Facts and Trivia Pot : 1

Here are some Facts and Trivia collected by me since last few months

     

    Named 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.

    IBM holds the record for the most number of patents held by any company or individual in the world. An astounding 29,021 patents in the last 12 years!

     

    Lenovo stands for “new legend”. It’s an amalgamation of the words “Le” for legend and “novo” for new.

     

    According to a study paper on ResourceSaver.org,

One metric ton of electronic scrap from personal computers could get you more gold than that recovered from 17 tons of gold ore!

     

    Grace Hopper, a woman Admiral in the navy, was the inventor of COBOL. Admiral Hopper wrote COBOL to be a programming language for general business use. It was supposed to be easier to understand than either Fortran or assembly language.

     

    Estimates 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.

     

    The world’s most widely used operating system, Windows,  was originally named interface manager.

     

    Alexander Graham Bell originally wanted the greeting for the telephone to be “Ahoy” but Thomas Edison voted for “Hello,” a word he coined in 1877.

     

    A ‘blue-bomb’ is a technique for causing the Windows operating system of someone you are communicating with to crash.

   

    Most intercontinental Internet traffic passes through underwater fibre optic cables. The first such layout was across the Atlantic, in 1988.

     

    The idea of Bluetooth technology was born in 1994. The name Bluetooth is derived from a Danish Viking King, Harald Blatand - translated as Bluetooth in English - who lived in the latter part of the 10th century. Blatand united and controlled Denmark and Norway, hence the inspiration for the name, as in ‘uniting devices through Bluetooth’.

     

    Programs that are small and un-useful, but demonstrate a point, are called ‘Noddy’ programs. Noddy programs are often written by people learning a new language or system. The archetypal noddy program is the “hello world” program, which is simply a program that outputs the phrase. In North America, this might be called a ‘Mickey Mouse’ program.

     

    Stinger was the codename Microsoft used for its smart phone platform that was unveiled in 2001, now called Windows Mobile.

     

    The Palm OS fits in less than 100K, which is less than one per cent the size of Windows 98 or the Mac OS.

     

    LISP is a programming language written in LISP itself. When you define functions in LISP, the entire language gets modified.