Amazing Facts

Some amazing fatcs of the computing world:

• The C language was created by Dennis Ritchie. It was codenamed “Cool” and is the root of the most popular programming languages.
• A Vulcan Nerve Pinch is any uncomfortable key combination like Ctrl- Alt- Delete. Ctrl-Alt-Delete is also referred to as the three finger salute.
• Apache web server’s name has originated from “A patchy” Server.
• Email address or the @ sign was invented by Ray Tomlinson. His Email address was tomlinsen@bbc-tenexa.com.
• News.google.com was developed by an Indian called Krishna Bharat.
• A nibble is 4 bits.
• Microsoft licensed the Quick and Dirty Operating System from Tim Paterson’s Seattle Computer Products in order to sell it to IBM as the standard Operating System for the IBM PC.
• Co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak, before founding Apple worked at Hewlett-Packard and designed video games for Atari.
• Co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, owns his own basketball team called Portland Trailblazers although he doesn’t have any current post at Microsoft.
• AT&T stand for American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation and was founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce.
• Azim Premji’s company WIPRO stands for Western India Vegetable Products Limited.
• The first killer application was the Visicalc.
• NCSA Mosaic was the first Graphical Web Browser.
• Unit of mouse movement is called Mickey.
• Peter Norton’s (of Norton antivirus fame) Programmer’s Guide to the IBM PC is also known as the Pink Shirt book as Norton is wearing a pink shirt on its cover.
• Silicon Graphics International has created the special effects for movies such as Forrest Gump, The Flintstones and The Mask.
• The four ghosts in the game Pacman are called Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde.
• Bob Metcalfe is the inventor of Ethernet and the founder of 3com.
• The program that is always running on an Operating System is called the Kernel.
• Kevin Mitnick, who is a very famous hacker, has founded the company Defensive Thinking.
• The term Artificial Intelligence was coined by John McCarthy.
• The @ sign is referred to as the little mouse by the Chinese, an elephant’s trunk by the Danes and Swedes, a spider monkey by the Germans, a snail by the Italians and is pronounced as strudels by the Israelis.
• The game Tetris was created by Alexey Pajitnov.
• UNIX was created by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and is a pun on Multics.
• Visicalc was created by Dan Bricklin and Rob Frankston.
• Raphael, Gabriel and Michael are the names of the Vatican city servers.
• Windows 95 was released under the sea in a submarine to show how life would be without “windows”.
• Ridley Scott directed the Apple ad “1984” which was based on the novel of the same name by George Orwell.
• Amazon’s search engine is A9.
• Amazon.com was started by Jeff Bezos whose surname is Spanish for “kisses”.
• Pyra Labs created Blogger.com which was bought by Google.
• SUN as in Sun Microsystems stands for Stanford University Network.
• Cisco’s logo has been taken from the Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco.
• IBM’s PC division was taken over by Lenovo, which is called “The Great Wall of China”.
• Hotmail was coined by inserting vowels between HTML.
• GNU is recursive for GNU’s Not Unix.
• Linus Torvalds works in OSDL (Open Source Developer’s Lab).
• Nintendo means “leave luck to heaven” in Japanese.
• In 1982, the computer was Time’s Magazine’s Man of the Year.
• Microsoft’s building is called Outlook.
• Vinod Dham is the father of Pentium.
• Toy Story was the first full-length computer animated movie.
• IEEE 1394 is codename for Fire wire.
• Nero is named after the king Nero who was playing the fiddle while Rome was burning.
• “Robot” word was coined from the Czech word for “drudgery”.
• The mascot for Linux is a penguin called Tux.
• An “Angry Fruit Salad” refers to a badly designed GUI.
• Symbolics.com was the first domain name.
• Yahoo stands for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle and was earlier called “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”.
• PS3’s chip is called “Cell”.
• The iPod was designed by Jonathan Ive.
• Al Gore is the self-proclaimed “Father of the Internet”.
• The Windows 95 theme song was the Rolling Stone’s “Start me up”.
• Brian Eno composed the startup tune for Windows.
• Larry Ellison, who is the creator of Oracle owns a yacht called “Sayonara”.
• It was rumored that Microsoft was going to buy out the Roman Catholic Church.
• “Chicago” was the codename of Windows 95, “Memphis” was the codename of Windows 98, “Whistler” was the codename of Windows XP and now “Longhorn” i.e. Windows Vista.