digit mini. april 2010
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Amazing mini information from the world of computing to the arcane nuances of WWWTRANSCRIPT
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1 | April 2010 mini
DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A
Just log on tothinkdigit.com/idols
And you couldbecome a partof Digit’shistory!
HURRY!Contest closesApril 30, 2010
1 | April 2010 mini
D o you call your-self a geek? Did
you know that Te-tris (the game) was the fi rst software to cross the iron curtain after the cold war?
This book, which will be every self-respecting geek’s pocket companion, has this and hun-dreds of other tech facts, quotes, mind games, Digit trivia and more. You will also enjoy sharing it all with your friends.
We cover amaz-ing facts from the world of Computing to the arcane nu-ances of the WWW. The Gaming section will have you remi-niscing about Mario,
while Tech-Firsts will take you on a journey interspersed with milestones in tech history. If this isn’t enough, you can ex-ercise your grey cells with our custom-made crosswords and word jumbles, or just trip out on the mind boggling opti-cal illusions.
The most special thing about this ex-clusive edition of Digit Mini is that it’s for our loyal subscribers only. This book will not be available on news stands.
Keep reading and expecting more from Digit, your technol-ogy navigator.
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© 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 2010Free with Digit. Not to be sold separately. If you have paid separately for this book, please email the editor at [email protected] along with details of location of purchase, for appropriate action.
2 | April 2010mini
3 | April 2010 mini
INTRODUCTION
01
COMPUTING
05
TECH FIRSTS
39
WWW
61
GAMING
98
BITS & BYTES
123
CONTENTS
4 | April 2010mini
First DIGIT Anniversary issue
5 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini5 | April 2010
Ever 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
The fi rst 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!
COMPUTING
mini
6 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
The fi rst Apple II computers that went on sale in
1977 had 1MHz processor speed and 4kB of RAM
Named after the McIntosh variety of Apples, the
fi rst Macintosh was released in 1984. It was the
fi rst commercially successful personal computer to
have a graphical user interface and a mouse
According to the UNEP
(United Nations Environ-
mental Programme), each
year, the
world gener-
ates 20 mil-
lion to 50
million metric
tons of e-
waste
You’ve heard of computer
bugs right? Minor glitches
in code that hamper smooth
operation. But in 1947, when
a computer (Harvard Mark 1)
was running a test of it’s mul-
tiplier and adder function engi-
neers noticed something was
“I knew then (in 1970) that a 4-kbyte mini-
computer would cost as much as a
house. So I rea-soned that after
college, I’d have to live cheaply in an
apartment and put all my money into owning a compu-
ter.” [Apple co founder
Steve Wozniak]
stupid quotes
7 | April 2010
COMPUTING
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wrong despite rechecking eve-
rything. On further investigation
engineers found a moth in Panel
F, Relay #70 of the system. The
moth was trapped, removed and
taped into the computer’s log-
book with the words: “fi rst actual
case of a bug being found.”
It’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 !
Although 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
did Youknow?
About 85% of microwave radia-tion emitted by a cellphone is absorbed by your head.
8 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
The worst MS-DOS virus ever,
Michelangelo (1991) was so
named because it activated itself
on March 6, the birth day of the
famous renaissance painter. The
virus attacked the boot sector of
hard drives and any fl oppy drive
inserted into a computer. Upon
activation it destroyed data.
The 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.
Co-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.
did Youknow?
According to re-search by Sprint, about 2/3rds of cellphone users use their back-lights as torches.
9 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
The very fi rst issue of Digit
10 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
In 1995, he updated his predic-
tion to once every two years. In
our recent interaction with con-
sulting fi rm Deloitte, they predict-
ed the axiom will hold true for the
coming years.
Before founding Microsoft, Bill
Gates was apparently count-
ing cars. His fi rst business was Traf-O-Data, a company
that read raw data from roadway traffi c counters to
create meaningful reports for
traffi c controllers.
Contrary to popular belief
Apple wasn’t started in
a garage, it was started in a
bedroom at 11161 Crist Drive
in Los Altos.
IBM holds the record for
the most number of pat-
ents held by any company
or individual in the world. An
astounding 29,021 patents in
the last 12 years !
triv!aMath
A rude pick up line
for math geeks. The
question mark after the
answer is what makes it
rude. Solve the equation
to fi nd out how.
11 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
In the 1950s computers were
commonly referred to as
“electronic brains.”
The Burroughs B-5000 is re-
garded as probably the most
advanced computer of it’s time.
Designed back in 1961 comput-
ers of today such as the Unisys
ClearPath MCP machines, still
use its design principles.
Lenovo stands for “new legend”. It’s an amalgama-
tion of the words “Le” for legend and “novo” for new.
The DVORAK keyboard is said to be at least 70%
more effi cient than a QWERTY keyboard.
did Youknow?
South Korean teenagers on average text an astounding 200,000 times a year. That is 60.1 messages EVERY day
12 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
This is known as the Hermann-grid illusion, and
experts don’t have an explanation for the dark
spots that appear in the grid.
13 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
Apple too had some
fl op 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 landfi ll in Logan,
Utah, in order to receive a tax write-off on the unsold
inventory.
Here’s an interesting computing easter egg: Type
=rand(200,99) into Microsoft Word and watch as
your document fi lls up with random text!
Ever wondered what browser
safe colors are? There are
certain colours that are rendered
the same way on both PC and
Mac. They are totally 216 colors
in all.
It is impossible to create a
folder with the name “Con” or
“con” on any Microsoft operating
system
did Youknow?
The cellphone is actually a very complicated radio that com-municates with the cell tower in the area.
14 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
First DIGIT Zero1 Awards
15 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
Intel’s fi rst microprocessor the
4004 was originally meant to
be a pocket calculator
Did you know that most of the
virus writers work for organ-
ised crime syndicates. And many
of these are controlled from eastern European countries.
In all the years since the invention of the compu-
ter, none can take an input from a telegraph key in
morse code
According 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.
Another 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.
did Youknow?
130 million cell phones each year go into retire-ment
16 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
In November 2004,
Blue Gene posted a
new record 70.72 Tera-
fl ops, or trillions of fl oat-
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.
Recycles.Org is a website that can match you up with
nonprofi t agencies that use old equipment. Freecy-
cle.org is another network with a few India chapters.
An 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 effi cient process-
17 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
ing and information storage.
To consider an example given
by Google, an average compu-
ter requires 500,000 peeks to
fi nd a particular object hidden
in one of a million drawers on
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.
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 tonnes
of gold ore!
The 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
triv!aOskar’s Cube has a maze
on each of the six sides
of the cube and a six-
pronged brass star going
through all of them. The
objective of the game is
to pass the brass star
through all the mazes
and get it out. Its now
available as an iPhone
app called Amazing
Cube Maze.
Math
18 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
next to each other. It is widely
believed that the keyboard was
designed to slow down typists,
which is not true.
Grace Hopper, a woman
Admiral in the navy, was
the inventor of COBOL. Admi-
ral Hopper wrote COBOL to be
a programming language for
general business use. It was
supposed to be easier to un-
derstand than either Fortran
or assembly language.
The name ‘worm’ appeared in the
1970 movie ‘Shockwave Rider’ to
describe a program that propagates
itself through a computer network.
Apple 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.
“A bit of tolerance is worth a mega-byte of fl aming”
[Henry Spencer, Canadian computer
programmer and author of The 10
Commandments for C Programmers]
stupid quotes
19 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
Now for some personal computing with this Sudoku
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.
All the three founders of Apple Inc - Steve Jobs,
Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne – worked at Atari
before founding Apple.
20 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
The worlds most widely used
operating system, Windows,
was originally named interface
manager.
Consider this carefully: The
Macintosh Business Unit, a
division of Microsoft, is the larg-
est software developer for long
term rivals Apple. It’s latest re-
lease is Offi ce 2011 for Mac.
When the Science Museum in London, UK, built a
working replica of the Babbage machine, using the
materials and work methods
available at Babbage’s time.
It worked just as Charles
Babbage had intended.
The stair-step effect that
can be seen in diago-
nal lines of some computer
graphics is called ‘the jaggies’.
George J. Laurer is con-
sidered the invetor of
the UPC or Uniform Product
did Youknow?
The annual revenue for the telephone indus-try is $210 billion, almost 8 times that of television and 23 times the revenue of radio.
triv!aMath
The ultimate gift idea for
math geeks – The Geek
Clock, available online
21 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
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
� The portable media player that redefi ned
the product category
� The smallest discrete component of an
image
� Graphical User Interface for Linux users
� Short for electrical
� Gigabytes, Megabytes, Kilobytes – what is
it?
� The mobile operating system from Google
� Defence Advanced Research Projects
Agency
� A Google acquisition that rhymes with help
� Short for upload
� An Internet utility used to check the connec-
tion with another site
� A standard used by consumer electronics to
allow entertainment devices to interact with
each other over a home network
� Redundant Array of Independent Disks
� DDR, DDR3 are types of?
� Intellectual Property Rights
� A famous internet browser
� Internal combustion engine
� Extensible markup language
� Macs latest operating system
WORD SEARCH
22 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
Code, invented in 1973. The UPC symbol set for bar-
code recognition is still used in the USA.
The 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 fi rst
to do medical imaging and
three-dimensional recon-
structions.
The 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.
Possibly, the fi rst known exam-
ple of biometrics in practise
was a form of fi nger printing be-
ing used in China in the 14th cen-
tury, as reported by explorer Joao
de Barros of Portugal
When the CD was being de-
signed, Sony and Philips
were instrumental in deciding
how long each CD could play.
23 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
The Digit 2009 collector’s edition was fully sold
out in record time
24 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was
used as a standard, the perform-
ance of which lasted for 74 min-
utes.
When Win-
dows 3.1
was launched,
3 million copies
were sold in the
fi rst two months.
Windows 95 can offi cially run
on a 386DX at 20MHz with
just 4MB of RAM.
The Japanese
version of MS
Offi ce has a charac-
ter you can’t fi nd in
any other version.
The ‘Offi ce Lady’ is a virtual as-
sistant that bows and serves tea.
The Windows 95/98 logos
were created with Freehand on a Macintosh
did Youknow?
Your mobile bat-tery is very low, you are expecting an important call and you don’t have a charger. Many Nokia phones come with a reserve battery. To activate the battery, key-in *3370# your cell will restart with this reserve and your instrument will show a 50% increase in bat-tery. This reserve will get charged when you charge your mobile next time.
25 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
David Bradley wrote the code
for the [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Del]
key sequence.
The name Epson for the popu-
lar brand of printers was
coined when the subsequent
models of their fi rst printer ‘Elec-
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.
When desktop scan-
ners were fi rst intro-
duced, many manufactur-
ers used fl orescent bulbs as light sources.
CD-ROM XA (Compact Disk-read-only memory, ex-
tended architecture) is a modifi cation of CD-ROM that
defi nes two new types of sectors that enable it to read and
display data, graphics, video, and audio at the same time.
did Youknow?
The original name of the telephone was the harmonic telegraph.
26 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
The fi rst optical data storage disk, developed by
Philips, had 60 times the capacity of a 5.25 inch
fl oppy disk.
Though 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.
WinPad 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 fi gure out how to squeeze
a variant of Windows into an affordable handheld size.
MS-DOS was a rough imitation of CP/M, one of the
fi rst portable operating systems. ‘Portable’ here
means that the OS could run on different hardware.
Finger’ is an Internet tool for locating people on oth-
er sites. It gives access to non-personally identifi -
able information.
27 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
The term ‘petabit’ is used in
discussing possible volumes
of data traffi c per second in a
large network.
RDF (Resource Defi nition
Framework) is a set of rules for
creating descriptions of information
available on the World Wide Web.
SOAP (Simple Object Access
Protocol) is a protocol for cli-
ent-server communication that
sends and receives information
‘on top of’ HTTP.
Wake-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.
did Youknow?
Alexander Gra-ham Bell origi-nally wanted the greeting for the telephone to be “Ahoy” but Thomas Edison voted for “Hello,” a word he coined in 1877.
28 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
Certifi cate Revocation List (CRL) is a method of us-
ing a public key infrastructure for maintaining ac-
cess to servers.
South Pacifi c Railroad laid down telegraph wires
across tracks to help railway stations keep in touch.
The high-speed data highways of the Internet are
called backbones. Sprint and AT&T own the major
backbones in the US.
Silver 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 fl exibility.
Most intercontinental Internet traffi c passes
through underwater fi bre-optic cables. The fi rst
such layout was across the
Atlantic, in 1988.
A typical fi bre-optic cable
fi ve thousandths of an
inch thick can carry up to 2.5
billion bits of data per sec-
ond, or 32,000 simultaneous
telephone calls.
29 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
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’.
Chuq Von Rospach of Apple Com-
puter, circa 1983, coined the word ‘Netiquette’.
In 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.
Programs 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.
30 | April 2010
COMPUTING
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ULSI stands for Ultra Large
Scale Integration, used in
microchips with over one million
transistors.
A fat Mac application is an ap-
plication program for the
Macintosh computer that works
on a Mac running on a Motorola 68000 series chip.
FC-PGA (Flip Chip-Pin Grid Array) is a microchip design
developed by Intel for its faster microprocessors.
VisiCalc, invented in 1979, was the fi rst spreadsheet
program available for computers.
IBM was incorporated in 1911 under the name Com-
puting-Tabulating-Recording Company.
Intel’s Flying Pentium Ads and
the ‘Intel Inside’ logo were
made on an Apple Macintosh.
The computing for the Pioneer
10 spacecraft was done by the
Intel 4004 microprocessor.
did Youknow?
The Emergency Number world-wide for Mo-biles 112.
31 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
In 1938, Claude Shannon fi rst showed that electronic
switching circuits could perform logical operations.
The 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.
Andrew Grove, former Chairman, Intel Corporation,
was fl ooded with over 120 names to choose from
for its latest processor. He fi nally settled on ‘Pentium’.
Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor and Federico Faggin designed
the Pentium Chip that was launched on March 22,
1993.
Intel’s code name for its effort to make the one GHz
microprocessor was codenamed Project Foster.
Intel’s project on the fi rst processor to use the new
64-bit architecture was under the code name Merced.
32 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
If you happened to open up the
case of the original Macintosh,
you would fi nd 47 signatures, one
for each member of Apple’s Mac-
intosh division as of 1982.
Intel 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.
The fi rst 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.
The Comptometer was invented
by Dorr Felt. IT was the fi rst
entirely keyboard operated calcu-
lating machine - a practical adding
and listing machine.
The Pentium 4 runs code about
5,000 times faster than the
8088.
33 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
Wintel computers, PCs
with an Intel processor
and running a Windows oper-
ating system, account for 80
percent of PCs in use today.
The fi rst microprocessor to make a real splash in the
market was the Intel 8088, introduced in 1979 and
incorporated into the IBM PC.
Hewlett Packard’s fi rst order, for eight oscillators,
came from Walt Disney, while he was making the
fi lm Fantasia in 1940.
Hewlett Packard introduced the
mopier in 1996, a printer that
offers a low-cost, high-quality alter-
native to photocopying.
In 1984, Apple computer in-
troduced the Apple IIc model
laptop, which had an internal 5.25-
inch floppy drive.
The Biztalk Server is a Microsoft Product. It unites
enterprise application integration (EAI) and b2b in-
tegration into a single product.
34 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
Stinger was the codename Microsoft used for its
smartphone platform that was unveiled in 2001,
now called Windows
Mobile.
PROM (Program-
mable Read Only
Memory) is memory
programmed at the
time of manufacturing.
The 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 fl ies by
A hacker with benign intentions
is called a ‘white hat’
Windows ME was the operat-
ing system that started the
technology called System File
Protection that prevented appli-
cations overwriting key system
fi les.
did Youknow?
Recycling 100 million phones would recover 3.4 metric tons of gold—gold that would not have to be mined.
35 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
Stinger was the codename
Microsoft used for its smart
phone platform that was unveiled
back in 2001.
The typical computer CRT
monitor boosts the voltage to
30,000 volts in parts of the cir-
cuitry
The Palm OS fi ts in less than
100K, which is less than one
per cent the size of Windows 98 or the Mac OS.
The 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.
LISP is a programming language written in LISP it-
self. When you defi ne functions in LISP, the entire
language gets modifi ed.
In 1995, Iomega Corp
went from $3.5 a
share to $48.63 for a gain
did Youknow?
The fi rst product to have a bar code on its pack-age was Wrigleys chewing gum.
36 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
of 1396 per cent. This made it the company to have
the greatest percentage gain of all NASFAQ high-tech
stocks ever. Iomega.jpg
The 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.
ICQ was the fi rst instant
messenger program, and
that’s notable because it’s still
running, although it’s been
bought by AOL.
HDTV made its debut in
1989 in Japan
Sony’s VAIO stands for ‘Video Audio Integrated Op-
eration’
Infosys was the fi rst Indian company to release its
annual report in CD-ROM format.
Stewardesses – the longest word you can type with
your left hand using the usual two-handed typing
method.
37 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
In computer slang, an ordinary, postal mail is called
snail mail.
Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the
fi rst subscriber to India’s fi rst private ISP, Satyam
Infoway.
The fi rst fl y-by-wire test fl ight was held in 1972 on a
NASA F-8 test plane. The fi rst passenger aircraft to
do so was the Airbus 320 launched in 1988.
38 | April 2010
COMPUTING
mini
Second DIGIT Anniversary issue
mini39 | April 2010
The fi rst 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.
The silicon transistor, that transformed the history
of computers forever, was invented by John Bar-
TECH FIRSTS
mini
40 | April 2010
TECH FIRSTS
mini
deen, Walter Brattain and Wiliam
Shockley in 1947.
1951 saw the fi rst commercial
computer – the UNIVAC in-
vented by John Presper Eckert
and John W. Mauchly
The fi rst virus to use the lure
of social engineering did it
though a digital picture of famous
Sports celebrity Anna Kournik-
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.
The fi rst success-
ful high level pro-
gramming language,
IBM FORTRAN was
developed in 1954.
The Stanford Research Institute, Bank of America,
and General Electric developed MICR (magnetic ink
did Youknow?
Google’s search engine alone leaves behind a carbon footprint of 200 tons of CO2 every day. The footprint of a single search is 0.2g of CO2.
41 | April 2010
TECH FIRSTS
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character recognition) used in
banker’s cheques in 1955
Boeing was reportedly the
fi rst company to detect
the Y2K glitch way back in
1993
The integrated circuit was
invented by Jack Kilby
and Robert Noyce in 1958
In the early 1800s, a French
silk weaver called Joseph-
Marie Jacquard invented a
way of automatically control-
ling the warp and weft threads
on a silk loom by recording
patterns of holes in a string
of cards. This was the world’s
fi rst ‘program’
On April 3, 1973, Martin
Cooper made the fi rst cell
phone call outside research
labs and company facilities.
A refund for defective software
might be nice, except it would
bankrupt the entire software
industry in the fi rst year” [Andrew S. Tanenbaum, pro-fessor and author
of MINIX]
stupid quotes
triv!aMath
14th March is celebrated
as the Pi Day worldwide
as the date in the month/
day format comes to
3/14 which corresponds
to 3.14 the approxima-
tion upto two decimal
places of Pi (22/7)
42 | April 2010
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The Arpanet, predecessor to today’s internet was de-
veloped in 1969.
Sasser was the fi rst mass spread worm virus that
didn’t need to utilise email for delivery. Globally,
Sasser’s effects were devastating. It grounded aircraft,
SUDOKU
43 | April 2010
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blocked satellite communica-
tions and closed down banks. In
May 2004, an 18 year-old German
computer science student was ar-
rested for authoring the virus.
ENIAC, the fi rst electronic
computer that appeared over
50 years ago was about 80 feet
long, weighed 30 tons, and had
17,000 tubes. A desktop com-
puter today can store a million
times more information than an ENIAC, and is 50,000
times faster.
The fi rst dynamic RAM chip, Intel 1103 Computer
Memory was invented in 1970
The world’s microprocessor, the Intel 4004 was in-
vented by Faggin, Hoff and Mazor in 1971.
The good old fl oppy disk (fl oppy for its fl exibility) was
invented by Alan Shugart and IBM in 1971
The Ethernet computer network was invented by
Robert Metcalfe and Xerox in 1973
did Youknow?
By 2001, e-waste already ac-counted for 70 percent of the heavy metals and 40 percent of the lead in U.S. landfi lls.
44 | April 2010
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1976-77 saw the fi rst consumer computers - Apple I,
II, TRS-80 and Commodore Pet Computers
Spreadsheets fi rst appeared
with the VisiCalc developed
by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frank-
ston in 1978
The fi rst word processors ap-
peared a year after spread-
sheets in 1979 with Seymour
Rubenstein and Rob Barnaby’s
WordStar
Microsoft’s MS DOS operating system was devel-
oped in 1981
The fi rst 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
fl oppy disk and displayed a short poem beginning “Elk
Cloner: The program with a personality.”
IBM is known for several tech fi rsts. Here’s some of
them: Magnetic storage (1955), DRAM - dynamic
random access memory (1962) Superconductivity
(1987)
did Youknow?
23% of all pho-tocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopy-ing their butts.
45 | April 2010
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The fi rst 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.
In 60 AD, Heron of Alexandria set up a machine that
could follow a series of instructions, in effect coming
up with the fi rst program.
In 1200 AD, an Arab clockmaker
by the name of Al-Jazari went
about creating the fi rst 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.
The classical Indian mathema-
tician Pingala was the fi rst to
describe the binary number system
way back in 300 BC.
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Differential gears used in an-
tiquity from Ionia, to Greece,
to China were the fi rst devices
used to compute time, and astro-
nomical movements.
Obscure theoretical math-
ematician George Boole’s
work in the 1840s were instru-
mental a century and a half later
in binary programming. He was
the fi rst to develop binary algebra.
Computer’s were nei-
ther real time nor in-
teractive, in a sense “live”
till 1951, when MIT stu-
dents crafted the Whirl-
wind.
The fi rst computer
game was developed
at MIT and was called
spacewar! The game
even had realistic star
charts. You can play the
did Youknow?
Firms in devel-oped countries currently ac-count for 96% of royalties from technology patents, or $71 billion a year.
47 | April 2010
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original game in a Java emu-
lator for the original machine
at http://spacewar.oversigma.
com.
In June 1980, The VIC-20
became the fi rst compu-
ter to sell over a million units.
It just had 3.5 KB of usable
memory.
The fi rst 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 fi rst personal computer with
a GUI.
Multitasking was something that computers did not
have till the Commodore Amiga came out in 1985.
The fi rst 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.
The Russian satellite Sputnik 1 was the fi rst to make
it to space. It maintained a speed of 29,000 kmph
The only le-gitimate use of a computer is
to play games – [Eugene Jarvis,
game designer and programmer]
stupid quotes
48 | April 2010
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and was in orbit for 22 days be-
fore burning up during re-entry.
The fi rst digital camera was
designed by a Kodak engineer
by the name of Steven Sasson. It
weight 3.6 kg and was the size of
a toaster.
Napster was the fi rst P2P fi le
sharing network and it was only launched in 1999.
The fi rst modem was made in 1962 by Bell; it was
called the Bell 103. The maximum speed achieved
was 300 bytes per second.
The fi rst 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
In 2000, Ericsson
gave a demo of
the fi rst bluetooth
phone, the T36 at
the CommunicAsia
festival.
did Youknow?
Wearing head-phones for just an hour will increase the bac-teria in your ear by 700 times.
49 | April 2010
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52nd street by Billy
Joel was the fi rst
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.
Money for Nothing
by the Dire Straits
was the fi rst music video to use computer generated
graphics in 1985.
Lynx was the fi rst web brows-
er to be released in 1993. Op-
era and Netscape followed soon
after, in 1994.
The fi rst object-oriented lan-
guage was Simula. It was de-
veloped by Kristen Nygaard ad Ole-Johan Dahl in the
mid 1960s.
The EDSAC ran its fi rst program on May 6, 1949. It
wasn’t the fi rst stored-program computer, but rath-
er, the fi rst practical one.
did Youknow?
The average per-son’s left hand does 56 per cent of the typing.
50 | April 2010
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The Nintendo 3DS, announced
in March 2010 is the fi rst 3D
handheld gaming device.
In December 1970, Gilbert Hy-
att fi led a patent application
entitled “Single Chip Integrated
Circuit Computer Architecture”,
the fi rst basic patent on the mi-
croprocessor.
In 1971, Intel launched the
world’s fi rst single-chip mi-
croprocessor, the Intel 4004.
The Pioneer 10 spacecraft used
the 4004 microprocessor.
did Youknow?
Vorbis is an open source audio compres-sion format. Audio encoding formats, such as MP3, VQF, and AAC. Vorbis fi les compress to a smaller size than MP3s. According to many, Vorbis fi le provides bet-ter sound quality.
51 | April 2010
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The fl oppy disk was invented
in 1971.
The fi rst commercial comput-
ers were sold in 1951.
The fi rst cellular phone com-
munication network was
launched in Japan, in 1979.
How many legs does the elephant have?
did Youknow?
For the fi rst time since 1996, TV sales in 2006 outpaced PC sales, according to the Consumer Electronics As-sociation
52 | April 2010
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Dr. Brent Townshend invented the 56K modem in
1996.
The Lehigh virus, was one of the fi rst fi le viruses back
in 1987 that infected command.com fi les
In 1998, the StrangeBrew virus became the fi rst to
infect Java fi les.
James Gosling created Java at Sun Microsystems in
1994. He came up with the name ‘Java’ while de-
bating over it at a coffee shop.
Hewlett Packard (HP) intro-
duced the mopier in 1996,
a printer that offers a low-cost,
high-quality alternative to pho-
tocopying.
In 1982, Andrew Fluegelman
created the fi rst ever share-
ware, known as PC-Talk. It was a
communications software.
Sony introduced the 3.5-inch
fl oppy in 1981.
did Youknow?
Almost 150 bil-lion spam mails are sent out eve-ryday, a carbon footprint of 17 million tons of CO2 every year. One in 12 million spam mails are replied to.
53 | April 2010
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The Babylonians were the
fi rst to come up with Al-
gorithms for mathematical
operations like factorization of
numbers, in 1600 BC.
Optical chips were fi rst
introduced in 1988, as
a faster way to make infor-
mation travel on processors.
However, they have not yet
managed to replace electric-
ity.
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
was fi rst introduced by
Netscape in 1994.
Id Quantique introduced commercial quantum cryp-
tography in 2004, with a quantum key distribution
service.
The GNU license was around since 1976, the GNU
Emacs were the fi rst machines to be release with
this license.
“Programming graphics in X is
like fi nding sqrt(pi) using Roman
numerals.” [Henry Spencer, Cana-dian computer
programmer and author of The 10
Commandments for C Program-
mers]
stupid quotes
54 | April 2010
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The Morris Worm is the fi rst worm to break into the
wild, and infect a large number of machines in 1988.
The fi rst DEFCON, an annual
conference of penetration
testers, security experts and
hackers was held for the fi rst
time in 1993. The original idea
of the conference was a send off
party to the bulletin boards.
In 1997, the RIAA started their fi rst crackdown on
“pirates” who shared .mp3 fi les. Many teenagers
lost their computers in the crackdown.
Although many teenagers were involved in hack-
ing before 2000, it was the year the fi rst underage
hacker was actually sent to jail. Jonathan James spent
time for Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He would
kill himself eight years later.
1981 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.
Jim Knopf is known as the ‘father of shareware’.
The fi rst shareware program was PC-FIle, in 1982,
did Youknow?
People view fi fteen billion videos online every month.
55 | April 2010
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which Knopf published under the pseudonym Jim But-
ton.
In 1966, Xerox invented the
Telecopier - the fi rst success-
ful fax machine.
The microprocessor was in-
vented in 1971. The creation
was considered a computer on a
chip.
George Boole published his
Mathematical Analysis of
Logic, inventing Boolean algebra
in 1854. This became the basis for computer design.
In 1983 Fred Cohen fi rst defi ned 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.”
Leonardo Da Vinci’s sketches of a mechanical cal-
culating device that used an elaborate assembly of
wheels and chains was the fi rst computing device to be
planned.
did Youknow?
On average, only 24 songs on each iPod are paid for directly. The rest are either illegally down-loaded or ripped from CDs
56 | April 2010
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First Digit Droolmaal: June 2001
57 | April 2010
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Hardly drool worthy anymore...
58 | April 2010
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Plasma displays that are so common these days,
were fi rst thought of long ago. The concept was
fi rst conceived in July 1964 at the University of Illinois.
The same is the case with the competing LCD tech-
nology. Shunsuke Kobayashi of Japan produced fi rst
defect-free LCD way back in 1972.
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
59 | April 2010
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ACROSS3. A completely useless button that
almost even sees but is never used
6. A 1337 key board layout that is
supposed to be seventy percent more
effi cient than the most widely used one
right now
9. Light amplifi cation by stimulated emis-
sion of radiation
11. This virus was designed to infect DOS
systems and like all boot sector viruses,
basically operated at the BIOS level
12. The fi rst domain name ever registered
13. The rudimentary telephone
DOWN1. Connections beneath the sea
2. Which PC manufacturer’s name is an amal-
gamation of the words Legend and New?
4. Three of these together will tell you where
you are
5. I am Shawn Fanning and I like to share
fi les
7. A 2001 virus that used the power of a
sports celebrity to spread across comput-
ers
8. First music on the go
10. Dots, dashes and scribbling on sand inspired
this technology used to represent data
60 | April 2010
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DIGIT 2007 Anniversary issue
mini61 | April 2010
Since 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.
Google earns 97per cent of its revenues from adver-
tising alone. This amounts to $20 billion.
WWW
mini
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Did you know that Goog-
le logs each search
queries into its systems to
enhance future searches
They 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.
Google has the largest network
of translators in the world,
this is needed for continuously
integrating searches and indexing
web pages into their engine
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.
Google makes small
changes on their products very often. They some-
times try a particular feature with a set of users from
did Youknow?
One million threads of fi ber optic cable can fi t in a tube 1/2” in diameter.
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a given network or region; for
example Excite@Home users
often get to see new features.
They aren’t told of this, just
presented with the new UI and
observed how they use it.
The infamous “I feel lucky”
is nearly never used. How-
ever, in trials it was found that
removing it would somehow
reduce the Google experience.
Users wanted it to be kept. It was like a comfort button.
When Google was founded, Brin and Page, the
founders tossed a coin to decide what position
they would take.
Notice the logos appear-
ing on your Google
homepage around major
events or holidays? This is
known as the Google Doo-
dle. The fi rst one was dedi-
cated to the Burning Man
festival in 1998. You can check out past Google doodles
at google.com/logos.
“There is no need for any individual to have a compu-
ter in their home.” [Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment
Corp, in 1977]
stupid quotes
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By July 2008, Google had in-
dexed an astounding 1 trillion
(1000000000000) pages on the
Internet.
Heard of Mentalplex? It was an
April fools joke that Google
could read peoples minds and
search the Internet for what they
were thinking of. The joke also in-
cluded broadband access wires
coming out from people’s toilet
bowls! Try it out @ http://www.
google.com/mentalplex/
Larry Page, the co founder of
Google once made an inkjet
printer out of Lego
blocks when he
was in college.
There are more
than 600 mil-
lion phones. Even
then, more than half the popula-
tion of the entire world hasn’t yet
made a phone call.
Across5. A confusing and
anthithetical term that is both global and local
6. Information added to a fi le that can be used to locate the document or resource on a world map
8. Search Engine Optimi-zation
10. A combination of two or more Web 2.0 services
12. A single update on a Twitter stream
Down1. A snippet of code that
can be embedded on many pages
2. Syndicated audio content delivered in the style of blogs
3. User generated content
4. The sum total of all blogs and blogging related activities
7. An online representa-tion of yourself, commonly on forums and social networkng sites
9. A mechanism that allows several web 2.0 and cloud services to interact with each other
11. A mechanism for verifying if a visitor is a human
C R O S S
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W O R D
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All three founders of YouTube,
Steve Chen, Chad Hurley
and Jawed Karim were work-
ing for Paypal when they started
YouTube.
Did you know that the domain
www.Youtube.com was reg-
istered on Valentines Day (Febru-
ary 14, 2005).
YouTube 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.
If Youtube was Hol-
lywood, they have
enough material to re-
lease 60,000 new fi lms
every week.
One of the biggest leaps in Google’s search engine
usage came about when they introduced their
much improved spell checker giving birth to the “Did
you mean…” feature. This instantly doubled their traffi c
did Youknow?
The busiest tel-ephone exchange was by BellSouth at the 1996 Olym-pic Games, where 100 billion bits of information were transmitted per second
67 | April 2010
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Bac
k th
en...
. Th
ink
dig
it.c
om
1.0
in
20
01
68 | April 2010
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The total amount of band-
width used by Youtube is
about the same as used by entire
Internet in 2000.
One needs over 1000 years
of time to watch all videos
on Youtube (but there will be bil-
lion of more videos uploaded on
Youtube by then).
Most popular category for uploaded videos is ‘Music’
having around 20per cent Youtube videos.
Gmail 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.
United States users upload most of YouTube videos
followed by UK. Americans are also the number-
one watchers of YouTube videos followed by Japan.
did Youknow?
More than a bil-lion transistors are manufac-tured... every second.
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Yest
erd
ay...
. Th
ink
dig
it.c
om
2.0
in
20
07..
..
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The fi rst 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.
There isn’t any restriction
for proper dress code in
the Google offi ces. This is to
ensure comfort and a produc-
tive working environment. So
one may dress up in pyjamas
or even as a superhero.
Tom 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
because he was young and would
know how young hackers thought.
His job was to help address secu-
rity fl aws in Gmail.
Google consists of over
450,000 servers, racked up
in clusters located in data centers
around the world.
did Youknow?
In 1999, new fi ber was being installed at a rate of 2800 miles or 4500 kilometers per hour!
71 | April 2010
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Tod
ay...
. Th
ink
dig
it.c
om
3.0
....
72 | April 2010
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The fi rst ever search engine
was called “Archie” and was
created way back in 1990 by a
Canadian student Alan Emtage.
In 2007, Google became the
most visited website with 700
million users. It beat the next
popular website, Microsoft.com
by over 200 million hits. In March
2010, Facebook overtook Google!
The 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.
The prime reason the Google home page is so bare, is
due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML
did Youknow?
It took a year to connect the fi rst line from New York to San Francisco. 14,000 miles of copper wire and 130,000 telephone poles were needed to link the country.
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Tom
orro
w...
Th
ink
dig
it.c
om
4.0
co
min
g s
oo
n t
o a
bro
ws
er
ne
ar
yo
u..
.
74 | April 2010
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and just wanted a quick interface.
In fact, the submit button was a
later addition and initially, hitting
the RETURN key was the only
way to burst Google into life.
Sweden has the highest per-
centage of its population i.e.
76.9 per cent hooked on to the In-
ternet. In contrast, the world av-
erage is 11.9 per cent and India has a poor 7.2 per cent
The Dilbert Zone was the
fi rst 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.
The 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.
Globally, about $1 trillion is spent annually on telecommunica-tions products and services.
did Youknow?
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The 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-
ternet. This move become the
subject of ridicule from the cyber
community in general
Did you know that www.sym-
bolics.com was the fi rst ever
domain name registered online?
According to a University of
Minnesota report, research-
ers estimate the volume of Inter-
net traffi c is growing at an annual
rate of 50 to 60 per cent.
The terms Internet and World
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
did Youknow?
The fi rst Touch Tone system, which used tones rather than pulses generated by rotary dials, was installed in Baltimore, US, in 1941. Touch Tone telephones were invented by the research team at Bell Systems.
76 | April 2010
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documents and other re-
sources, linked by hyperlinks
and URLs.
In February 2009, Twitter
had a monthly growth (of
users) of over 1300 per cent
- several times more than
Facebook.
The fi rst graphical Web browser to become truly pop-
ular was Marc Andreessen and Jamie Zawinski’s
NCSA Mosaic. It was the fi rst browser made available
for Windows, Mac and Unix X Windows System with the
fi rst version appearing in March 1993.
Datacenters 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.
The 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
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The typical Internet user
worldwide is young, male and
wealthy – a member of an elite
minority.
The average total cost of using
a local dialup Internet ac-
count for 20 hours a month in Af-
rica is about USD 60 a month and
USD 22 a month in the US. The
average African monthly salary is
less than USD 60.
Before 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
At the end of the 20th century, 90 per cent of data on
Africa was stored in Europe and the United States.
Facebook 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 traffi c measuring service.
did Youknow?
”hello” wasn’t always the fi rst thing said over the phone. The fi rst operating phone service was established in 1878 and the formal greeting back then was “ahoy”
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MySpace 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.
Mr Tomlinson was the fi rst 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.
Counting 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
that are updated regularly. When
it began observing sites through
the domain name system in 1995,
there were 18,000 web sites in
existence.
did Youknow?
The fi rst GPS satellite was launched in 1978
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On the Internet, a ‘bastion
host’ is the only host compu-
ter that a company allows to be
addressed directly from the pub-
lic network.
Around 1 per cent of the
world’s 650 million corpo-
rate e-mail accounts are plugged
into hardware and software that
forwards incoming messages to
a mobile device. And about
3.65 million of them use
a BlackBerry.
Almost 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.
Spam accounts for
over 60 per cent of all
email, according to Mes-
sageLabs. Google says
at least one third of all
Gmail servers are fi lled
with spam
did Youknow?
In Britain on January 1st 1985, the fi rst call on a mobile (cell) phone was made by Ernie Wise, comedian and one half of the famous duo Morecambe and Wise.
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Yahoo 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.
The fi rst Web browser was already capable of down-
loading and displaying movies, sounds and any fi le
type supported by the operating
system.
‘Carnivore’ is the Internet
surveillance system devel-
oped by the US Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI), who de-
veloped it to monitor the elec-
tronic transmissions of criminal
suspects.
Anthony Greco, aged 18, be-
came the fi rst person arrest-
ed for spim (unsolicited instant
messages) on February 21, 2005.
A NeXT computer used by Tim Berners-Lee was the
world’s fi rst Web server
did Youknow?
multiple inde-pendent tests have measured up to four times the radiation coming out of the earpiece of a cellular phone, than out of the antenna
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The fi rst web site
was built at CERN.
CERN is the French
acronym for European
Council for Nuclear Re-
search and is located at
Geneva, Switzerland.
The World Wide Web is the
most extensive implementa-
tion of hypertext but it is not the
only one. A computer help fi le is
actually a hypertext document.
The concept of stylesheets
was already in place when
the fi rst browser was released.
WorldWideWeb was pro-
grammed with Objective C
Hypertext is implemented
in the Web as links in the
browser window. Links are refer-
ences to text that the user wants
to access. When a link is clicked,
did Youknow?
GPS was origi-nally developed for military use. An executive de-cree in the 1980’s made it available to the general population. The development of small, cheap mi-croprocessors in the 1990’s led to the small, cheap GPS units you can buy today.
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the referenced text is displayed
or bought into focus.
The address of the world’s fi rst
web server is http://info.cern.
ch/ The URL of the fi rst web page
was http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hy-
pertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
Although this page is not hosted
anymore at CERN, a later version
of the page is posted at http://
www.w3.org/History/19921103hypertext/hypertext/
WWW/TheProject.html.
In December 1991, the fi rst 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.
Marc 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.
The fi rst browser that made the web
available to PC and Mac users was
did Youknow?
Shopping for a new HDTV? Plas-ma TVs consume far more energy than LCDs, and they waste it as heat energy.
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Mosaic. It was developed by
National Center for Super-
computing (NCSA) led by Marc
Andreessen in February, 1993.
Mosaic was one of the fi rst
graphical web browsers and
led to an explosion in web use.
April 30, 1993 is an impor-
tant date for the Web be-
cause on that day, CERN an-
nounced that anyone may use
WWW technology freely.
Microsoft released Inter-
net Explorer on 1995.
This event initiated the brows-
er wars. By bundling Internet
Explorer with the Windows
operating system, by 2002,
Internet Explorer became the
most dominant web browser
with a market share over 95
per cent.
It was in the Conference
Dinner in May 26, 1994
did Youknow?
The minimum number of satel-lites needed to show your position on the GPS device is 3. A signal from one GPS satellite will just tell you your distance from that particular satellite. If you know your ap-proximate latitude and longitude, you can fi gure out which point you’re at. Four satellites are necessary to ac-curately determine altitude. In general, the more GPS satel-lites your receiver can get a fi x on, the more accurate your location will be.
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where the fi rst Best of WWW
awards were given. It was by
pure coincidence that the jazz
band that played during the
awards was called “Wolfgang
and the Were Wolves”
Only 4 per cent of Arab
women use the Inter-
net. Moroccan women rep-
resent almost a third of
that fi gure.
As 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.
The 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
The fi rst White House web-
site was launched dur-
ing the Clinton-Gore admin-
“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5
tons.” [Popular
Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of
science, 1949]
stupid quotes
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istration on October 21, 1994.
Coincidentally, the site www.
whitehouse.com linked to a por-
nography web site.
Open source technology domi-
nates the web. The most
common software used for web-
serving is called LAMP standing
for the Linux operating system,
Apache web server, MySQL data-
base and PHP scripting language
The “www” part of a web site
(www.google.com) is optional
and is not required by any web
policy or standard.
Despite IPv4’s 4.3 billion
unique addresses, it is fore-
casted that by 2011, the address
space will be consumed. A newer
scheme called IPv6 is slowly re-
placing IPv4 in some countries.
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
did Youknow?
There are 21 active GPS satel-lites and 3 oper-ating spares. The GPS satellites orbit the earth at an altitude of 12,000 miles. They travel in one of six orbits, all inclined 55 degrees relative to the equator, and are spaced 60 degrees apart. Their orbital period is 12 hours. The full set of satellites became opera-tional in 1994.
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as of 2006 can be given 295
unique addresses.
YouTube’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.
The blue coloured links on a
web page is just a browser
default because way back on the
days when monitors only had 16
colours, blue was the darkest
colour that did not affect text
legibility.
All three letter word combi-
nations from aaa.com to zzz.
com are already registered as
domain names.
Around 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.
did Youknow?
SMS is being used by more people than the internet and it has twice the number of users than there are TV set owners. More people use SMS than have bank accounts!
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One million domain names are
registered every month.
According to AT&T vice presi-
dent Jim Cicconi, 8 hours of
video is uploaded into YouTube
every minute. This was on April
2008. On May 21, 2009, YouTube
received 20 hours of video con-
tent per minute.
Of the 13 million music fi les
available on the web, 52,000
tunes accounted for 80 per cent
of download.
By 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.
The 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
did Youknow?
The fi rst ever camera took 8 hours to take a photograph. It consisted of bitu-men (tar) over a metal plate. The exposed parts of the tar would harden and the soft part cleaned away.
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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 defi nitive answer
to simple questions like “How much is the cheapest air-
fare from New York to London next Thursday”?
In 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.
Naked women make up 80
per cent of all the pictures
on the internet.
The online population of Fa-
cebook, 250 million users
worldwide, and MySpace, which
had 100 million accounts by
2007, are bigger than the popu-
lations of many nations world-
wide. On April 2008, Facebook
overtook MySpace in terms of
monthly visits.
did Youknow?
After Microsoft purchased 2% of facebook for $30 million, it gained a value of $15 bil-lion in 2007
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It took the Web only 4 years to
reach 50 million users. Radio
took 38 years while TV made it in
13 years.
Amazon.com was formerly
known as Cadabra.com.
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 fi lm role for a
two-storey farm-
house Kipling, Sas-
katchewan.
Bit torrents, depending on location, are estimated to
consume 27 to 55 per cent of all internet bandwidth
as of February, 2009.
Domain registration was free until the National Sci-
ence Foundation decided to change this on Sep-
tember 14th, 1995.
did Youknow?
The chairman of IBM Thomas Watson infa-mously predicted that there was a total world market of only 5 computers!
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It is estimated that one of
every eight married couples
started by meeting online.
Lee Stein invented the fi rst on-
line electronic bank in 1994
entitled, “First Virtual Holdings”.
The Internet is roughly 35 per
cent English, 65 per cent non-
English with the Chinese at 14
per cent. Yet only 13 per cent of
world’s population i.e. 812 million
are Internet users as of Decem-
ber 2004. North America has the
highest continental concentration
with 70 per cent of the populace using the Internet.
Offi cial statistics in the UK
say that 29 per cent of
women have never used the
internet, but only 20 per cent
of men.
In 1995, Bob Metcalfe
coined the phrase ‘The Web
might be better than sex’.
did Youknow?
The fi rst coin op-erated machine ever designed was a holy-water dispenser that required a fi ve-drachma piece to operate. It was the brainchild of the Greek scien-tist Hero in the fi rst century AD.
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Iceland 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.
Employees 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.
Afghanistan has a com-
bined telephone pen-
etration of 3.4 per cent.
Someone is a victim
of a cybercrime every
10 seconds, and it is on
the rise.
The fi rst search engine for Gopher fi les was called
Veronica, created by the University of Nevada Sys-
tem Computing Services group.
The Electrohippies collective is an international
group of hactivists based in Oxfordshire, England.
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The fi rst Digit Web Awards back in the 2001 issue
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Lurking is to read through mailing lists or news
groups and get a feel of the topic before posting
one’s own messages.
The internet was called the ‘Galactic Network’ in
memos written by MIT’s JCR Licklider in 1962.
The fi rst internet worm was
created by Robert Morris, Jr,
and attacked more than 6,000
Internet hosts.
SRS stands for Shared Regis-
try Server which is the cen-
One 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.
did Youknow?
Hotwired was the fi rst Web site to feature a banner ad
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tral system for all accredited registrars to access, reg-
ister and control domain names.
The search engine Lycos
is named after Lycosidae
which is a latin name for the
wolf spider family
It is believed that Subhash Ghai’s fi lm Taal was the
fi rst Bollywood movie to be widely promoted on the
internet.
Rob Glasser’s company
Progressive Networks
launched the RealAudio
system on April 10, 1995.
Butler 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.
In Beijing, the internet community has coined the
word ‘Chortal’ as a shortened version of ‘Chinese
Portal’.
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Satyam Online became the fi rst private ISP in De-
cember 1998 to offer internet connections in India.
In 1946, the Merriam Webster defi ned a computer as
a person who tabulates numbers, acountant, actu-
ary, book keeper.
SUDOKU
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In 1969, Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA) went
online connecting four major US
universities. The idea was to have
a backup in case a military attack
destroyed conventional commu-
nication system.
The fi rst ever ISP was Com-
puServe which still exists un-
der AOL, Time Warner.
Jeff Bezos while starting his
business could not name his
website Cadabra due to copyright
issues. He later named it amazon.
com.
did Youknow?
The longest phone cable is a submarine cable called FLAG (Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe). It spans 16,800 miles from Japan to the United Kingdom and can carry 600,000 calls at a time.
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DIGIT 2008 Anniversary issue
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South Korea is the fi rst country in the world to have
opened a game addiction hotline. Korean offi cials
are terrifi ed 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 specifi cally
treat this “problem”
Amazingly, chromosome 7 of our genome has the
name “Sonic the Hedgehog” — famous SEGA mascot.
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In 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.
Marlon 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
somebody who sounded just like
him to do the job
Some numbers now! Of the
so called sixth generation
gaming platforms, there are 33.5
million Playstation 3s, 77 million
Nintendo Wiis, 125 million Nin-
tendo DS’, 55.9 million PSPs and
39 million Xbox 360s sold world-
wide. This is just about enough
did Youknow?
Inkjet print-ers print small micro dots on the printed material that are yellow in color and can tell the FBI your printer type.
GAMING
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to give every man, woman and
child in the United States and
Canada, a gaming console!
Atari took it’s name from
the Chinese game Go!. It
specifi cally refers to a situa-
tion where a stone or group of
stones is in a situation where it
can be captured by opponents.
Ironically, Atari found itself in
this situation when a French
company took it over recently.
Around 145 million people
play video games. The
worldwide average gamer is
28 years old.
The Dragon Quest series
was so popular in Japan in
the late 80s and the early 90s
that the company that made
it, Enix, was advised by Gov-
ernment offi cials to release
newer games in the series on
weekends so as to stop the
“Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the
question. NO is the answer.” – [Erik
Naggum, compu-ter programmer of SGML, Emacs, and
Lisp]
stupid quotes
triv!aMath
Fabrice Bellard used
a desktop computer to
calculate the mathemati-
cal constant pi to about
2.7 trillion digits, about
123 billion more than
the previous record. It
took a total of 131 days
to fi nish the task and this
version of pi takes over
a terabyte of hard disk
space to store.
GAMING
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massive amounts of ‘sick leaves’
that happened when the game
released on weekdays!
A PlayStation 3 Blu-ray disc
can hold up to 20 GB of data
or the equivalent of about 2000
Nintendo 64 game cartridges.
Sixteen 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.
The 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 butterfl ies.
The absurdly tough
shooting game, Ikaru-
ga, that was sold in Japan,
came with a disc recording
did Youknow?
A survey showed that 5% of all laptop users fall asleep in their beds mistakenly using their lap-tops as pillows
GAMING
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the country’s best players completing levels with non-
stop combos and beating bosses in astounding time.
Over 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.
The fi rst 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 muffl ed and gurgly.
Imagine a girl standing outside a house and knocking
on a window. The camera then moves in and shows
her horrifi ed 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.
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The fi rst coin-operated ‘com-
puter’ game was created in
1971 by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck.
It was called Galaxy Game and
the only unit ever built was in-
stalled at Stanford University in
September of that year. Appar-
ently, eager punters would en-
dure a one hour wait just to have
a go.
The 80’s arcade game Phoenix was the fi rst game
ever, to introduce the concept of end-level bosses.
The game had players shoot their way through an alien
mothership’s defences
Halo’s Master Chief, is the fi rst gaming character to
be given a wax statue by Madame Tussauds.
Designed by Ralph
Baer and released
in 1972, the Magnavox
Odyssey was the fi rst
videogame console
and the fi rst cartridge-
based system. It was
also the home of the
did Youknow?
“Switched-off” devices account for 40 percent of the energy consumed by electronics in an average home
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fi rst console light gun, called Shooting Gallery.
Released in November 1971 in the United States,
Computer Space was the fi rst commercially re-
leased coin-operated arcade game and is generally re-
garded as the fi rst commercially available video game.
It was created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, who
would later found Atari.
In 1988 Electronic Arts be-
came the fi rst major publisher
to release an ‘online’ multiplayer
game. Dan Bunten’s Modem
Wars allowed two players to sit
at their own computers and play
over a telephone line.
While games such as Doom,
Marathon, Quake, Duke
Nukem 3D and GoldenEye 007
may have defi ned the fi rst-person
shooter genre, the fi rst docu-
mented ‘fi rst-person shooter 3D
multiplayer networked game’ was
called Spasim (space + simulation
= Spasim). It appeared in 1974 and
could be played by up to 32 people.
did Youknow?
Contrary to the potrayal of lasers in many science fi ction movies, a laser beam would not be visible (at least to the naked eye) in the near vacuum of space as there would be insuf-fi cient matter in the environment to make it visible
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Atari’s fi rst arcade machines were built in an old
roller skating rink and assembled by - so the story
goes - pot-smoking students and hippies.
The fi rst name for Electronic Arts was actually Amazin’
Software, but company founder Trip Hawkins want-
ed the title to refl ect software as an art form, so it was
subsequently changed to Electronic Arts.
Wii is the fi rst Nintendo console to be sold outside of
Japan that doesn’t feature the company’s name
as part of the trademark.
The very fi rst gaming East-
er egg is thought to have
been tucked away in the 1979
Atari 2600 title, Adventure. By
carrying a hidden pixel, players
could access a hidden room
where the message “Created
by Warren Robinett” was dis-
played.
The fi rst name Atari founder
Nolan Bushnell intended
for the company was Syzygy,
Real men don’t use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of
the world make copies.” [Linus
Torvalds, creator of Linux Kernel]
stupid quotes
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an astronomical term used to de-
scribe the sun, moon and earth in
total eclipse.
The maximum score possible in
Pac-Man is 3,333,360.
UK actress Rhona Mitra was
the fi rst offi cial Lara Croft
model.
Atari Football, is the fi rst true sport-based video
game, there’s no argument that it was the fi rst ar-
cade cabinet to feature a ‘trak-ball’ interface, or that
the game featured the fi rst
programmed scrolling pitch.
The fi rst major movie
based on a video game
was the critically assassi-
nated Super Mario.
In the original arcade Don-
key Kong game, Mario
was called Jumpman and
he was a carpenter, not a
plumber.
did Youknow?
At the 2008 CES, Fujitsu showed a laptop PC whose outside plastic shell is 50 per-cent vegetable-based polymer alloy
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Michael Jackson, in some form or other, has ap-
peared in Sonic the Hedge-
hog 3, Ready 2 Rumble Round 2,
Space Channel 5 1 & 2, GTA: Vice
City and, obviously, Moonwalker.
FIFA 2001 is the fi rst and
only game to date to use a
“scratch and sniff” CD. The disc
smelt of turf.
The PSone was initially a
Nintendo console with a
partnership with Sony to de-
velop the electronics. When
Nintendo abandoned it, Sony
decided to continue and com-
plete the console anyway.
Spacewar was the fi rst sci-fi game. Students at MIT
created in 1961 and it lets users control spaceships
with missile fi ring capability.
The makers of The Sims tried languages such as
Ukranian, Tagalog and Navajo before fi xing on the
nonsensical ‘Simlish’ dialogue for the game, The Sims.
did Youknow?
In 2007, com-panies with an enviro-tech focus received $3.95 billion in venture funding, a 38 percent increase over 2006. IT asset recovery (selling refur-bished PCs)—is now a $6 billion–a-year business.
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Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft
was originally called Lau-
ra Cruz.
The English translation of
the Japanese word Nin-
tendo is “Leave luck to heav-
en”
Each of the cars in the racing
title Gran Turismo 4 took
around a month per developer
to create.
The Texas Instruments TI-83
calculator has more graph-
ics processing power than the
Commodore 64. Amazingly,
some basic C64 games can
even be programmed into it.
The Xbox was originally going
to be called the DirectX-box,
after Microsoft’s programming interface for Windows.
did Youknow?
While old CRT monitors use more energy to show white than black, LCDs spend slightly more energy to show black than white.
triv!aMath
The probability of life
evolving at random is
1040,000 to 1 as calculated
by the late astronomer
Sir Fred Hoyle.
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The Sims managed to spend
82 weeks within the UK’s top
ten sales chart.
Halo 2 earned the most in a
single day — $125 million in
a day, more than any movie in its
fi rst day of sale.
32 million of the 100 million Game Boys are in Japan,
44 million in America.
Early iterations of Nintendo’s
failed Virtual Boy console in-
cluded a gun you’d set vertical on a
fl at surface, which would project a
3D image into the air.
If, 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.
The violent racer Carmageddon
was released in the UK with
did Youknow?
Fifteen billion batteries are made and sold across the globe every year.
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zombies. The In-
dian version had no
cows. The game was
banned in Germany.
The Shenmue
game made by Yu
Suzuki in Japan was
so wildly popular that
it’s cutscenes were
actually played as
movies in theatres!
Starcraft is the fi rst 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.
The fi rst female video game
designer is widely consid-
ered to be Carol Shaw. She cre-
ated 3D Tic-Tac-Toe for the Atari
2600 in 1979. Her best known
game is Activision’s River Raid,
which itself was one of the fi rst
vertical scrolling shooters.
did Youknow?
The average offi ce drone uses up 10,000 sheets of paper—about a whole tree’s worth of wood pulp—per year.
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Tetris has been sold since
1982; it has sold 40 million
and earned 800 million in the
process.
A whopping 11.5 million sub-
scribers play World of
Warcraft - that’s more or less the
population of Goa
Wii is the most power-effi -
cient of all the consoles. It
only consumes 18.4W as com-
pared to the PS3’s 199W and
Xbox’s 186W.
Nintendo was originally founded in 1889 as a maker
of playing cards!
Sega Dreamcast released in
1999 was the fi rst console
game machine to sport the
128-bit architechture.
The fi rst all-computer chess
championship was held
in New York in 1970, and was
won by CHESS 3.0 – a program
did Youknow?
Duke Nukem Forever is the best example of Vaporware... an-nounced games that never made it to the market. The game was in development for 12 years before being aban-doned.
112 | April 2010
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written by Slate, Atkin and Gorlen at Northwestern Uni-
versity, Illinois.
In 1968, International Master David Levy made
a $3,000 bet with John McCarthy a researcher in
Aritifi cial Intelligence at Stanford University that no
Now for some personal computing with this Sudoku
113 | April 2010
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The Nazis Too many games to count
From 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
What 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
5 Bad a$$ game villains of all time
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Shodan System Shock series
Her 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!
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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 fi rst S.T.A.L.K.E.R
will recall the last level swarm-
ing with Monolith fi ghters trying
their level best to keep you away
from the fi nale. They’re well
trained, heavily armed and armoured and pretty
much hostile to everyone they come across, open-
ing fi re 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 fi ghter 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,
116 | April 2010
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chess computer in the world would beat him. He won
his bet.
On June 17,1980, Atari’s ‘As-
teroids’ and ‘Lunar Lander’
were the fi rst two video games
to ever be registered in the Copy-
right Offi ce
Mario, one of the most popular video game characters
was named after Nintendo’s landlord.
Daphne Bavelier at the University of Rochester, New
York, exploded the myth that video gaming is bad for
your eyes, when her experiments clearly showed that video
games improves a person’s abil-
ity to perceive contrast, a skill
we rely on in dark conditions. In
other words, playing fi rst person
shooters may actually make
you a better night driver.
PlayStation 2 hit the shelves
in Japan on March 4, 2000
and sold 98,000 units in four
hours.
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The fi rst computer book to sell one million copies
was 101 BASIC Computer Games which was pub-
lished by Creative Computing in 1978 in the US.
The fi rst 32-bit home video game system was the
Panasonic 3DO released in 1993
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 “fl oat” over the page
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Sony released the fi rst 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.
The fi rst software to be imported from the Soviet
Union to the US was Tetris, developed by Alexey
Pazhitov in 1985
In 2003, a 14-year old Romanian boy collapsed and
was hospitalised because he’d been playing Counter
Strike for nine days in a row.
Deep Blue’s chess playing program is written in C
and runs under AIX operating system. It is capable
of evaluating 10 crore positions per second.
William Higginbotham created what might have
been the fi rst video game in 1958. His game
called ‘Tennis for Two’, was cre-
ated and played on Brookhaven
National Laboratory oscilloscope.
Sega release Sonic the
hedgehog in 1991 as a di-
rect response to Nintendo’s Su-
per NES gaming system.
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Pacman got
its name
from the Jap-
anese word
‘pacu’ mean-
ing ‘to munch’.
Since pacu is
p r o n o u n c e d
the same as
‘f*** you’ only with a p sound its name
was Pacman.
Gupei Yokoi was the creator of the
Game Boy and Virtual Boy. He
worked on Famicom, the Metroid se-
ries, Gameboy pocket and did extensive
work on the system we knew today as
the Nintendo Entertainment system
In 1981, Shigeru Miyamoto guided
by Gunpei Yokoi made the fi rst
game for Nintendo starring Mario
which was previously the arcade game
Donkey Kong.
Across1. Marks in game
space that fade after some time, like blood splat-ters, bullet holes and footprints
6. the “original” version of a game, not one of the commonly played mods
8. Staying in one place and fi ring, or even hiding in a game as against “rushing”
9. A recording of a previous run in a racing game that is overlaid over the current run
12. Macros and actions assigned to keyboards are called this
Down2. The act of your
character ap-pearing within a gamespace
3. Field of View4. A group or team
of gamers5. A single level
in a game, or a gamespace area loaded at once
7. A script or software that au-tomatically plays a multiplayer fi rst person shooter
10. Firing in a game without taking too much trouble to aim
11. Heads up display
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In Spring 1967, MacHACK VI became the fi rst chess
program to beat a human at the Massachussets
State Chess Championship.
Sara 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.
Wii Sports, is the biggest selling game of all time
with over 46 million copies sold
The 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.
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DIGIT 2009 Anniversary issue
123 | April 2010
BITS & BYTES
mini
TECH ONE-LINERS
Windows contains FAT. Use Linux -- you won’t ever have to worry about weight.
Programming is an art form that fi ghts 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 fi les 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.
BBBBBIIIIIITTTTTTSSSSS &&&&& BBYYYYYTTTTTTEEEESSSSSSBITS & BYTES
124 | April 2010
BITS & BYTES
mini
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?
125 | April 2010
BITS & BYTES
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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.
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
WORD SEARCH SOLUTION
126 | April 2010
BITS & BYTES
mini
TECH CROSSWORD SOLUTION
127 | April 2010
BITS & BYTES
mini
WEB2.0 CROSSWORD SOLUTION
128 | April 2010
BITS & BYTES
mini
GAMING CROSSWORD SOLUTION
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