980’s
made it available
to the general
population. The
W orldWideWeb was pro-
grammed with Objective C development of
small, cheap mi-
croprocessors in
H ypertext is implemented
in the Web as links in the
browser window. Links are refer-
the 1990’s led to
the small, cheap
ences to text that the user wants GPS units you
to access. When a link is clicked, can buy today.

WWW
the referenced text is displayed did You
or bought into focus.
know?
he address of the world’s first Shopping for a
T web server is http://info.cern. new HDTV? Plas-
ch/ The URL of the first web page ma TVs consume
was http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hy- far more energy
pertext/WWW/TheProject.html. than LCDs, and
Although this page is not hosted they waste it as
anymore at CERN, a later version heat energy.
of the page is posted at http://
www.w3.org/History/19921103hypertext/hypertext/
WWW/TheProject.html.
I n December 1991, the first institution in the US to

adopt the web was the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center (SLAC). True to the Berners-Lee vision, it was
used to display an online catalog of SLAC’s documents.
M arc Andreessen started Netscape

and released Netscape Navigator
in 1994. During the height of its popu-
larity, Netscape Navigator accounted
for almost 90 per cent of all web use.
T he first browser that made the web

available to PC and Mac users was

WWW
did You Mosaic. It was developed by
know? National Center for Super-
computing (NCSA) led by Marc
The minimum Andreessen in February, 1993.
number of satel- Mosaic was one of the first
lites needed to graphical web browsers and
show your position led to an explosion in web use.
on the GPS device is
3. A signal from one
GPS satellite will
just tell you your
A pril 30, 1993 is an impor-
tant date for the Web be-
cause on that day, CERN an-
distance from that nounced that anyone may use
particular satellite. WWW technology freely.
If you know your ap-
proximate latitude
and longitude,
you can figure out
M icrosoft released Inter-
net Explorer on 1995.
This event initiated the brows-
which point you’re er wars. By bundling Internet
at. Four satellites Explorer with the Windows
are necessary to ac- operating system, by 2002,
curately determine Internet Explorer became the
altitude. In general, most dominant web browser
the more GPS satel- with a market share over 95
lites your receiver per cent.
can get a fix on, the
more accurate your
location will be. I t was in the Conference
Dinner in May 26, 1994

WWW
where the first Best of WWW
awards were given. It was by
stupid
quotes pure coincidence that the jazz
band that played during the
“Computers in the awards was called “Wolfgang
future may weigh and the Were Wolves”
no more than 1.5
tons.”
[Popular
Mechanics, forecasting
O nly 4 per cent of Arab
women use the Inter-
net. Moroccan women rep-
the relentless march of
resent almost a third of
science, 1949]
that figure.
A s of July 2009, Microsoft Internet Explorer ac-

counted for 67.68 per cent of all browsers used.
Mozilla Firefox was used by 22.47 per cent of all users.
T he development of standards for the World Wide

Web is managed by the
W3C or the World Wide Web
consortium.The W3C was
founded in October, 1994 and
is headed by Tim Berners-Lee
T he first White House web-

site was launched dur-
ing the Clinton-Gore admin-

WWW
istration on October 21, 1994. did You
Coincidentally, the site www.
whitehouse.com linked to a por-
know?
nography web site. There are 21
active GPS satel-
lites and 3 oper-
O pen source technology domi-
nates the web. The most
common software used for web-
ating spares. The
GPS satellites
serving is called LAMP standing orbit the earth
for the Linux operating system, at an altitude
Apache web server, MySQL data- of 12,000 miles.
base and PHP scripting language They travel in
one of six orbits,
all inclined 55
T he “www” part of a web site
(www.google.com) is optional
and is not required by any web
degrees relative
to the equator,
policy or standard. and are spaced
60 degrees
apart. Their
D espite IPv4’s 4.3 billion
unique addresses, it is fore-
casted that by 2011, the address
orbital period is
12 hours. The full
space will be consumed. A newer set of satellites
scheme called IPv6 is slowly re- became opera-
placing IPv4 in some countries. tional in 1994.
IPv6 has the capability to ad-
dress 2128 computers. To give perspective to this very
big number, the world’s population of 6.5 billion people

WWW
as of 2006 can be given 295
unique addresses.
Y
ouTube’s bandwidth re-
quirements 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.
did You
T he blue coloured links on a
web page is just a browser know?
default because way back on the SMS is being
days when monitors only had 16 used by more
colours, blue was the darkest people than the
colour that did not affect text internet and it
legibility. has twice the
number of users
than there are TV
A ll three letter word combi-
nations from aaa.com to zzz.
com are already registered as
set owners. More
people use SMS
domain names. than have bank
accounts!
A round 75 per cent of the mu-

sic that is available for download has never been
purchased and it is costing money just to be on the
server.

WWW
O ne million domain names are did You
registered every month.
know?
The first ever
A ccording to AT&T vice presi-
dent Jim Cicconi, 8 hours of
video is uploaded into YouTube
camera took 8
hours to take a
every minute. This was on April photograph. It
2008. On May 21, 2009, YouTube consisted of bitu-
received 20 hours of video con- men (tar) over a
tent per minute. metal plate. The
exposed parts
of the tar would
O f the 13 million music files
available on the web, 52,000
tunes accounted for 80 per cent
harden and the
soft part cleaned
of download. away.
B y 2012 it has been said that there will be 17 bil-

lion devices connected to the internet. In most of
Asia, mobile phones are leading the way to internet
connectivity.
T he term Deep Web is used to refer to a wealth of

information that is at least 400 to 550 times larger
than the searchable Internet. This content consisting
of most of the information on today’s active websites
is stored in databases which are invisible to search en-
gines. This information contains data such as prices of

WWW
items, airfares and other stuff that will never surface
unless somebody queries for that information. The
Deep Web and all that hidden information is what pre-
vents search engines from giving us a definitive answer
to simple questions like “How much is the cheapest air-
fare from New York to London next Thursday”?
I n a recent survey con-

ducted by security special-
ist Symantec of the 100 most
unsafe and malware infested
web sites, 48 per cent of them
feature adult content.
N aked women make up 80

per cent of all the pictures
on the internet.
T he online population of Fa- did You

cebook, 250 million users
worldwide, and MySpace, which
know?
had 100 million accounts by After Microsoft
2007, are bigger than the popu- purchased 2% of
lations of many nations world- facebook for $30
wide. On April 2008, Facebook million, it gained
overtook MySpace in terms of a value of $15 bil-
monthly visits. lion in 2007

WWW
did You
know? I
t took the Web only 4 years to
reach 50 million users. Radio
took 38 years while TV made it in
The chairman 13 years.
of IBM Thomas
Watson infa-
mously predicted
that there was
A mazon.com was formerly
known as Cadabra.com.
a total world
market of only 5
computers!
A blogger Kyle MacDonald,
made history in 2006 by trad-
ing his way to glory. Starting out
with a paper clip, he traded his
way to increasingly costlier items and of value includ-
ing a years rent and an afternoon with Alice Cooper.
He eventually trad-
ed a film role for a
two-storey farm-
house Kipling, Sas-
katchewan.
B it torrents, depending on location, are estimated to

consume 27 to 55 per cent of all internet bandwidth
as of February, 2009.
D omain registration was free until the National Sci-

ence Foundation decided to change this on Sep-
tember 14th, 1995.

WWW
I t is estimated that one of did You
every eight married couples
started by meeting online.
know?
The first coin op-
erated machine
L ee Stein invented the first on-
line electronic bank in 1994
entitled, “First Virtual Holdings”.
ever designed
was a holy-water
dispenser that
required a five-
T he Internet is roughly 35 per
cent English, 65 per cent non-
English with the Chinese at 14
drachma piece
to operate. It was
per cent. Yet only 13 per cent of the brainchild of
world’s population i.e. 812 million the Greek scien-
are Internet users as of Decem- tist Hero in the
ber 2004. North America has the first century AD.
highest continental concentration
with 70 per cent of the populace using the Internet.
O fficial statistics in the UK

say that 29 per cent of
women have never used the
internet, but only 20 per cent
of men.
I n 1995, Bob Metcalfe

coined the phrase ‘The Web
might be better than sex’.

WWW
I celand has the highest per centage of Internet us-
ers at 68 per cent. The United States stands at 56
per cent. 34 per cent of all Malaysians use the Internet
while only eight per cent of Jordanians are connected,
4 per cent of Palestinians; 0.6 per cent of Nigerians and
0.1 per cent of Tajikistanis.
E mployees at Google are encouraged to use 20 per

cent of their time working on their own projects.
Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that
grew from this working model.
A fghanistan has a com-

bined telephone pen-
etration of 3.4 per cent.
S omeone is a victim
of a cybercrime every
10 seconds, and it is on
the rise.
T he first search engine for Gopher files was called

Veronica, created by the University of Nevada Sys-
tem Computing Services group.
T he Electrohippies collective is an international

group of hactivists based in Oxfordshire, England.

WWW
The first Digit Web Awards back in the 2001 issue

WWW
O ne of the 2001 Digit Web Awards winners was

Khoj.com, for the best search engine in India.
This was at a time when Google wasn’t as popular
as it is today. Traveljini.com was the best travel site
but if we check today, it’s defunct. Makemytrip was
one of the runner-ups. Rediff was the best of the
Indian portals, and is still popular today. Rediffmail
was one of the most preferred mail services, and
though Gmail might be everyone’s favourite now,
Rediffmail isn’t completely ignored either.
L urking is to read through mailing lists or news

groups and get a feel of the topic before posting
one’s own messages.
T he internet was called the ‘Galactic Network’ in

memos written by MIT’s JCR Licklider in 1962.
T he first internet worm was did You

created by Robert Morris, Jr,
and attacked more than 6,000 know?
Internet hosts. Hotwired was the
first Web site to
feature a banner
S RS stands for Shared Regis-
try Server which is the cen- ad

WWW
tral system for all accredited registrars to access, reg-
ister and control domain names.
T he search engine Lycos

is named after Lycosidae
which is a latin name for the
wolf spider family
I t is believed that Subhash Ghai’s film Taal was the

first Bollywood movie to be widely promoted on the
internet.
R ob Glasser’s company
Progressive Networks
launched the RealAudio
system on April 10, 1995.
B utler Jeeves of the in-

ternet site AskJeeves.
com made its debut as a
large helium balloon in the
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day
parade in 2000.
I n Beijing, the internet community has coined the

word ‘Chortal’ as a shortened version of ‘Chinese
Portal’.

WWW
SUDOKU
S atyam Online became the first private ISP in De-

cember 1998 to offer internet connections in India.
I n 1946, the Merriam Webster defined a computer as

a person who tabulates numbers, acountant, actu-
ary, book keeper.

WWW
I n 1969, Advanced Research did You
Projects Agency (ARPA) went
online connecting four major US
know?
universities. The idea was to have The longest
a backup in case a military attack phone cable is a
destroyed conventional commu- submarine cable
nication system. called FLAG
(Fiber-Optic
Link Around the
T he first ever ISP was Com-
puServe which still exists un-
der AOL, Time Warner.
Globe). It spans
16,800 miles
from Japan
to the United
J eff Bezos while starting his
business could not name his
website Cadabra due to copyright
Kingdom and can
carry 600,000
issues. He later named it amazon. calls at a time.
com.

WWW

GAMING
S outh Korea is the first country in the world to have

opened a game addiction hotline. Korean officials
are terrified of what they term to be a gaming addiction
epidemic. In addition to this, many South Korean hospi-
tals and psychiatric clinics have opened to specifically
treat this “problem”
A mazingly, chromosome 7 of our genome has the

name “Sonic the Hedgehog” — famous SEGA mascot.

GAMING
I n 1986, Nintendo released a special Disk System
peripheral for the NES in Japan. Among its features
was a microphone in the con-
troller, which certain games
used, including an updated
version of the original Zelda.
You had to destroy enemies by
shouting into the mic.
M arlon Brando had re-

corded lines for the EA
videogame ‘The Godfather’,
just before his death. Sadly, it
wasn’t used because he was
so old, that his voice was feeble
and weak. They went on to hire did You
somebody who sounded just like
him to do the job
know?
Inkjet print-
ome numbers now! Of the ers print small
S so called sixth generation micro dots on the
gaming platforms, there are 33.5 printed material
million Playstation 3s, 77 million that are yellow
Nintendo Wiis, 125 million Nin- in color and can
tendo DS’, 55.9 million PSPs and tell the FBI your
39 million Xbox 360s sold world- printer type.
wide. This is just about enough

GAMING
to give every man, woman and
child in the United States and
stupid
quotes Canada, a gaming console!
“Microsoft is
not the answer.
Microsoft is the
A tari took it’s name from
the Chinese game Go!. It
specifically refers to a situa-
question. NO is the tion where a stone or group of
answer.” – [Erik stones is in a situation where it
Naggum, compu- can be captured by opponents.
ter programmer of Ironically, Atari found itself in
SGML, Emacs, and this situation when a French
Lisp] company took it over recently.
A round 145 million people

play video games. The
worldwide average gamer is
Math
triv!a
28 years old. Fabrice Bellard used
a desktop computer to
calculate the mathemati-
T he Dragon Quest series

was so popular in Japan in
the late 80s and the early 90s
cal constant pi to about
2.7 trillion digits, about
123 billion more than
the previous record. It
that the company that made took a total of 131 days
it, Enix, was advised by Gov- to finish the task and this
ernment officials to release version of pi takes over
a terabyte of hard disk
newer games in the series on space to store.
weekends so as to stop the

GAMING
massive amounts of ‘sick leaves’ did You
that happened when the game
released on weekdays!
know?
A survey showed
that 5% of all
A PlayStation 3 Blu-ray disc
can hold up to 20 GB of data
or the equivalent of about 2000
laptop users fall
asleep in their
Nintendo 64 game cartridges. beds mistakenly
using their lap-
tops as pillows
S ixteen times a second is the
fastest a key can be pressed
on a keyboard or controller. Toshuyuki Takahashi, a Jap-
anese, is the record holder.
T he idea for Pokemon,

the wildly popular
Game Boy phenomenon
occurred to its creator
Satoshi Tajiri while collect-
ing caterpillars as a child
and watching them grow
into butterflies.
T he absurdly tough
shooting game, Ikaru-
ga, that was sold in Japan,
came with a disc recording

GAMING
the country’s best players completing levels with non-
stop combos and beating bosses in astounding time.
O ver 20 million copies

of Super Mario World
were sold, and it went on
to become the bestsell-
ing game of it’s genera-
tion. This made the stag-
gering 20,000 hours that
went into developing it
totally worthwhile.
T he first game to incorporate real time audio effects,

or basically, the difference in the same sound in dif-
ferent physical environments was Duke Nukem 3D.
When the player shot his gun in the water, the sound
would be muffled and gurgly.
I magine a girl standing outside a house and knocking

on a window. The camera then moves in and shows
her horrified family scared to death. The girl is a zombie!
This insanely scary ad for the Japanese game Siren was
pulled off the air after parents started protesting and
did not let children buy the game.

GAMING
T he first coin-operated ‘com- did You
puter’ game was created in
1971 by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck. know?
It was called Galaxy Game and “Switched-off”
the only unit ever built was in- devices account
stalled at Stanford University in for 40 percent
September of that year. Appar- of the energy
ently, eager punters would en- consumed by
dure a one hour wait just to have electronics in an
a go. average home
T he 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
H alo’s Master Chief, is the first gaming character to

be given a wax statue by Madame Tussauds.
D esigned by Ralph
Baer and released
in 1972, the Magnavox
Odyssey was the first
videogame console
and the first cartridge-
based system. It was
also the home of the

GAMING
first console light gun, called Shooting Gallery.
R eleased in November 1971 in the United States,

Computer Space was the first commercially re-
leased coin-operated arcade game and is generally re-
garded as the first commercially available video game.
It was created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, who
would later found Atari.
I n 1988 Electronic Arts be-

came the first major publisher did You
to release an ‘online’ multiplayer
game. Dan Bunten’s Modem
know?
Wars allowed two players to sit Contrary to the
at their own computers and play potrayal of lasers
over a telephone line. in many science
fiction movies,
a laser beam
W hile games such as Doom,
Marathon, Quake, Duke
Nukem 3D and GoldenEye 007
would not be
visible (at least to
may have defined the first-person the naked eye) in
shooter genre, the first docu- the near vacuum
mented ‘first-person shooter 3D of space as there
multiplayer networked game’ was would be insuf-
called Spasim (space + simulation ficient matter in
= Spasim). It appeared in 1974 and the environment
could be played by up to 32 people. to make it visible

GAMING
A tari’s first arcade machines were built in an old

roller skating rink and assembled by - so the story
goes - pot-smoking students and hippies.
T he first name for Electronic Arts was actually Amazin’

Software, but company founder Trip Hawkins want-
ed the title to reflect software as an art form, so it was
subsequently changed to Electronic Arts.
W ii is the first Nintendo console to be sold outside of

Japan that doesn’t feature the company’s name
as part of the trademark.
T he very first gaming East-

er egg is thought to have stupid
been tucked away in the 1979 quotes
Atari 2600 title, Adventure. By
carrying a hidden pixel, players
Real men don’t
could access a hidden room
use backups, they
where the message “Created
post their stuff on
by Warren Robinett” was dis-
a public ftp server
played.
and let the rest of
the world make
copies.” [Linus
T he first name Atari founder
Nolan Bushnell intended
for the company was Syzygy,
Torvalds, creator
of Linux Kernel]

GAMING
did You an astronomical term used to de-
know? scribe the sun, moon and earth in
total eclipse.
At the 2008 CES,
Fujitsu showed a
laptop PC whose
outside plastic T he maximum score possible in
Pac-Man is 3,333,360.
shell is 50 per-
cent vegetable-
based polymer U K actress Rhona Mitra was
the first official Lara Croft
model.
alloy
A tari Football, is the first true sport-based video

game, there’s no argument that it was the first ar-
cade cabinet to feature a ‘trak-ball’ interface, or that
the game featured the first
programmed scrolling pitch.
T he first major movie

based on a video game
was the critically assassi-
nated Super Mario.
I n the original arcade Don-

key Kong game, Mario
was called Jumpman and
he was a carpenter, not a
plumber.

GAMING
M ichael Jackson, in some form or other, has ap-

peared in Sonic the Hedge-
hog 3, Ready 2 Rumble Round 2, did You
Space Channel 5 1 & 2, GTA: Vice
City and, obviously, Moonwalker.
know?
In 2007, com-
IFA 2001 is the first and panies with an
F only game to date to use a enviro-tech focus
“scratch and sniff” CD. The disc received $3.95
smelt of turf. billion in venture
funding, a 38
he PSone was initially a percent increase
T Nintendo console with a over 2006. IT
partnership with Sony to de- asset recovery
velop the electronics. When (selling refur-
Nintendo abandoned it, Sony bished PCs)—is
decided to continue and com- now a $6 billion–
plete the console anyway. a-year business.
S pacewar was the first sci-fi game. Students at MIT

created in 1961 and it lets users control spaceships
with missile firing capability.
T he makers of The Sims tried languages such as

Ukranian, Tagalog and Navajo before fixing on the
nonsensical ‘Simlish’ dialogue for the game, The Sims.

GAMING
Math
triv!a T
The probability of life
omb Raider’s Lara Croft
was originally called Lau-
evolving at random is ra Cruz.
1040,000 to 1 as calculated
by the late astronomer
Sir Fred Hoyle.
T he English translation of
the Japanese word Nin-
tendo is “Leave luck to heav-
en”
E ach of the cars in the racing

title Gran Turismo 4 took did You
around a month per developer
to create. know?
While old CRT
monitors use
T he Texas Instruments TI-83
calculator has more graph-
ics processing power than the
more energy
to show white
Commodore 64. Amazingly, than black, LCDs
some basic C64 games can spend slightly
even be programmed into it. more energy to
show black than
white.
T he Xbox was originally going
to be called the DirectX-box,
after Microsoft’s programming interface for Windows.

GAMING
did You
T he Sims managed to spend
82 weeks within the UK’s top
ten sales chart.
know?
Fifteen billion
batteries are
H alo 2 earned the most in a
single day — $125 million in
a day, more than any movie in its
made and sold
across the globe
first day of sale. every year.
3 2 million of the 100 million Game Boys are in Japan,

44 million in America.
E arly iterations of Nintendo’s

failed Virtual Boy console in-
cluded a gun you’d set vertical on a
flat surface, which would project a
3D image into the air.
I f, for some strange reason, you

still have a Madden NFL 06
save game on your memory card,
a special Madden van will be un-
locked when you start up Burnout
Revenge on the Playstation 2.
T he violent racer Carmageddon

was released in the UK with

GAMING
zombies. The In-
dian version had no
cows. The game was
banned in Germany.
T he Shenmue
game made by Yu
Suzuki in Japan was
so wildly popular that
it’s cutscenes were
actually played as
movies in theatres!
S tarcraft is the first computer game to be played in

space. It was sent on shuttle mission shuttle mis-
sion STS-96 back in 1999 by Daniel T. Barry, a mission
specialist.
did You
T he first female video game
designer is widely consid-
know?
ered to be Carol Shaw. She cre- The average
ated 3D Tic-Tac-Toe for the Atari office drone uses
2600 in 1979. Her best known up 10,000 sheets
game is Activision’s River Raid, of paper—about
which itself was one of the first a whole tree’s
vertical scrolling shooters. worth of wood
pulp—per year.

GAMING
T etris has been sold since did You
1982; it has sold 40 million
and earned 800 million in the
know?
Duke Nukem
process.
Forever is the
best example of
A whopping 11.5 million sub-
scribers play World of
Warcraft - that’s more or less the
Vaporware... an-
nounced games
that never made
population of Goa
it to the market.
The game was in
W ii is the most power-effi-
cient of all the consoles. It
only consumes 18.4W as com-
development for
12 years before
being aban-
pared to the PS3’s 199W and
doned.
Xbox’s 186W.
N intendo was originally founded in 1889 as a maker

of playing cards!
S ega Dreamcast released in

1999 was the first console
game machine to sport the
128-bit architechture.
T he first all-computer chess

championship was held
in New York in 1970, and was
won by CHESS 3.0 – a program

GAMING
Now for some personal computing with this Sudoku
written by Slate, Atkin and Gorlen at Northwestern Uni-

versity, Illinois.
I n 1968, International Master David Levy made

a $3,000 bet with John McCarthy a researcher in
Aritificial Intelligence at Stanford University that no

GAMING
5 Bad a$$ game villains of all time
The Nazis
Too many games to count
F rom Commandos to the famous

Medal Of Honor series to eve-
rybody’s favourite WW2 shooter,
the Wolfenstein series, to the sexy
protagonist BloodRayne, these bad
boys are the ultimate fodder for our collective can-
nons. Whether the genre be strategy, or a good old
fashioned fps, the sheer number of games based on
obliterating fascists are too many to count.
Arthas
Warcraft III
W hat more can we say about

this guy? He allows his
soul to get corrupted by hate and
revenge, betrays his Kingdom,
slays his own father and very
nearly succeeds at wiping out
life from the world of Azeroth. In
combat a mighty foe wielding Frostmourne – a blade
crafted to steal souls

GAMING
Shodan
System Shock series
H er virtual omnipresence in the game is discon-

certing – you just feel she’s watching every
move and after a while, you feel she’s reading your
thoughts. Although you never actually face off with
Shodan, she’ll keep you busy by turning mutants, ro-
bots and cyborgs after your hide. Every step you take,
every move you make – she’s watching you!

GAMING
The Monolith
S.T.A.L.K.E.R
Okay. So we’re not talking about
one baddie over here, but an en-
tire cult of them. Anyone who
has played the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R
will recall the last level swarm-
ing with Monolith fighters trying
their level best to keep you away
from the finale. They’re well
trained, heavily armed and armoured and pretty
much hostile to everyone they come across, open-
ing fire indiscriminately.
Hellknight
Doom 3
This is a bad character to run into
in a narrow corridor. Even worse is
to run into him in a dimly lit narrow
corridor. For he is over 10 feet tall,
and not only is he the ultimate me-
lee fighter with those claws and that musculature
but he can throw large energy balls at you that do
splash damage. He is also immensely tough to kill,

GAMING
chess computer in the world would beat him. He won
his bet.
O n June 17,1980, Atari’s ‘As-

teroids’ and ‘Lunar Lander’
were the first two video games
to ever be registered in the Copy-
right Office
M ario, one of the most popular video game characters

was named after Nintendo’s landlord.
D aphne 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 abil-
ity 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.
P layStation 2 hit the shelves

in Japan on March 4, 2000
and sold 98,000 units in four
hours.

GAMING
This one is known as the Ouchi Illusion, shake the
book (or your head) and the disc in the center will
pop out and appear to “float” over the page
T he first computer book to sell one million copies

was 101 BASIC Computer Games which was pub-
lished by Creative Computing in 1978 in the US.
T he first 32-bit home video game system was the

Panasonic 3DO released in 1993

GAMING
S ony released the first matte black version of its
Playstation in 1997, which enabled programmers
to create their own games in the C programming lan-
guage, called Net Yaroze.
T he first software to be imported from the Soviet

Union to the US was Tetris, developed by Alexey
Pazhitov in 1985
I n 2003, a 14-year old Romanian boy collapsed and

was hospitalised because he’d been playing Counter
Strike for nine days in a row.
D eep 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.
W illiam Higginbotham created what might have

been the first video game in 1958. His game
called ‘Tennis for Two’, was cre-
ated and played on Brookhaven
National Laboratory oscilloscope.
S ega release Sonic the

hedgehog in 1991 as a di-
rect response to Nintendo’s Su-
per NES gaming system.

GAMING
Across
1. Marks in game
space that fade
P acman got
its name
from the Jap-
after some time,
like blood splat-
ters, bullet holes
and footprints
6. the “original”
anese word version of a game,
not one of the
‘pacu’ mean- commonly played
mods
ing ‘to munch’. 8. Staying in one
place and firing,
Since pacu is or even hiding in a
game as against
pronounced “rushing”
9. A recording of a
the same as previous run in a
‘f*** you’ only with a p sound its name racing game that
is overlaid over
was Pacman. the current run
12. Macros and
actions assigned
to keyboards are
G upei Yokoi was the creator of the

Game Boy and Virtual Boy. He
worked on Famicom, the Metroid se-
Down
called this
2. The act of your

character ap-
ries, Gameboy pocket and did extensive pearing within a
gamespace
work on the system we knew today as 3. Field of View
4. A group or team
the Nintendo Entertainment system of gamers
5. A single level
in a game, or a
gamespace area
I n 1981, Shigeru Miyamoto guided

by Gunpei Yokoi made the first
game for Nintendo starring Mario
loaded at once
7. A script or
software that au-
tomatically plays
a multiplayer first
which was previously the arcade game person shooter
10. Firing in a game
Donkey Kong. without taking too
much trouble to
aim
11. Heads up display

GAMING

GAMING
I n Spring 1967, MacHACK VI became the first chess
program to beat a human at the Massachussets
State Chess Championship.
S ara Lhadi logged 16,799 hours grinding away in

Runescape between November 2004 and October
2009 (we guess she hasn’t stopped). 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.
W ii Sports, is the biggest selling game of all time

with over 46 million copies sold
T he videogame with the most advanced character

face generator is the Bioware creation Mass Effect.
Blending together over 150 different facial features, the
system offers over 1 billion permutations for the face of
lead character Commander Shepard.

GAMING

BITS & B
BYTES
BITS
ITS & BYTES
BYTES
TECH ONE-LINERS
Windows contains FAT. Use Linux -- you

won’t ever have to worry about weight.
Programming is an art form that fights back.
Unix is user-friendly. It’s just very selective about

who its friends are.
The best way to accelerate a Mac is at 9.8 m /

sec^2
The only problem with troubleshooting is

that sometimes trouble shoots back.
Do files get embarrassed when they get un-

zipped?
Do you remember when you only had to pay for

windows when *you* broke them?
If you can’t beat your computer at chess,

try kickboxing.

BITS & BYTES
If the automobile had followed the same
development cycle as the computer, a
Rolls-Royce today would cost $100, get a
million miles to the gallon, and explode once a
year, killing everyone inside.
One picture is worth 128K words.
Owners of digital watches: Your day’s are

numbered!
Programmers don’t die, they just GOSUB without

RETURN.
There can never be a computer language in which

you cannot write a bad program.
There were computers in Biblical times. Eve had

an Apple.
What boots up must come down.
Why do they call this a word processor?

It’s simple, ... you’ve seen what food proc-
essors do to food, right?

BITS & BYTES
WORD SEARCH SOLUTION
U I R
A P P L E I P O D
I I M
D L N A X
G N O M E I
D D E L E C
A R M E
R O O S X
P I P R M
R A I D Y E L P
The Internet: where men are men, women are

men, and children are FBI agents.
A printer consists of three main parts: the

case, the jammed paper tray and the blink-
ing red light.

BITS & BYTES
TECH CROSSWORD SOLUTION

BITS & BYTES
WEB2.0 CROSSWORD SOLUTION

BITS & BYTES
GAMING CROSSWORD SOLUTION

DON’T MISS OUT ON THE FUN
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SECTION NAME

1 | April 2010 mini

And you could

1 | April 2010 mini

mini 2 | April 2010

mini 4 | April 2010

E ver wondered where the ubiq-

T he ﬁrst 1 GB hard drive was sold in 1950s, weighed

5 | April 2010 mini

N amed after the McIntosh variety of Apples, the

A ccording to the UNEP

mini 6 | April 2010

I t’s surprising but Ethernet is a

A study by Dell some time

A lthough the iPod started

7 | April 2010 mini

T he most expensive laptop in the world costs a whop-

C o-founder of Intel Gordon Moore is widely known

mini 8 | April 2010

The very ﬁrst issue of Digit

9 | April 2010 mini

B efore founding Microsoft, Bill

I BM holds the record for

mini 10 | April 2010

L enovo stands for “new legend”. It’s an amalgama-

T he DVORAK keyboard is said to be at least 70%

11 | April 2010 mini

mini 12 | April 2010

H ere’s an interesting computing easter egg: Type

E ver wondered what browser

13 | April 2010 mini

mini 14 | April 2010

I n all the years since the invention of the compu-

A ccording to a BBC report, the Creation of a desktop

A nother Easter Egg for you: Open notepad in XP and

15 | April 2010 mini

R ecycles.Org is a website that can match you up with

A n interesting Google post talks about the use of

mini 16 | April 2010

A ccording to a study paper

T he QWERTY keyboard was

17 | April 2010 mini

T he name ‘worm’ appeared in the

A pple based their Lisa (later

mini 18 | April 2010

E stimates suggest as much as 50 percent of the

A ll the three founders of Apple Inc - Steve Jobs,

19 | April 2010 mini

C onsider this carefully: The

W hen the Science Museum in London, UK, built a

T he stair-step effect that

The ultimate gift idea for

mini 20 | April 2010

21 | April 2010 mini

T he inventor of the scanner is Robert S. Ledley, who

T he first patent for the

P ossibly, the ﬁrst known exam-

W hen the CD was being de-

mini 22 | April 2010

23 | April 2010 mini

mini 24 | April 2010

A CD-RW disk can, in general, be-written about a

W hen desktop scan-

C D-ROM XA (Compact Disk-read-only memory, ex-