A bit of this and a bit of that

It’s been some time since I did a trivia post on this blog, so here are some bits I found recently (I tend to bookmark these then collate them all together) Here are some techie ones

• In tech parlance, ‘chip jewellery’ is an outdated computer.
• The term ‘bug‘ was probably coined after Admiral Grace Hopper found a moth in the Mark II computer at the US Naval Surface Warfare Center, causing the machine to malfunction.
• Adobe Pagemaker 7, one of Adobe’s flagship products, was made at a development centre in New Delhi, India.
• The ‘Quiet Zone’ is the blank margin on either side of a bar code that is used to tell the bar code reader where a bar code’s symbology starts and stops.
• The first object-oriented language was Simula, although it was not completely object-oriented. It was developed by Kristan Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl in the mid 1960s.
• The term ‘Silicon Valley’ was coined by journalist Don Hoefler.
• Among Unix users, a bang is an exclamation point.
• In the summer of 1969, UNIX was developed. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, was born the same year.
• In 1970, a team of researchers at Corning Glass Works in New York made fibre optic communications a reality, using fiber optic cables which could carry 65,000 times more information than copper wire.
• In 1993, Intel released the Pentium processor. It was a 60 MHz processor, incorporating 3.2 million transistors. It sold for $878 apiece.
• Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee (London, England) is the father of World Wide Web.
• A hard disk is very vulnerable to vibrations; a minor bump can make the head crash into the disk’s surface. The damage usually cannot be repaired, causing data loss and hard disk damage.
• A special parallel-processing cluster called ‘Beowulf‘ was used for the special effects in the multi Oscar winning movie Titanic.
• ‘Adobe’ (pronounced a-DOE-bee) of Adobe Systems (Headquarter : San Jose, California, USA) came from the name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of its founder John Warnock.
• The Windows95/98 logos were created with Freehand on a Macintosh.
• American inventor Elisha Gray and Scottish-born American inventor Alexander Graham Bell filed patents for the telephone within hours of each other. Bell got there first, and later won a legal battle against Gray.

Amazing stuff, isn’t it ?