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More from less

D o you call your-

self a geek? Did

you know that Te-

while Tech-Firsts will

take you on a journey

interspersed with

tris (the game) was milestones in tech

the first software to history. If this isn’t

Agent 001 cross the iron curtain enough, you can ex-

after the cold war? ercise your grey cells

This book, which with our custom-

will be every self- made crosswords

respecting geek’s and word jumbles,

pocket companion, or just trip out on the

has this and hun- mind boggling opti-

dreds of other tech cal illusions.

facts, quotes, mind The most special

games, Digit trivia thing about this ex-

and more. You will clusive edition of

also enjoy sharing it Digit Mini is that

all with your friends. it’s for our loyal

We cover amaz- subscribers only.

ing facts from the This book will not

world of Computing be available on

to the arcane nu- news stands.

ances of the WWW. Keep reading and

The Gaming section expecting more from

will have you remi- Digit, your technol-

niscing about Mario, ogy navigator.



1 | April 2010 mini

© 9.9 Mediaworx Pvt. Ltd.

Published by 9.9 Mediaworx

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system

or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior

written permission of the publisher.



April 2010

Free with Digit. Not to be sold separately. If you have paid

separately for this book, please email the editor at

editor@thinkdigit.com along with details of location of purchase,

for appropriate action.







mini 2 | April 2010

CONTENTS



INTRODUCTION

01

COMPUTING

05

TECH FIRSTS

39

WWW

61

GAMING

98

BITS & BYTES

123

3 | April 2010 mini

First DIGIT Anniversary issue









mini 4 | April 2010

COMPUTING

COMPUTING









E ver wondered where the ubiq-

uitous Laptop came from?

It is believed that the Laptop’s

great grandaddy was the Gavi-

lan SC, a truly portable

computer introduced back

in 1983





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

250 kg and cost about $40,000. Imagine carrying

that bad boy in your back pack!



5 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

T he first Apple II computers that went on sale in

1977 had 1MHz processor speed and 4kB of RAM





N amed after the McIntosh variety of Apples, the

first Macintosh was released in 1984. It was the

first commercially successful personal computer to

have a graphical user interface and a mouse





A ccording to the UNEP

(United Nations Environ-

mental Programme), each stupid

year, the

quotes

world gener- “I knew then

ates 20 mil- (in 1970) that a

lion to 50 4-kbyte mini-

million metric computer would

tons of e- cost as much as a

waste house. So I rea-

soned that after

college, I’d have to

Y ou’ve heard of computer

bugs right? Minor glitches

in code that hamper smooth

live cheaply in an

apartment and put

operation. But in 1947, when all my money into

a computer (Harvard Mark 1) owning a compu-

was running a test of it’s mul- ter.”

tiplier and adder function engi- [Apple co founder

neers noticed something was Steve Wozniak]





mini 6 | April 2010

COMPUTING

wrong despite rechecking eve- did You

rything. On further investigation

engineers found a moth in Panel

know?

F, Relay #70 of the system. The About 85% of

moth was trapped, removed and microwave radia-

taped into the computer’s log- tion emitted by

book with the words: “first actual a cellphone is

case of a bug being found.” absorbed by your

head.



I t’s surprising but Ethernet is a

registered trademark of Xerox, while Unix is a regis-

tered trademark of AT&T





A study by Dell some time

ago claimed that 12,000

laptops go lost, missing or

are stolen each week in the

US !





A lthough the iPod started

selling in 2001 it wasn’t

until 1.5 years later that Ap-

ple sold a Windows compat-

ible iPod – the second gen-

eration iPod









7 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

did You

know? T

he worst MS-DOS virus ever,

Michelangelo (1991) was so

named because it activated itself

According to re- on March 6, the birth day of the

search by Sprint, famous renaissance painter. The

about 2/3rds of virus attacked the boot sector of

cellphone users hard drives and any floppy drive

use their back- inserted into a computer. Upon

lights as torches. activation it destroyed data.





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

ping 1 milion dollars and is produced by Luvaglio,

the luxury technology makes from London. Reportedly

only one is ever going to be made and in typical fashion

is going to be encrusted with all sorts of precious met-

als and gems.





C o-founder of Intel Gordon Moore is widely known

for “Moore’s

Law,” in which he

predicted that the

number of transis-

tors the industry

would be able to

place on a com-

puter chip would

double every year.



mini 8 | April 2010

COMPUTING









The very first issue of Digit



9 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

In 1995, he updated his predic-

tion to once every two years. In

our recent interaction with con-

sulting firm Deloitte, they predict-

ed the axiom will hold true for the

coming years.



B efore founding Microsoft, Bill

Gates was apparently count-

ing cars. His first business was Traf-O-Data, a company

that read raw data from roadway traffic counters to

create meaningful reports for

traffic controllers. Math

triv!a

C ontrary to popular belief

Apple wasn’t started in

a garage, it was started in a

bedroom at 11161 Crist Drive

in Los Altos.

A rude pick up line



I BM holds the record for

the most number of pat-

ents held by any company

for math geeks. The

question mark after the

answer is what makes it

rude. Solve the equation

or individual in the world. An to find out how.

astounding 29,021 patents in

the last 12 years !









mini 10 | April 2010

COMPUTING

did You

know? I

n the 1950s computers were

commonly referred to as

“electronic brains.”

South Korean

teenagers on

average text

an astounding

T he Burroughs B-5000 is re-

garded as probably the most

advanced computer of it’s time.

200,000 times a Designed back in 1961 comput-

year. That is 60.1 ers of today such as the Unisys

messages EVERY ClearPath MCP machines, still

day use its design principles.





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

tion of the words “Le” for legend and “novo” for new.





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

more efficient than a QWERTY keyboard.









11 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

This is known as the Hermann-grid illusion, and

experts don’t have an explanation for the dark

spots that appear in the grid.









mini 12 | April 2010

COMPUTING

A pple too had some

flop launches

in its time. Their fa-

mous Lisa line which

preceded Macintosh,

didn’t sell very well.

In 1989, Apple dis-

posed of approximate-

ly 2,700 unsold Lisas in a guarded landfill in Logan,

Utah, in order to receive a tax write-off on the unsold

inventory.





H ere’s an interesting computing easter egg: Type

=rand(200,99) into Microsoft Word and watch as

your document fills up with random text!





E ver wondered what browser

safe colors are? There are did You

certain colours that are rendered

the same way on both PC and

know?

The cellphone is

Mac. They are totally 216 colors actually a very

in all. complicated

radio that com-

I t is impossible to create a

folder with the name “Con” or

“con” on any Microsoft operating

municates with

the cell tower in

the area.

system



13 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

First DIGIT Zero1 Awards









mini 14 | April 2010

COMPUTING

did You

know? I ntel’s first microprocessor the

4004 was originally meant to

130 million cell be a pocket calculator

phones each year

go into retire-

ment D id you know that most of the

virus writers work for organ-

ised crime syndicates. And many

of these are controlled from eastern European countries.





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

ter, none can take an input from a telegraph key in

morse code





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

PC usually requires ten times the PC’s weight in

fossil fuels and chemicals, most of them toxic.





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

type ‘Bush hid the facts’ (without the quotes), save

the document and then reopen it. You will see the text

garbled. Before you jump to conspiracy theories, you

should know that this happens for many character

strings that follow the 4,3,3,5 word combination. The

bug has something to do with ANSI encoding.









15 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

I n November 2004,

Blue Gene posted a

new record 70.72 Tera-

flops, or trillions of float-

ing point calculations

per second. To put this

processing power into

context consider this:

every person on Earth

would need to perform 100,000 calculations a second

in order to equal the power of IBM’s Blue Gene.





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

nonprofit agencies that use old equipment. Freecy-

cle.org is another network with a few India chapters.





A n interesting Google post talks about the use of

quantum computing to recognise and sort images,

videos and objects. Several research teams have been

working on the develop-

ment of quantum proces-

sors that can store data

as quantum bits. These

qbits can represent both

the 0 and 1 simultane-

ously allowing for much

more efficient process-



mini 16 | April 2010

COMPUTING

Math

triv!a

Oskar’s Cube has a maze

ing and information storage.

To consider an example given

by Google, an average compu-

on each of the six sides ter requires 500,000 peeks to

of the cube and a six-

pronged brass star going find a particular object hidden

through all of them. The in one of a million drawers on

objective of the game is an average. But such a quan-

tum computer could locate the

position the ball by just peek-

ing into 1000 out of the million

drawers.





A ccording to a study paper

on ResourceSaver.org, one

metric ton of electronic scrap

to pass the brass star from personal computers

through all the mazes could get you more gold than

and get it out. Its now

available as an iPhone that recovered from 17 tonnes

app called Amazing of gold ore!

Cube Maze.





T he QWERTY keyboard was

designed to prevent jams

on a keyboard. The early typewriters used arms to im-

press a letter on paper. If neighbouring keys were used

in rapid sucession, then the arms were likely to jam,

which was a serious issue. The keyboard was designed

to prevent commonly used key combinations from being



17 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

next to each other. It is widely

believed that the keyboard was stupid

designed to slow down typists, quotes

which is not true.

“A bit of tolerance

is worth a mega-

G race Hopper, a woman

Admiral in the navy, was

the inventor of COBOL. Admi-

byte of flaming”

[Henry Spencer,

ral Hopper wrote COBOL to be Canadian computer

programmer and

a programming language for

author of The 10

general business use. It was Commandments for C

supposed to be easier to un- Programmers]

derstand than either Fortran

or assembly language.





T he name ‘worm’ appeared in the

1970 movie ‘Shockwave Rider’ to

describe a program that propagates

itself through a computer network.





A pple based their Lisa (later

Macintosh) operating system

on work done on graphical user in-

terfaces at PARC which was run by

Xerox. It was here that the idea of the desktop and

the mouse as we have it today was created.







mini 18 | April 2010

COMPUTING

Now for some personal computing with this Sudoku









E stimates suggest as much as 50 percent of the

power used in desktop PCs is wasted as heat and

expelled through fans on the power supply.





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

Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne – worked at Atari

before founding Apple.



19 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

T he worlds most widely used

operating system, Windows,

was originally named interface

did You

know?

manager. The annual

revenue for the



C onsider this carefully: The

Macintosh Business Unit, a

division of Microsoft, is the larg-

telephone indus-

try is $210 billion,

almost 8 times

est software developer for long that of television

term rivals Apple. It’s latest re- and 23 times the

lease is Office 2011 for Mac. revenue of radio.





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

working replica of the Babbage machine, using the

materials and work methods

Math

triv!a available at Babbage’s time.

It worked just as Charles

Babbage had intended.





T he stair-step effect that

can be seen in diago-

nal lines of some computer

graphics is called ‘the jaggies’.



The ultimate gift idea for

math geeks – The Geek

Clock, available online

G eorge J. Laurer is con-

sidered the invetor of

the UPC or Uniform Product



mini 20 | April 2010

COMPUTING

WORD SEARCH

B V R U I W E R T



A P P L E I P O D



L K I J T F I M G



D L N A S E X Y N



E T G N O M E V I



Q D E D T E L E C



R A U R A M G P E



E R M O T O S X Y



Q P F I P R D M C



R A I D F Y E L P

HINTS

User Interface Short for upload

The portable media player that redefined An Internet utility used to check the connec-

the product category tion with another site

The smallest discrete component of an A standard used by consumer electronics to

image allow entertainment devices to interact with

Graphical User Interface for Linux users each other over a home network

Short for electrical Redundant Array of Independent Disks

Gigabytes, Megabytes, Kilobytes – what is DDR, DDR3 are types of?

it? Intellectual Property Rights

The mobile operating system from Google A famous internet browser

Defence Advanced Research Projects Internal combustion engine

Agency Extensible markup language

A Google acquisition that rhymes with help Macs latest operating system







21 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

Code, invented in 1973. The UPC symbol set for bar-

code recognition is still used in the USA.





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

patented the whole-body CT (computerised tomo-

graphic) diagnostic X-ray ra-

diology, and he was the first

to do medical imaging and

three-dimensional recon-

structions.





T he first patent for the

bar code - US Patent

#2,612,994 was issued to inventors Joseph Wood-

land and Bernard Silver on October 7, 1952.





P ossibly, the first known exam-

ple of biometrics in practise

was a form of finger printing be-

ing used in China in the 14th cen-

tury, as reported by explorer Joao

de Barros of Portugal





W hen the CD was being de-

signed, Sony and Philips

were instrumental in deciding

how long each CD could play.



mini 22 | April 2010

COMPUTING

The Digit 2009 collector’s edition was fully sold

out in record time









23 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was did You

used as a standard, the perform-

ance of which lasted for 74 min-

know?

Your mobile bat-

utes.

tery is very low,

you are expecting

W

was

hen

dows

Win-

3.1

launched,

an important call

and you don’t

have a charger.

3 million copies

Many Nokia

were sold in the

phones come with

first two months.

a reserve battery.

To activate the

W indows 95 can officially run

on a 386DX at 20MHz with

just 4MB of RAM.

battery, key-in

*3370# your cell

will restart with

this reserve and

T he Japanese

version of MS

Office has a charac-

your instrument

will show a 50%

increase in bat-

ter you can’t find in

tery. This reserve

any other version.

will get charged

The ‘Office Lady’ is a virtual as-

when you charge

sistant that bows and serves tea.

your mobile next

time.

T he Windows 95/98 logos

were created with Freehand on a Macintosh







mini 24 | April 2010

COMPUTING

D avid Bradley wrote the code did You

for the [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Del]

key sequence. know?

The original

name of the

T he name Epson for the popu-

lar brand of printers was

coined when the subsequent

telephone was

the harmonic

models of their first printer ‘Elec- telegraph.

tronic Printer 101 were called

‘Sons if electronic Printers’





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

thousand times. In

contrast, a hard disk can

be written over virtually

an unlimited number of

times.





W hen desktop scan-

ners were first intro-

duced, many manufactur-

ers used florescent bulbs as light sources.





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

tended architecture) is a modification of CD-ROM that

defines two new types of sectors that enable it to read and

display data, graphics, video, and audio at the same time.



25 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING



T he first optical data storage disk, developed by

Philips, had 60 times the capacity of a 5.25 inch

floppy disk.





T hough the highest pos-

sible encryption in Win-

dows 2000 was 128 bit, Mi-

crosoft only sent the 40-bit

version to India, because In-

dia was under US sanctions

after Pokhran.





W inPad was Microsoft’s failed handheld PC operating

system, which it developed and killed before coming

up with Windows CE. Microsoft scrapped the WinPad project

reportedly because they couldn’t figure out how to squeeze

a variant of Windows into an affordable handheld size.





M S-DOS was a rough imitation of CP/M, one of the

first portable operating systems. ‘Portable’ here

means that the OS could run on different hardware.





F inger’ is an Internet tool for locating people on oth-

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

able information.







mini 26 | April 2010

COMPUTING

T he term ‘petabit’ is used in

discussing possible volumes did You

of data traffic per second in a

large network.

know?

Alexander Gra-

ham Bell origi-



R DF (Resource Definition

Framework) is a set of rules for

creating descriptions of information

nally wanted

the greeting for

the telephone

available on the World Wide Web. to be “Ahoy” but

Thomas Edison



S OAP (Simple Object Access

Protocol) is a protocol for cli-

ent-server communication that

voted for “Hello,”

a word he coined

in 1877.

sends and receives information

‘on top of’ HTTP.





W ake-on-LAN (WOL) is a technology that enables

a computer motherboard to switch

itself on (and off) based on signals arriv-

ing at the computer’s network card.





A ‘blue-bomb’ is a technique for caus-

ing the Windows operating system of

someone you are communicating with to

crash.









27 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

C ertificate Revocation List (CRL) is a method of us-

ing a public key infrastructure for maintaining ac-

cess to servers.





S outh Pacific Railroad laid down telegraph wires

across tracks to help railway stations keep in touch.





T he high-speed data highways of the Internet are

called backbones. Sprint and AT&T own the major

backbones in the US.





S ilver is the most conductive material, but copper is

widely used in communications because it costs much

less and is better in terms of strength and flexibility.





M ost intercontinental Internet traffic passes

through underwater fibre-optic cables. The first

such layout was across the

Atlantic, in 1988.





A typical fibre-optic cable

five thousandths of an

inch thick can carry up to 2.5

billion bits of data per sec-

ond, or 32,000 simultaneous

telephone calls.







mini 28 | April 2010

COMPUTING

T he idea of Bluetooth technology was born in 1994.

The name Bluetooth is derived from

Danish Viking King, Harald Blatand -

a



translated as Bluetooth in English

- who lived in the latter part of

the 10th century. Blatand united

and controlled Denmark and

Norway, hence the inspiration for

the name, as in ‘uniting devices

through Bluetooth’.





C huq Von Rospach of Apple Com-

puter, circa 1983, coined the word ‘Netiquette’.





I n the mid-1980s, engineers at Apple Computer de-

veloped a high-speed method of transferring data to

and from the hard drives in Macintosh desktops while

simplifying the internal cabling. They called it FireWire.





P rograms that are small and un-useful, but dem-

onstrate a point, are called ‘Noddy’ programs.

Noddy programs are often written by people learn-

ing a new language or system. The archetypal noddy

program is the “hello world” program, which is simply

a program that outputs the phrase. In North Amer-

ica, this might be called a ‘Mickey Mouse’ program.





29 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

U LSI stands for Ultra Large did You

Scale Integration, used in

microchips with over one million know?

transistors. The Emergency

Number world-

wide for Mo-

A fat Mac application is an ap-

plication program for the

Macintosh computer that works

biles 112.



on a Mac running on a Motorola 68000 series chip.





F C-PGA (Flip Chip-Pin Grid Array) is a microchip design

developed by Intel for its faster microprocessors.





V isiCalc, invented in 1979, was the first spreadsheet

program available for computers.





I BM was incorporated in 1911 under the name Com-

puting-Tabulating-Recording Company.





I ntel’s Flying Pentium Ads and

the ‘Intel Inside’ logo were

made on an Apple Macintosh.





T he computing for the Pioneer

10 spacecraft was done by the

Intel 4004 microprocessor.







mini 30 | April 2010

COMPUTING

I n 1938, Claude Shannon first showed that electronic

switching circuits could perform logical operations.





T he CVAX is a chip used as a DEC Micro VAX II micro-

processor. A message was inscribed on the chip, in Rus-

sian, which said, “VAX, when you care enough to steal the

very best”!





A modern quarter inch

square silicon chip

has the power of the 1949

ENIAC computer, which

occupied a full city block.





A ndrew Grove, former Chairman, Intel Corporation,

was flooded with over 120 names to choose from

for its latest processor. He finally settled on ‘Pentium’.





T ed Hoff, Stan Mazor and Federico Faggin designed

the Pentium Chip that was launched on March 22,

1993.





I ntel’s code name for its effort to make the one GHz

microprocessor was codenamed Project Foster.





I ntel’s project on the first processor to use the new

64-bit architecture was under the code name Merced.



31 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING



I f you happened to open up the

case of the original Macintosh,

you would find 47 signatures, one

for each member of Apple’s Mac-

intosh division as of 1982.





I ntel created the Timna proces-

sor in 2001, a low-end product, but it was given a

hasty burial after problems cropped up with the mem-

ory translator hub.





T he first microprocessor to make it into a home com-

puter was the Intel 8080, a complete 8-bit compu-

ter on one chip, introduced in 1974.





T he Comptometer was invented

by Dorr Felt. IT was the first

entirely keyboard operated calcu-

lating machine - a practical adding

and listing machine.





T he Pentium 4 runs code about

5,000 times faster than the

8088.









mini 32 | April 2010

COMPUTING

W intel computers, PCs

with an Intel processor

and running a Windows oper-

ating system, account for 80

percent of PCs in use today.





T he first microprocessor to make a real splash in the

market was the Intel 8088, introduced in 1979 and

incorporated into the IBM PC.





H ewlett Packard’s first order, for eight oscillators,

came from Walt Disney, while he was making the

film Fantasia in 1940.





H ewlett Packard introduced the

mopier in 1996, a printer that

offers a low-cost, high-quality alter-

native to photocopying.





I n 1984, Apple computer in-

troduced the Apple IIc model

laptop, which had an internal 5.25-

inch floppy drive.





T he Biztalk Server is a Microsoft Product. It unites

enterprise application integration (EAI) and b2b in-

tegration into a single product.



33 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING



S tinger was the codename Microsoft used for its

smartphone platform that was unveiled in 2001,

now called Windows

Mobile.





P ROM (Program-

mable Read Only

Memory) is memory

programmed at the

time of manufacturing.





T he incredible feat

of a hard drive read/write head is like a 747 going

600 mph 3 feet off the ground counting blades of grass

as it flies by



did You

know? A

hacker with benign intentions

is called a ‘white hat’

Recycling 100

million phones

would recover

3.4 metric tons of W indows ME was the operat-

ing system that started the

technology called System File

gold—gold that

would not have Protection that prevented appli-

to be mined. cations overwriting key system

files.



mini 34 | April 2010

COMPUTING

did You

know? S tinger was the codename

Microsoft used for its smart

phone platform that was unveiled

back in 2001.







The first product

T he typical computer CRT

monitor boosts the voltage to

30,000 volts in parts of the cir-

to have a bar

cuitry

code on its pack-

age was Wrigleys

chewing gum.

T he Palm OS fits in less than

100K, which is less than one

per cent the size of Windows 98 or the Mac OS.





T he difference between CDRs and music CDs (or oth-

er commercially produced CDs) are that the former

are burnt, while the latter are pressed. ‘Pressing’ is a

manufacturing technique very different from burning.





L ISP is a programming language written in LISP it-

self. When you define functions in LISP, the entire

language gets modified.





I n 1995, Iomega Corp

went from $3.5 a

share to $48.63 for a gain



35 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

of 1396 per cent. This made it the company to have

the greatest percentage gain of all NASFAQ high-tech

stocks ever. Iomega.jpg





T he network ‘ping’ program gets its name from the

sound of sonar. The creator, Mike Muuss, says he

named it after the sound that a sonar makes, inspired

by the principle of echo-location.





I CQ was the first instant

messenger program, and

that’s notable because it’s still

running, although it’s been

bought by AOL.





H DTV made its debut in

1989 in Japan





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

eration’





I nfosys was the first Indian company to release its

annual report in CD-ROM format.





S tewardesses – the longest word you can type with

your left hand using the usual two-handed typing

method.



mini 36 | April 2010

COMPUTING



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

snail mail.





F ormer Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the

first subscriber to India’s first private ISP, Satyam

Infoway.





T he first fly-by-wire test flight was held in 1972 on a

NASA F-8 test plane. The first passenger aircraft to

do so was the Airbus 320 launched in 1988.









37 | April 2010 mini

COMPUTING

Second DIGIT Anniversary issue









mini 38 | April 2010

TECH FIRSTS









T he first ever computer that was general purpose

and controlled by programs was made by a German

called Konrad Zuse in the early 40’s. He wanted the Hit-

ler government to fund his computer for military use.

He was denied funding because they believed that war

would be over before the year ended.





T he silicon transistor, that transformed the history

of computers forever, was invented by John Bar-



39 | April 2010 mini

mini

TECH FIRSTS

deen, Walter Brattain and Wiliam did You

Shockley in 1947.

know?

Google’s search

1 951 saw the first commercial

computer – the UNIVAC in-

vented by John Presper Eckert

engine alone

leaves behind a

and John W. Mauchly carbon footprint

of 200 tons of

CO2 every day.

T he first virus to use the lure

of social engineering did it

though a digital picture of famous

The footprint of

a single search is

Sports celebrity Anna Kournik- 0.2g of CO2.

ova. Millions of people in 2001

could not resist the temptation of a free picture of the

beautiful tennis star

Anna Kournikova, but

they got more than

they bargained for.





T he first success-

ful high level pro-

gramming language,

IBM FORTRAN was

developed in 1954.





T he Stanford Research Institute, Bank of America,

and General Electric developed MICR (magnetic ink



mini 40 | April 2010

TECH FIRSTS

Math

triv!a

14th March is celebrated

character recognition) used in

banker’s cheques in 1955



as the Pi Day worldwide

as the date in the month/

day format comes to

3/14 which corresponds

B oeing was reportedly the

first company to detect

the Y2K glitch way back in

to 3.14 the approxima- 1993

tion upto two decimal

places of Pi (22/7)







and Robert Noyce in 1958

T he integrated circuit was

invented by Jack Kilby







I n the early 1800s, a French

silk weaver called Joseph- stupid

Marie Jacquard invented a quotes

way of automatically control-

A refund for

ling the warp and weft threads

defective software

on a silk loom by recording

might be nice,

patterns of holes in a string

except it would

of cards. This was the world’s

bankrupt the

first ‘program’

entire software

industry in the first

O n April 3, 1973, Martin

Cooper made the first cell

phone call outside research

year” [Andrew S.

Tanenbaum, pro-

fessor and author

labs and company facilities.

of MINIX]



41 | April 2010 mini

TECH FIRSTS

SUDOKU









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

veloped in 1969.





S asser was the first mass spread worm virus that

didn’t need to utilise email for delivery. Globally,

Sasser’s effects were devastating. It grounded aircraft,



mini 42 | April 2010

TECH FIRSTS

blocked satellite communica- did You

tions and closed down banks. In

May 2004, an 18 year-old German know?

computer science student was ar- By 2001, e-waste

rested for authoring the virus. already ac-

counted for 70

percent of the

E NIAC, the first electronic

computer that appeared over

50 years ago was about 80 feet

heavy metals

and 40 percent

long, weighed 30 tons, and had of the lead in U.S.

17,000 tubes. A desktop com- landfills.

puter today can store a million

times more information than an ENIAC, and is 50,000

times faster.





T he first dynamic RAM chip, Intel 1103 Computer

Memory was invented in 1970





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

vented by Faggin, Hoff and Mazor in 1971.





T he good old floppy disk (floppy for its flexibility) was

invented by Alan Shugart and IBM in 1971





T he Ethernet computer network was invented by

Robert Metcalfe and Xerox in 1973





43 | April 2010 mini

TECH FIRSTS

1 976-77 saw the first consumer computers - Apple I,

II, TRS-80 and Commodore Pet Computers





S preadsheets first appeared did You

with the VisiCalc developed

by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frank-

know?

ston in 1978 23% of all pho-

tocopier faults

worldwide are

T he first word processors ap-

peared a year after spread-

sheets in 1979 with Seymour

caused by people

sitting on them

Rubenstein and Rob Barnaby’s and photocopy-

WordStar ing their butts.





M icrosoft’s MS DOS operating system was devel-

oped in 1981





T he first virus program that spread outside a control-

led environment was “Rother J”. It was created in

1981 by Richard Skrenta as a practical joke. It spead via

floppy disk and displayed a short poem beginning “Elk

Cloner: The program with a personality.”





I BM is known for several tech firsts. Here’s some of

them: Magnetic storage (1955), DRAM - dynamic

random access memory (1962) Superconductivity

(1987)



mini 44 | April 2010

TECH FIRSTS



T he first computer

mouse was invented

by Doug Engelbart in

around 1964 and was

made of wood. He called

it mouse owing to the ca-

ble that comes out of it.

Plus it was like a square cube! Talk about ergonomics.





I n 60 AD, Heron of Alexandria set up a machine that

could follow a series of instructions, in effect coming

up with the first program.





I n 1200 AD, an Arab clockmaker

by the name of Al-Jazari went

about creating the first mechanical

robots the world had seen. The pinac-

cle of his achievement was an elabo-

rate hybrid device that was both an

orchestra made up of animated man-

nequins (robots) and a clock.





T he classical Indian mathema-

tician Pingala was the first to

describe the binary number system

way back in 300 BC.



45 | April 2010 mini

TECH FIRSTS

did You

D ifferential gears used in an-

tiquity from Ionia, to Greece,

know?

to China were the first devices Firms in devel-

used to compute time, and astro- oped countries

nomical movements. currently ac-

count for 96% of

royalties from

O bscure theoretical math-

ematician George Boole’s

work in the 1840s were instru-

technology

patents, or $71

mental a century and a half later billion a year.

in binary programming. He was

the first to develop binary algebra.





C omputer’s were nei-

ther real time nor in-

teractive, in a sense “live”

till 1951, when MIT stu-

dents crafted the Whirl-

wind.





T he first computer

game was developed

at MIT and was called

spacewar! The game

even had realistic star

charts. You can play the



mini 46 | April 2010

TECH FIRSTS

original game in a Java emu-

lator for the original machine stupid

at http://spacewar.oversigma. quotes

com.

The only le-

gitimate use of

I n June 1980, The VIC-20

became the first compu-

ter to sell over a million units.

a computer is

to play games –

[Eugene Jarvis,

It just had 3.5 KB of usable

game designer and

memory.

programmer]



T he first computer to use a

GUI was the 1982 Xerox 8010 Star. It introduced

Windows, Icons, and the mouse pointer, forming the ba-

sic elements of modern operating systems. A year later,

Apple introduced Lisa, the first personal computer with

a GUI.





M ultitasking was something that computers did not

have till the Commodore Amiga came out in 1985.





T he first joystick was developed in 1944 in Germany

and was used for aiming bombs. It was used to con-

trol a variant of the V2 rocket as well.





T he Russian satellite Sputnik 1 was the first to make

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



47 | April 2010 mini

TECH FIRSTS

and was in orbit for 22 days be- did You

fore burning up during re-entry.

know?

Wearing head-

T he first digital camera was

designed by a Kodak engineer

by the name of Steven Sasson. It

phones for just

an hour will

weight 3.6 kg and was the size of increase the bac-

a toaster. teria in your ear

by 700 times.



N apster was the first P2P file

sharing network and it was only launched in 1999.





T he first modem was made in 1962 by Bell; it was

called the Bell 103. The maximum speed achieved

was 300 bytes per second.





T he first electronic game to be created was not Pong

as most think it to be, but a game called Tennis

for Two. It was de-

signed in 1958





I n 2000, Ericsson

gave a demo of

the first bluetooth

phone, the T36 at

the CommunicAsia

festival. 



mini 48 | April 2010

TECH FIRSTS

2nd street by Billy

5 Joel was the first

album to be released on

a CD in 1978, although

Abba’s The Visitors was

produced before that,

and a handful of CDs

were made. 





M

oney for Nothing

by the Dire Straits

was the first music video to use computer generated

graphics in 1985. 

did You

L ynx was the first web brows-

er to be released in 1993. Op-

know?

era and Netscape followed soon The average per-

after, in 1994. son’s left hand

does 56 per cent

of the typing.

T he first object-oriented lan-

guage was Simula. It was de-

veloped by Kristen Nygaard ad Ole-Johan Dahl in the

mid 1960s.





T he EDSAC ran its first program on May 6, 1949. It

wasn’t the first stored-program computer, but rath-

er, the first practical one.



49 | April 2010 mini

TECH FIRSTS









did You

T he Nintendo 3DS, announced

in March 2010 is the first 3D

handheld gaming device.

know?

Vorbis is an

open source

I n December 1970, Gilbert Hy-

att filed a patent application

entitled “Single Chip Integrated

audio compres-

sion format.

Circuit Computer Architecture”, Audio encoding

the first basic patent on the mi- formats, such as

croprocessor. MP3, VQF, and

AAC. Vorbis files

compress to a

I n 1971, Intel launched the

world’s first single-chip mi-

croprocessor, the Intel 4004.

smaller size than

MP3s. According

The Pioneer 10 spacecraft used to many, Vorbis

the 4004 microprocessor. file provides bet-

ter sound quality.





mini 50 | April 2010

TECH FIRSTS

How many legs does the elephant have?









T he floppy disk was invented did You

in 1971.

know?

For the first time

T he first commercial comput-

ers were sold in 1951. since 1996, TV

sales in 2006

outpaced PC

T he first cellular phone com-

munication network was

launched in Japan, in 1979.

sales, according

to the Consumer

Electronics As-

sociation



51 | April 2010 mini

TECH FIRSTS

D r. Brent Townshend invented the 56K modem in

1996.





T he Lehigh virus, was one of the first file viruses back

in 1987 that infected command.com files





I n 1998, the StrangeBrew virus became the first to

infect Java files.





J ames Gosling created Java at Sun Microsystems in

1994. He came up with the name ‘Java’ while de-

bating over it at a coffee shop.





H ewlett Packard (HP) intro-

duced the mopier in 1996, did You

a printer that offers a low-cost,

high-quality alternative to pho-

know?

tocopying. Almost 150 bil-

lion spam mails

are sent out eve-

I n 1982, Andrew Fluegelman

created the first ever share-

ware, known as PC-Talk. It was a

ryday, a carbon

footprint of 17

communications software. million tons of

CO2 every year.

One in 12 million

S ony introduced the 3.5-inch

floppy in 1981. spam mails are

replied to.





mini 52 | April 2010

TECH FIRSTS

T he Babylonians were the

first to come up with Al- stupid

gorithms for mathematical quotes

operations like factorization of

“Programming

numbers, in 1600 BC.

graphics in X is

like finding sqrt(pi)

O ptical chips were first

introduced in 1988, as

a faster way to make infor-

using Roman

numerals.” [Henry

Spencer, Cana-

mation travel on processors.

dian computer

However, they have not yet

programmer and

managed to replace electric-

author of The 10

ity.

Commandments

for C Program-

S ecure Sockets Layer (SSL)

was first introduced by

Netscape in 1994.

mers]







I d Quantique introduced commercial quantum cryp-

tography in 2004, with a quantum key distribution

service.





T he GNU license was around since 1976, the GNU

Emacs were the first machines to be release with

this license.









53 | April 2010 mini

TECH FIRSTS

T he Morris Worm is the first worm to break into the

wild, and infect a large number of machines in 1988.





T he first DEFCON, an annual did You

conference of penetration

testers, security experts and

know?

hackers was held for the first People view

time in 1993. The original idea fifteen billion

of the conference was a send off videos online

party to the bulletin boards. every month.





I n 1997, the RIAA started their first crackdown on

“pirates” who shared .mp3 files. Many teenagers

lost their computers in the crackdown.





A lthough many teenagers were involved in hack-

ing before 2000, it was the year the first underage

hacker was actually sent to jail. Jonathan James spent

time for Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He would

kill himself eight years later.





1 981 was the year that PCs began, when IBM distrib-

uted the IBM PC. Microsoft shipped it with BASIC.

The operating system too was developed by Microsoft.





J im Knopf is known as the ‘father of shareware’.

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



mini 54 | April 2010

TECH FIRSTS

which Knopf published under the pseudonym Jim But-

ton.





I n 1966, Xerox invented the

did You

Telecopier - the first success-

ful fax machine. know?

On average, only



T he microprocessor was in-

vented in 1971. The creation

was considered a computer on a

24 songs on each

iPod are paid

for directly. The

chip. rest are either

illegally down-



G eorge Boole published his

Mathematical Analysis of

Logic, inventing Boolean algebra

loaded or ripped

from CDs



in 1854. This became the basis for computer design.





I n 1983 Fred Cohen first defined a computer virus

as a “program that can affect other computer pro-

grammes by modifying them in such a way as to include

a (possibly evolved) copy of itself.”





L eonardo Da Vinci’s sketches of a mechanical cal-

culating device that used an elaborate assembly of

wheels and chains was the first computing device to be

planned.





55 | April 2010 mini

TECH FIRSTS

First Digit Droolmaal: June 2001









mini 56 | April 2010

TECH FIRSTS









Hardly drool worthy anymore...



57 | April 2010 mini

TECH FIRSTS









Start by reading the text in each of the blocks as

fast as you can, then try reading out the colour at

the same speed





P lasma displays that are so common these days,

were first thought of long ago. The concept was

first conceived in July 1964 at the University of Illinois.





T he same is the case with the competing LCD tech-

nology. Shunsuke Kobayashi of Japan produced first

defect-free LCD way back in 1972.



mini 58 | April 2010

TECH FIRSTS









ACROSS DOWN

3. A completely useless button that 1. Connections beneath the sea

almost even sees but is never used 2. Which PC manufacturer’s name is an amal-

6. A 1337 key board layout that is gamation of the words Legend and New?

supposed to be seventy percent more 4. Three of these together will tell you where

efficient than the most widely used one you are

right now 5. I am Shawn Fanning and I like to share

9. Light amplification by stimulated emis- files

sion of radiation 7. A 2001 virus that used the power of a

11. This virus was designed to infect DOS sports celebrity to spread across comput-

systems and like all boot sector viruses, ers

basically operated at the BIOS level 8. First music on the go

12. The first domain name ever registered 10. Dots, dashes and scribbling on sand inspired

13. The rudimentary telephone this technology used to represent data







59 | April 2010 mini

TECH FIRSTS

DIGIT 2007 Anniversary issue









mini 60 | April 2010

WWW









S ince Google’s centerpiece in search technology was

patented by Stanford University (on behalf of the

founders Page & Brin), Google gave Stanford 1.8 million

shares for exclusive right to the patent that the univer-

sity later sold for a staggering $336 million.





G oogle earns 97per cent of its revenues from adver-

tising alone. This amounts to $20 billion.



61 | April 2010 mini

WWW

D id you know that Goog-

le logs each search

queries into its systems to

enhance future searches





T hey have found in user testing, that a small number

of people are very typical of the larger user base.

They run labs continually and always monitor how peo-

ple use a page of results.

did You

know? G oogle has the largest network

of translators in the world,

One million this is needed for continuously

threads of fiber integrating searches and indexing

optic cable can web pages into their engine

fit in a tube 1/2” in

diameter.

The reason Orkut doesn’t look

or feel like a Google applica-

tion was that the designer in-charge was given free

reign to do things his way without the usual company

procedures. Google is look-

ing to improve Orkut’s re-

source utilisation however.





G oogle makes small

changes on their products very often. They some-

times try a particular feature with a set of users from



mini 62 | April 2010

WWW

a given network or region; for

example Excite@Home users

stupid

often get to see new features. quotes

They aren’t told of this, just

presented with the new UI and

“There is no need

observed how they use it.

for any individual

to have a compu-

ter in their home.”

T he infamous “I feel lucky”

is nearly never used. How-

ever, in trials it was found that

[Ken Olson, President

of Digital Equipment

Corp, in 1977]

removing it would somehow

reduce the Google experience.

Users wanted it to be kept. It was like a comfort button.





W hen Google was founded, Brin and Page, the

founders tossed a coin to decide what position

they would take.





N otice the logos appear-

ing on your Google

homepage around major

events or holidays? This is

known as the Google Doo-

dle. The first one was dedi-

cated to the Burning Man

festival in 1998. You can check out past Google doodles

at google.com/logos.



63 | April 2010 mini

WWW

C R O S S

B y July 2008, Google had in-

dexed an astounding 1 trillion

(1000000000000) pages on the

Across

5. A confusing and

anthithetical term

that is both global and

local

Internet. 6. Information added

to a file that can be

used to locate the





H eard of Mentalplex? It was an document or resource

on a world map

April fools joke that Google 8. Search Engine Optimi-

zation

could read peoples minds and 10. A combination of

two or more Web 2.0

search the Internet for what they services

12. A single update on a

were thinking of. The joke also in- Twitter stream

cluded broadband access wires Down

coming out from people’s toilet 1. A snippet of code that

can be embedded on

bowls! Try it out @ http://www. many pages

2. Syndicated audio

google.com/mentalplex/ content delivered in

the style of blogs

3. User generated

content





L arry Page, the co founder of

Google once made an inkjet

printer out of Lego

4. The sum total of all

blogs and blogging

related activities

7. An online representa-

tion of yourself,

blocks when he commonly on forums

and social networkng

was in college. sites

9. A mechanism that

allows several web

2.0 and cloud services





T here are more

than 600 mil-

lion phones. Even

to interact with each

other

11. A mechanism for

verifying if a visitor is

a human

then, more than half the popula-

tion of the entire world hasn’t yet

made a phone call.



mini 64 | April 2010

WWW

W O R D









65 | April 2010 mini

WWW

A ll three founders of YouTube, did You

Steve Chen, Chad Hurley

and Jawed Karim were work- know?

ing for Paypal when they started The busiest tel-

YouTube. ephone exchange

was by BellSouth

at the 1996 Olym-

D id you know that the domain

www.Youtube.com was reg-

istered on Valentines Day (Febru-

pic Games, where

100 billion bits of

ary 14, 2005). information were

transmitted per

second

Y ouTube loves young Ameri-

cans? Here’s proof: 70 per

cent of YouTube’s registered us-

ers are from USA and half of Youtube users are under

20 years old.





I f Youtube was Hol-

lywood, they have

enough material to re-

lease 60,000 new films

every week.





O ne of the biggest leaps in Google’s search engine

usage came about when they introduced their

much improved spell checker giving birth to the “Did

you mean…” feature. This instantly doubled their traffic



mini 66 | April 2010

67 | April 2010

Back then.... Thinkdigit.com 1.0 in 2001

WWW









mini

WWW

T he total amount of band- did You

width used by Youtube is

about the same as used by entire

know?

Internet in 2000. More than a bil-

lion transistors

are manufac-

O ne needs over 1000 years

of time to watch all videos

on Youtube (but there will be bil-

tured... every

second.

lion of more videos uploaded on

Youtube by then).





M ost popular category for uploaded videos is ‘Music’

having around 20per cent Youtube videos.





G mail was internally

used for nearly 2

years prior to launch

to the public. They dis-

covered there were ap-

proximately 6 types of

email users, and Gmail

has been designed to ac-

commodate all of these.





U nited States users upload most of YouTube videos

followed by UK. Americans are also the number-

one watchers of YouTube videos followed by Japan.



mini 68 | April 2010

69 | April 2010

Yesterday.... Thinkdigit.com 2.0 in 2007....

WWW









mini

WWW

T he first ever video that was uploaded on Youtube

is by Jawed Karim (one of Youtube founders) titled

“Me at zoo” on April 23rd, 2005. This video is all of 18

seconds long.





T here isn’t any restriction

for proper dress code in

the Google offices. This is to

ensure comfort and a produc-

tive working environment. So

one may dress up in pyjamas

or even as a superhero.





T om Vendetta is the young-

est Google employee ever hired. He was hired by

Google when he was just 15 years old. Vendetta used

to fool his friends by sending fake press releases and

news. Vendetta was employed

did You because he was young and would

know? know how young hackers thought.

His job was to help address secu-

In 1999, new

rity flaws in Gmail.

fiber was being

installed at a rate

of 2800 miles or

4500 kilometers

G oogle consists of over

450,000 servers, racked up

in clusters located in data centers

per hour!

around the world.



mini 70 | April 2010

71 | April 2010

Today.... Thinkdigit.com 3.0....

WWW









mini

WWW

T he first ever search engine did You

was called “Archie” and was

created way back in 1990 by a

know?

Canadian student Alan Emtage. It took a year

to connect the

first line from

I n 2007, Google became the

most visited website with 700

million users. It beat the next

New York to San

Francisco. 14,000

popular website, Microsoft.com miles of copper

by over 200 million hits. In March wire and 130,000

2010, Facebook overtook Google! telephone poles

were needed to

link the country.

T he English once took it to be

an alphabet. The Chinese af-

fectionately term it ‘the little mouse’. The Dutch call it

an ‘elephant’s trunk’, the Germans a

spider monkey, the Italians a snail.

It is ‘&’ (ampersand)





The inspiration for the brand

name Yahoo! Came from a word

made up by Jonathan Swift in his

book Gulliver’s Travels. A Yahoo was

a person who was ugly and not human in appearance.





T he prime reason the Google home page is so bare, is

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



mini 72 | April 2010

73 | April 2010

Tomorrow... Thinkdigit.com 4.0 coming soon to a browser near you...

WWW









mini

WWW

and just wanted a quick interface. did You

In fact, the submit button was a

later addition and initially, hitting

know?

the RETURN key was the only Globally, about

way to burst Google into life. $1 trillion is spent

annually on

telecommunica-

S weden has the highest per-

centage of its population i.e.

76.9 per cent hooked on to the In-

tions products

and services.

ternet. In contrast, the world av-

erage is 11.9 per cent and India has a poor 7.2 per cent





T he Dilbert Zone was the

first comic website on the

Internet.





A resident of Tonga could

have the rights to register

domains ending in .to as Tongo’s

Internet code is .to. Such possi-

bilities are fun to consider: travel.to or go.to.





T he day after Internet Explorer 4 was released, a

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

ternet Explorer logo on Netscape’s front lawn with a

message that said “We love you” at the height of the

browser wars in the late 90s.



mini 74 | April 2010

WWW

T he word ‘e-mail’ has been banned by the French

Ministry of Culture. They are required to use the

word ‘Courriel’ instead, which

is the French equivalent of In- did You

ternet. This move become the

subject of ridicule from the cyber

know?

community in general The first Touch

Tone system,

id you know that www.sym- which used tones

D bolics.com was the first ever rather than

domain name registered online? pulses generated

by rotary dials,

ccording to a University of was installed in

A Minnesota report, research- Baltimore, US, in

ers estimate the volume of Inter- 1941. Touch Tone

net traffic is growing at an annual telephones were

rate of 50 to 60 per cent. invented by the

research team at

he terms Internet and World Bell Systems.

T Wide Web are often used in

every-day speech without much distinction. However,

the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and

the same. The Internet is a global data communica-

tions system. It is a hardware and software infrastruc-

ture that provides connectivity between computers. In

contrast, the Web is one of the services communicated

via the Internet. It is a collection of interconnected



75 | April 2010 mini

WWW

documents and other re-

sources, linked by hyperlinks

and URLs.





I n February 2009, Twitter

had a monthly growth (of

users) of over 1300 per cent

- several times more than

Facebook.





T he first graphical Web browser to become truly pop-

ular was Marc Andreessen and Jamie Zawinski’s

NCSA Mosaic. It was the first browser made available

for Windows, Mac and Unix X Windows System with the

first version appearing in March 1993.





D atacenters produce around 0.3 per cent of the

world’s CO2 emissions. The airline industry pro-

duces 0.6 per cent, and the steel industry produces 1.0

per cent.





T he cost of transmitting information has fallen dra-

matically. A trillion bits of information from Boston

to Los Angeles from $1,50,000 in 1970 to 12 cents to-

day. E-mailing a 40-page document from Chile to Kenya

costs less than 10 cents, faxing it about $10, sending it

by courier $50



mini 76 | April 2010

WWW

did You

know? T

he typical Internet user

worldwide is young, male and

wealthy – a member of an elite

”hello” wasn’t minority.

always the first

thing said over

the phone. The

first operating

T he average total cost of using

a local dialup Internet ac-

count for 20 hours a month in Af-

phone service rica is about USD 60 a month and

was established USD 22 a month in the US. The

in 1878 and the average African monthly salary is

formal greeting less than USD 60.

back then was

“ahoy”

B efore they can read, almost

one in four children in nursery

school are learning a skill that even some adults have

yet to master: using the Internet. About 23per cent of

children in nursery school -- kids age 3, 4, or 5 -- have

gone online





A t the end of the 20th century, 90 per cent of data on

Africa was stored in Europe and the United States.





F acebook now has 24 million users who spend an av-

erage of 14 minutes on the site every time they visit.

This is up from 8 minutes last September, according to

Hitwise, a traffic measuring service.



77 | April 2010 mini

WWW

M ySpace has 67 million

numbers -- nearly 3

times as many as Facebook!

MySpace users spend an aver-

age of 30 minutes on the site

each time they visit.





If you want to sell your

book on Amazon.com, you

can set the price, but then they will take a 55 per cent

cut and leave you with only 45 per cent.





M r Tomlinson was the first person on records to

have sent an email. His email address was: tom-

linson@bbn-tenexa. He had invented this software that

allowed messages to be sent between computers. He is

also credited with the use of the @ in email addresses.





C ounting only domain name sites with content, Net-

craft has tracked the growth of the internet since

1995 and says of the 100m,

around 48 million are active sites did You

that are updated regularly. When

it began observing sites through

know?

the domain name system in 1995, The first GPS

there were 18,000 web sites in satellite was

existence. launched in 1978





mini 78 | April 2010

WWW

O n the Internet, a ‘bastion did You

host’ is the only host compu-

ter that a company allows to be

know?

addressed directly from the pub- In Britain on

lic network. January 1st

1985, the first

call on a mobile

A round 1 per cent of the

world’s 650 million corpo-

rate e-mail accounts are plugged

(cell) phone was

made by Ernie

into hardware and software that Wise, comedian

forwards incoming messages to and one half of

a mobile device. And about the famous duo

3.65 million of them use Morecambe and

a BlackBerry. Wise.







A lmost half of people online have at least three e-

mail accounts. In addition the average consumer

has maintained the same e-mail address for four to

six years.





S pam accounts for

over 60 per cent of all

email, according to Mes-

sageLabs. Google says

at least one third of all

Gmail servers are filled

with spam



79 | April 2010 mini

WWW

Y ahoo started out as “Jerry and David’s Guide to

the World Wide Web”. Jerry Yang and David Filo

were PhD candidates

at Stanford in 1994

when they started

the site.





T he first Web browser was already capable of down-

loading and displaying movies, sounds and any file

type supported by the operating

did You system.

know?

multiple inde-

pendent tests

‘C arnivore’ is the Internet

surveillance system devel-

oped by the US Federal Bureau

have measured of Investigation (FBI), who de-

up to four times veloped it to monitor the elec-

the radiation tronic transmissions of criminal

coming out of suspects.

the earpiece of a

cellular phone,

than out of the

antenna

A nthony Greco, aged 18, be-

came the first person arrest-

ed for spim (unsolicited instant

messages) on February 21, 2005.





A NeXT computer used by Tim Berners-Lee was the

world’s first Web server



mini 80 | April 2010

WWW

T he first web site

was built at CERN.

CERN is the French

acronym for European

Council for Nuclear Re-

search and is located at

Geneva, Switzerland.







T he World Wide Web is the did You

most extensive implementa-

tion of hypertext but it is not the

know?

only one. A computer help file is GPS was origi-

actually a hypertext document. nally developed

for military use.

An executive de-

T he concept of stylesheets

was already in place when

the first browser was released.

cree in the 1980’s

made it available

to the general

population. The

W orldWideWeb was pro-

grammed with Objective C development of

small, cheap mi-

croprocessors in

H ypertext is implemented

in the Web as links in the

browser window. Links are refer-

the 1990’s led to

the small, cheap

ences to text that the user wants GPS units you

to access. When a link is clicked, can buy today.





81 | April 2010 mini

WWW

the referenced text is displayed did You

or bought into focus.

know?

he address of the world’s first Shopping for a

T web server is http://info.cern. new HDTV? Plas-

ch/ The URL of the first web page ma TVs consume

was http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hy- far more energy

pertext/WWW/TheProject.html. than LCDs, and

Although this page is not hosted they waste it as

anymore at CERN, a later version heat energy.

of the page is posted at http://

www.w3.org/History/19921103hypertext/hypertext/

WWW/TheProject.html.





I n December 1991, the first institution in the US to

adopt the web was the Stanford Linear Accelerator

Center (SLAC). True to the Berners-Lee vision, it was

used to display an online catalog of SLAC’s documents.





M arc Andreessen started Netscape

and released Netscape Navigator

in 1994. During the height of its popu-

larity, Netscape Navigator accounted

for almost 90 per cent of all web use.





T he first browser that made the web

available to PC and Mac users was



mini 82 | April 2010

WWW

did You Mosaic. It was developed by

know? National Center for Super-

computing (NCSA) led by Marc

The minimum Andreessen in February, 1993.

number of satel- Mosaic was one of the first

lites needed to graphical web browsers and

show your position led to an explosion in web use.

on the GPS device is

3. A signal from one

GPS satellite will

just tell you your

A pril 30, 1993 is an impor-

tant date for the Web be-

cause on that day, CERN an-

distance from that nounced that anyone may use

particular satellite. WWW technology freely.

If you know your ap-

proximate latitude

and longitude,

you can figure out

M icrosoft released Inter-

net Explorer on 1995.

This event initiated the brows-

which point you’re er wars. By bundling Internet

at. Four satellites Explorer with the Windows

are necessary to ac- operating system, by 2002,

curately determine Internet Explorer became the

altitude. In general, most dominant web browser

the more GPS satel- with a market share over 95

lites your receiver per cent.

can get a fix on, the

more accurate your

location will be. I t was in the Conference

Dinner in May 26, 1994



83 | April 2010 mini

WWW

where the first Best of WWW

awards were given. It was by

stupid

quotes pure coincidence that the jazz

band that played during the

“Computers in the awards was called “Wolfgang

future may weigh and the Were Wolves”

no more than 1.5

tons.”

[Popular

Mechanics, forecasting

O nly 4 per cent of Arab

women use the Inter-

net. Moroccan women rep-

the relentless march of

resent almost a third of

science, 1949]

that figure.





A s of July 2009, Microsoft Internet Explorer ac-

counted for 67.68 per cent of all browsers used.

Mozilla Firefox was used by 22.47 per cent of all users.





T he development of standards for the World Wide

Web is managed by the

W3C or the World Wide Web

consortium.The W3C was

founded in October, 1994 and

is headed by Tim Berners-Lee





T he first White House web-

site was launched dur-

ing the Clinton-Gore admin-



mini 84 | April 2010

WWW

istration on October 21, 1994. did You

Coincidentally, the site www.

whitehouse.com linked to a por-

know?

nography web site. There are 21

active GPS satel-

lites and 3 oper-

O pen source technology domi-

nates the web. The most

common software used for web-

ating spares. The

GPS satellites

serving is called LAMP standing orbit the earth

for the Linux operating system, at an altitude

Apache web server, MySQL data- of 12,000 miles.

base and PHP scripting language They travel in

one of six orbits,

all inclined 55

T he “www” part of a web site

(www.google.com) is optional

and is not required by any web

degrees relative

to the equator,

policy or standard. and are spaced

60 degrees

apart. Their

D espite IPv4’s 4.3 billion

unique addresses, it is fore-

casted that by 2011, the address

orbital period is

12 hours. The full

space will be consumed. A newer set of satellites

scheme called IPv6 is slowly re- became opera-

placing IPv4 in some countries. tional in 1994.

IPv6 has the capability to ad-

dress 2128 computers. To give perspective to this very

big number, the world’s population of 6.5 billion people



85 | April 2010 mini

WWW

as of 2006 can be given 295

unique addresses.





Y

ouTube’s bandwidth re-

quirements to upload

and view all those videos

cost as much as 1 million dollars a day and growing.

The revenues generated by YouTube cannot pay for its

upkeep.

did You

T he blue coloured links on a

web page is just a browser know?

default because way back on the SMS is being

days when monitors only had 16 used by more

colours, blue was the darkest people than the

colour that did not affect text internet and it

legibility. has twice the

number of users

than there are TV

A ll three letter word combi-

nations from aaa.com to zzz.

com are already registered as

set owners. More

people use SMS

domain names. than have bank

accounts!



A round 75 per cent of the mu-

sic that is available for download has never been

purchased and it is costing money just to be on the

server.



mini 86 | April 2010

WWW

O ne million domain names are did You

registered every month.

know?

The first ever

A ccording to AT&T vice presi-

dent Jim Cicconi, 8 hours of

video is uploaded into YouTube

camera took 8

hours to take a

every minute. This was on April photograph. It

2008. On May 21, 2009, YouTube consisted of bitu-

received 20 hours of video con- men (tar) over a

tent per minute. metal plate. The

exposed parts

of the tar would

O f the 13 million music files

available on the web, 52,000

tunes accounted for 80 per cent

harden and the

soft part cleaned

of download. away.





B y 2012 it has been said that there will be 17 bil-

lion devices connected to the internet. In most of

Asia, mobile phones are leading the way to internet

connectivity.





T he term Deep Web is used to refer to a wealth of

information that is at least 400 to 550 times larger

than the searchable Internet. This content consisting

of most of the information on today’s active websites

is stored in databases which are invisible to search en-

gines. This information contains data such as prices of



87 | April 2010 mini

WWW

items, airfares and other stuff that will never surface

unless somebody queries for that information. The

Deep Web and all that hidden information is what pre-

vents search engines from giving us a definitive answer

to simple questions like “How much is the cheapest air-

fare from New York to London next Thursday”?





I n a recent survey con-

ducted by security special-

ist Symantec of the 100 most

unsafe and malware infested

web sites, 48 per cent of them

feature adult content.





N aked women make up 80

per cent of all the pictures

on the internet.





T he online population of Fa- did You

cebook, 250 million users

worldwide, and MySpace, which

know?

had 100 million accounts by After Microsoft

2007, are bigger than the popu- purchased 2% of

lations of many nations world- facebook for $30

wide. On April 2008, Facebook million, it gained

overtook MySpace in terms of a value of $15 bil-

monthly visits. lion in 2007





mini 88 | April 2010

WWW

did You

know? I

t took the Web only 4 years to

reach 50 million users. Radio

took 38 years while TV made it in

The chairman 13 years.

of IBM Thomas

Watson infa-

mously predicted

that there was

A mazon.com was formerly

known as Cadabra.com.



a total world

market of only 5

computers!

A blogger Kyle MacDonald,

made history in 2006 by trad-

ing his way to glory. Starting out

with a paper clip, he traded his

way to increasingly costlier items and of value includ-

ing a years rent and an afternoon with Alice Cooper.

He eventually trad-

ed a film role for a

two-storey farm-

house Kipling, Sas-

katchewan.





B it torrents, depending on location, are estimated to

consume 27 to 55 per cent of all internet bandwidth

as of February, 2009.





D omain registration was free until the National Sci-

ence Foundation decided to change this on Sep-

tember 14th, 1995.



89 | April 2010 mini

WWW

I t is estimated that one of did You

every eight married couples

started by meeting online.

know?

The first coin op-

erated machine

L ee Stein invented the first on-

line electronic bank in 1994

entitled, “First Virtual Holdings”.

ever designed

was a holy-water

dispenser that

required a five-

T he Internet is roughly 35 per

cent English, 65 per cent non-

English with the Chinese at 14

drachma piece

to operate. It was

per cent. Yet only 13 per cent of the brainchild of

world’s population i.e. 812 million the Greek scien-

are Internet users as of Decem- tist Hero in the

ber 2004. North America has the first century AD.

highest continental concentration

with 70 per cent of the populace using the Internet.





O fficial statistics in the UK

say that 29 per cent of

women have never used the

internet, but only 20 per cent

of men.





I n 1995, Bob Metcalfe

coined the phrase ‘The Web

might be better than sex’.



mini 90 | April 2010

WWW

I celand has the highest per centage of Internet us-

ers at 68 per cent. The United States stands at 56

per cent. 34 per cent of all Malaysians use the Internet

while only eight per cent of Jordanians are connected,

4 per cent of Palestinians; 0.6 per cent of Nigerians and

0.1 per cent of Tajikistanis.





E mployees at Google are encouraged to use 20 per

cent of their time working on their own projects.

Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that

grew from this working model.





A fghanistan has a com-

bined telephone pen-

etration of 3.4 per cent.





S omeone is a victim

of a cybercrime every

10 seconds, and it is on

the rise.





T he first search engine for Gopher files was called

Veronica, created by the University of Nevada Sys-

tem Computing Services group.





T he Electrohippies collective is an international

group of hactivists based in Oxfordshire, England.



91 | April 2010 mini

WWW









The first Digit Web Awards back in the 2001 issue



mini 92 | April 2010

WWW



O ne of the 2001 Digit Web Awards winners was

Khoj.com, for the best search engine in India.

This was at a time when Google wasn’t as popular

as it is today. Traveljini.com was the best travel site

but if we check today, it’s defunct. Makemytrip was

one of the runner-ups. Rediff was the best of the

Indian portals, and is still popular today. Rediffmail

was one of the most preferred mail services, and

though Gmail might be everyone’s favourite now,

Rediffmail isn’t completely ignored either.







L urking is to read through mailing lists or news

groups and get a feel of the topic before posting

one’s own messages.





T he internet was called the ‘Galactic Network’ in

memos written by MIT’s JCR Licklider in 1962.





T he first internet worm was did You

created by Robert Morris, Jr,

and attacked more than 6,000 know?

Internet hosts. Hotwired was the

first Web site to

feature a banner

S RS stands for Shared Regis-

try Server which is the cen- ad



93 | April 2010 mini

WWW

tral system for all accredited registrars to access, reg-

ister and control domain names.





T he search engine Lycos

is named after Lycosidae

which is a latin name for the

wolf spider family





I t is believed that Subhash Ghai’s film Taal was the

first Bollywood movie to be widely promoted on the

internet.





R ob Glasser’s company

Progressive Networks

launched the RealAudio

system on April 10, 1995.





B utler Jeeves of the in-

ternet site AskJeeves.

com made its debut as a

large helium balloon in the

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day

parade in 2000.





I n Beijing, the internet community has coined the

word ‘Chortal’ as a shortened version of ‘Chinese

Portal’.



mini 94 | April 2010

WWW

SUDOKU









S atyam Online became the first private ISP in De-

cember 1998 to offer internet connections in India.





I n 1946, the Merriam Webster defined a computer as

a person who tabulates numbers, acountant, actu-

ary, book keeper.



95 | April 2010 mini

WWW

I n 1969, Advanced Research did You

Projects Agency (ARPA) went

online connecting four major US

know?

universities. The idea was to have The longest

a backup in case a military attack phone cable is a

destroyed conventional commu- submarine cable

nication system. called FLAG

(Fiber-Optic

Link Around the

T he first ever ISP was Com-

puServe which still exists un-

der AOL, Time Warner.

Globe). It spans

16,800 miles

from Japan

to the United

J eff Bezos while starting his

business could not name his

website Cadabra due to copyright

Kingdom and can

carry 600,000

issues. He later named it amazon. calls at a time.

com.









mini 96 | April 2010

WWW

DIGIT 2008 Anniversary issue









97 | April 2010 mini

GAMING









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

opened a game addiction hotline. Korean officials

are terrified of what they term to be a gaming addiction

epidemic. In addition to this, many South Korean hospi-

tals and psychiatric clinics have opened to specifically

treat this “problem”





A mazingly, chromosome 7 of our genome has the

name “Sonic the Hedgehog” — famous SEGA mascot.



mini 98 | April 2010

GAMING

I n 1986, Nintendo released a special Disk System

peripheral for the NES in Japan. Among its features

was a microphone in the con-

troller, which certain games

used, including an updated

version of the original Zelda.

You had to destroy enemies by

shouting into the mic.





M arlon Brando had re-

corded lines for the EA

videogame ‘The Godfather’,

just before his death. Sadly, it

wasn’t used because he was

so old, that his voice was feeble

and weak. They went on to hire did You

somebody who sounded just like

him to do the job

know?

Inkjet print-

ome numbers now! Of the ers print small

S so called sixth generation micro dots on the

gaming platforms, there are 33.5 printed material

million Playstation 3s, 77 million that are yellow

Nintendo Wiis, 125 million Nin- in color and can

tendo DS’, 55.9 million PSPs and tell the FBI your

39 million Xbox 360s sold world- printer type.

wide. This is just about enough



99 | April 2010 mini

GAMING

to give every man, woman and

child in the United States and

stupid

quotes Canada, a gaming console!

“Microsoft is

not the answer.

Microsoft is the

A tari took it’s name from

the Chinese game Go!. It

specifically refers to a situa-

question. NO is the tion where a stone or group of

answer.” – [Erik stones is in a situation where it

Naggum, compu- can be captured by opponents.

ter programmer of Ironically, Atari found itself in

SGML, Emacs, and this situation when a French

Lisp] company took it over recently.





A round 145 million people

play video games. The

worldwide average gamer is

Math

triv!a

28 years old. Fabrice Bellard used

a desktop computer to

calculate the mathemati-



T he Dragon Quest series

was so popular in Japan in

the late 80s and the early 90s

cal constant pi to about

2.7 trillion digits, about

123 billion more than

the previous record. It

that the company that made took a total of 131 days

it, Enix, was advised by Gov- to finish the task and this

ernment officials to release version of pi takes over

a terabyte of hard disk

newer games in the series on space to store.

weekends so as to stop the



mini 100 | April 2010

GAMING

massive amounts of ‘sick leaves’ did You

that happened when the game

released on weekdays!

know?

A survey showed

that 5% of all

A PlayStation 3 Blu-ray disc

can hold up to 20 GB of data

or the equivalent of about 2000

laptop users fall

asleep in their

Nintendo 64 game cartridges. beds mistakenly

using their lap-

tops as pillows

S ixteen times a second is the

fastest a key can be pressed

on a keyboard or controller. Toshuyuki Takahashi, a Jap-

anese, is the record holder.





T he idea for Pokemon,

the wildly popular

Game Boy phenomenon

occurred to its creator

Satoshi Tajiri while collect-

ing caterpillars as a child

and watching them grow

into butterflies.





T he absurdly tough

shooting game, Ikaru-

ga, that was sold in Japan,

came with a disc recording



101 | April 2010 mini

GAMING

the country’s best players completing levels with non-

stop combos and beating bosses in astounding time.





O ver 20 million copies

of Super Mario World

were sold, and it went on

to become the bestsell-

ing game of it’s genera-

tion. This made the stag-

gering 20,000 hours that

went into developing it

totally worthwhile.





T he first game to incorporate real time audio effects,

or basically, the difference in the same sound in dif-

ferent physical environments was Duke Nukem 3D.

When the player shot his gun in the water, the sound

would be muffled and gurgly.





I magine a girl standing outside a house and knocking

on a window. The camera then moves in and shows

her horrified family scared to death. The girl is a zombie!

This insanely scary ad for the Japanese game Siren was

pulled off the air after parents started protesting and

did not let children buy the game.









mini 102 | April 2010

GAMING

T he first coin-operated ‘com- did You

puter’ game was created in

1971 by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck. know?

It was called Galaxy Game and “Switched-off”

the only unit ever built was in- devices account

stalled at Stanford University in for 40 percent

September of that year. Appar- of the energy

ently, eager punters would en- consumed by

dure a one hour wait just to have electronics in an

a go. average home





T he 80’s arcade game Phoenix was the first game

ever, to introduce the concept of end-level bosses.

The game had players shoot their way through an alien

mothership’s defences





H alo’s Master Chief, is the first gaming character to

be given a wax statue by Madame Tussauds.





D esigned by Ralph

Baer and released

in 1972, the Magnavox

Odyssey was the first

videogame console

and the first cartridge-

based system. It was

also the home of the



103 | April 2010 mini

GAMING

first console light gun, called Shooting Gallery.





R eleased in November 1971 in the United States,

Computer Space was the first commercially re-

leased coin-operated arcade game and is generally re-

garded as the first commercially available video game.

It was created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, who

would later found Atari.





I n 1988 Electronic Arts be-

came the first major publisher did You

to release an ‘online’ multiplayer

game. Dan Bunten’s Modem

know?

Wars allowed two players to sit Contrary to the

at their own computers and play potrayal of lasers

over a telephone line. in many science

fiction movies,

a laser beam

W hile games such as Doom,

Marathon, Quake, Duke

Nukem 3D and GoldenEye 007

would not be

visible (at least to

may have defined the first-person the naked eye) in

shooter genre, the first docu- the near vacuum

mented ‘first-person shooter 3D of space as there

multiplayer networked game’ was would be insuf-

called Spasim (space + simulation ficient matter in

= Spasim). It appeared in 1974 and the environment

could be played by up to 32 people. to make it visible





mini 104 | April 2010

GAMING



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

roller skating rink and assembled by - so the story

goes - pot-smoking students and hippies.





T he first name for Electronic Arts was actually Amazin’

Software, but company founder Trip Hawkins want-

ed the title to reflect software as an art form, so it was

subsequently changed to Electronic Arts.





W ii is the first Nintendo console to be sold outside of

Japan that doesn’t feature the  company’s name

as part of the trademark.





T he very first gaming East-

er egg is thought to have stupid

been tucked away in the 1979 quotes

Atari 2600 title, Adventure. By

carrying a hidden pixel, players

Real men don’t

could access a hidden room

use backups, they

where the message “Created

post their stuff on

by Warren Robinett” was dis-

a public ftp server

played.

and let the rest of

the world make

copies.” [Linus

T he first name Atari founder

Nolan Bushnell intended

for the company was Syzygy,

Torvalds, creator

of Linux Kernel]



105 | April 2010 mini

GAMING

did You an astronomical term used to de-

know? scribe the sun, moon and earth in

total eclipse.

At the 2008 CES,

Fujitsu showed a

laptop PC whose

outside plastic T he maximum score possible in

Pac-Man is 3,333,360.

shell is 50 per-

cent vegetable-

based polymer U K actress Rhona Mitra was

the first official Lara Croft

model.

alloy





A tari Football, is the first true sport-based video

game, there’s no argument that it was the first ar-

cade cabinet to feature a ‘trak-ball’ interface, or that

the game featured the first

programmed scrolling pitch.





T he first major movie

based on a video game

was the critically assassi-

nated Super Mario.





I n the original arcade Don-

key Kong game, Mario

was called Jumpman and

he was a carpenter, not a

plumber.



mini 106 | April 2010

GAMING



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

peared in Sonic the Hedge-

hog 3, Ready 2 Rumble Round 2, did You

Space Channel 5 1 & 2, GTA: Vice

City and, obviously, Moonwalker.

know?

In 2007, com-

IFA 2001 is the first and panies with an

F only game to date  to use  a enviro-tech focus

“scratch and sniff” CD. The disc received $3.95

smelt of turf. billion in venture

funding, a 38

he PSone was initially a percent increase

T Nintendo console with a over 2006. IT

partnership with Sony to de- asset recovery

velop the electronics. When (selling refur-

Nintendo abandoned it, Sony bished PCs)—is

decided to continue and com- now a $6 billion–

plete the console anyway. a-year business.





S pacewar was the first sci-fi game. Students at MIT

created in 1961 and it lets users control spaceships

with missile firing capability.





T he makers of The Sims tried languages such as

Ukranian, Tagalog and Navajo before fixing on the

nonsensical ‘Simlish’ dialogue for the game, The Sims.



107 | April 2010 mini

GAMING

Math

triv!a T

The probability of life

omb Raider’s Lara Croft

was originally called Lau-

evolving at random is ra Cruz.

1040,000 to 1 as calculated

by the late astronomer

Sir Fred Hoyle.

T he English translation of

the Japanese word Nin-

tendo is “Leave luck to heav-

en”





E ach of the cars in the racing

title Gran Turismo 4 took did You

around a month per developer

to create. know?

While old CRT

monitors use

T he Texas Instruments TI-83

calculator has more graph-

ics processing power than the

more energy

to show white

Commodore 64. Amazingly, than black, LCDs

some basic C64 games can spend slightly

even be programmed into it. more energy to

show black than

white.

T he Xbox was originally going

to be called the DirectX-box,

after Microsoft’s programming interface for Windows.









mini 108 | April 2010

GAMING

did You

T he Sims managed to spend

82 weeks within the UK’s top

ten sales chart.

know?

Fifteen billion

batteries are

H alo 2 earned the most in a

single day — $125 million in

a day, more than any movie in its

made and sold

across the globe

first day of sale. every year.







3 2 million of the 100 million Game Boys are in Japan,

44 million in America.





E arly iterations of Nintendo’s

failed Virtual Boy console in-

cluded a gun you’d set vertical on a

flat surface, which would project a

3D image into the air.





I f, for some strange reason, you

still have a Madden NFL 06

save game on your memory card,

a special Madden van will be un-

locked when you start up Burnout

Revenge on the Playstation 2.





T he violent racer Carmageddon

was released in the UK with



109 | April 2010 mini

GAMING

zombies. The In-

dian version had no

cows. The game was

banned in Germany.





T he Shenmue

game made by Yu

Suzuki in Japan was

so wildly popular that

it’s cutscenes were

actually played as

movies in theatres!





S tarcraft is the first computer game to be played in

space. It was sent on shuttle mission shuttle mis-

sion STS-96 back in 1999 by Daniel T. Barry, a mission

specialist.

did You

T he first female video game

designer is widely consid-

know?

ered to be Carol Shaw. She cre- The average

ated 3D Tic-Tac-Toe for the Atari office drone uses

2600 in 1979. Her best known up 10,000 sheets

game is Activision’s River Raid, of paper—about

which itself was one of the first a whole tree’s

vertical scrolling shooters. worth of wood

pulp—per year.





mini 110 | April 2010

GAMING

T etris has been sold since did You

1982; it has sold 40 million

and earned 800 million in the

know?

Duke Nukem

process.

Forever is the

best example of

A whopping 11.5 million sub-

scribers play World of

Warcraft - that’s more or less the

Vaporware... an-

nounced games

that never made

population of Goa

it to the market.

The game was in

W ii is the most power-effi-

cient of all the consoles. It

only consumes 18.4W as com-

development for

12 years before

being aban-

pared to the PS3’s 199W and

doned.

Xbox’s 186W.





N intendo was originally founded in 1889 as a maker

of playing cards!



S ega Dreamcast released in

1999 was the first console

game machine to sport the

128-bit architechture.





T he first all-computer chess

championship was held

in New York in 1970, and was

won by CHESS 3.0 – a program



111 | April 2010 mini

GAMING

Now for some personal computing with this Sudoku









written by Slate, Atkin and Gorlen at Northwestern Uni-

versity, Illinois.





I n 1968, International Master David Levy made

a $3,000 bet with John McCarthy a researcher in

Aritificial Intelligence at Stanford University that no



mini 112 | April 2010

GAMING

5 Bad a$$ game villains of all time



The Nazis

Too many games to count



F rom Commandos to the famous

Medal Of Honor series to eve-

rybody’s favourite WW2 shooter,

the Wolfenstein series, to the sexy

protagonist BloodRayne, these bad

boys are the ultimate fodder for our collective can-

nons. Whether the genre be strategy, or a good old

fashioned fps, the sheer number of games based on

obliterating fascists are too many to count.





Arthas

Warcraft III



W hat more can we say about

this guy? He allows his

soul to get corrupted by hate and

revenge, betrays his Kingdom,

slays his own father and very

nearly succeeds at wiping out

life from the world of Azeroth. In

combat a mighty foe wielding Frostmourne – a blade

crafted to steal souls





113 | April 2010 mini

GAMING









Shodan

System Shock series



H er virtual omnipresence in the game is discon-

certing – you just feel she’s watching every

move and after a while, you feel she’s reading your

thoughts. Although you never actually face off with

Shodan, she’ll keep you busy by turning mutants, ro-

bots and cyborgs after your hide. Every step you take,

every move you make – she’s watching you!







mini 114 | April 2010

GAMING

The Monolith

S.T.A.L.K.E.R

Okay. So we’re not talking about

one baddie over here, but an en-

tire cult of them. Anyone who

has played the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R

will recall the last level swarm-

ing with Monolith fighters trying

their level best to keep you away

from the finale. They’re well

trained, heavily armed and armoured and pretty

much hostile to everyone they come across, open-

ing fire indiscriminately.





Hellknight

Doom 3

This is a bad character to run into

in a narrow corridor. Even worse is

to run into him in a dimly lit narrow

corridor. For he is over 10 feet tall,

and not only is he the ultimate me-

lee fighter with those claws and that musculature

but he can throw large energy balls at you that do

splash damage. He is also immensely tough to kill,





115 | April 2010 mini

GAMING

chess computer in the world would beat him. He won

his bet.





O n June 17,1980, Atari’s ‘As-

teroids’ and ‘Lunar Lander’

were the first two video games

to ever be registered in the Copy-

right Office





M ario, one of the most popular video game characters

was named after Nintendo’s landlord.





D aphne Bavelier at the University of Rochester, New

York, exploded the myth that video gaming is bad for

your eyes, when her experiments clearly showed that video

games improves a person’s abil-

ity to perceive contrast, a skill

we rely on in dark conditions. In

other words, playing first person

shooters may actually make

you a better night driver.





P layStation 2 hit the shelves

in Japan on March 4, 2000

and sold 98,000 units in four

hours.







mini 116 | April 2010

GAMING

This one is known as the Ouchi Illusion, shake the

book (or your head) and the disc in the center will

pop out and appear to “float” over the page









T he first computer book to sell one million copies

was 101 BASIC Computer Games which was pub-

lished by Creative Computing in 1978 in the US.





T he first 32-bit home video game system was the

Panasonic 3DO released in 1993









117 | April 2010 mini

GAMING

S ony released the first matte black version of its

Playstation in 1997, which enabled programmers

to create their own games in the C programming lan-

guage, called Net Yaroze.





T he first software to be imported from the Soviet

Union to the US was Tetris, developed by Alexey

Pazhitov in 1985





I n 2003, a 14-year old Romanian boy collapsed and

was hospitalised because he’d been playing Counter

Strike for nine days in a row.





D eep Blue’s chess playing program is written in C

and runs under AIX operating system. It is capable

of evaluating 10 crore positions per second.





W illiam Higginbotham created what might have

been the first video game in 1958. His game

called ‘Tennis for Two’, was cre-

ated and played on Brookhaven

National Laboratory oscilloscope.





S ega release Sonic the

hedgehog in 1991 as a di-

rect response to Nintendo’s Su-

per NES gaming system.



mini 118 | April 2010

GAMING

Across

1. Marks in game

space that fade





P acman got

its name

from the Jap-

after some time,

like blood splat-

ters, bullet holes

and footprints

6. the “original”

anese word version of a game,

not one of the

‘pacu’ mean- commonly played

mods

ing ‘to munch’. 8. Staying in one

place and firing,

Since pacu is or even hiding in a

game as against

pronounced “rushing”

9. A recording of a

the same as previous run in a

‘f*** you’ only with a p sound its name racing game that

is overlaid over

was Pacman. the current run

12. Macros and

actions assigned

to keyboards are





G upei Yokoi was the creator of the

Game Boy and Virtual Boy. He

worked on Famicom, the Metroid se-

Down

called this





2. The act of your

character ap-

ries, Gameboy pocket and did extensive pearing within a

gamespace

work on the system we knew today as 3. Field of View

4. A group or team

the Nintendo Entertainment system of gamers

5. A single level

in a game, or a

gamespace area





I n 1981, Shigeru Miyamoto guided

by Gunpei Yokoi made the first

game for Nintendo starring Mario

loaded at once

7. A script or

software that au-

tomatically plays

a multiplayer first

which was previously the arcade game person shooter

10. Firing in a game

Donkey Kong. without taking too

much trouble to

aim

11. Heads up display









119 | April 2010 mini

GAMING









mini 120 | April 2010

GAMING

I n Spring 1967, MacHACK VI became the first chess

program to beat a human at the Massachussets

State Chess Championship.





S ara Lhadi logged 16,799 hours grinding away in

Runescape between November 2004 and October

2009 (we guess she hasn’t stopped). That’s nearly 700

days, which is nearly two solid years of game time!

Also, that averages out to 9 hours 20 minutes a day.





W ii Sports, is the biggest selling game of all time

with over 46 million copies sold





T he videogame with the most advanced character

face generator is the Bioware creation Mass Effect.

Blending together over 150 different facial features, the

system offers over 1 billion permutations for the face of

lead character Commander Shepard.









121 | April 2010 mini

GAMING

DIGIT 2009 Anniversary issue









mini 122 | April 2010

BYTES

BITS & BITS & BYTES

BITS BYTES

TECH ONE-LINERS



Windows contains FAT. Use Linux -- you

won’t ever have to worry about weight.



Programming is an art form that fights back.



Unix is user-friendly. It’s just very selective about

who its friends are.



The best way to accelerate a Mac is at 9.8 m /

sec^2



The only problem with troubleshooting is

that sometimes trouble shoots back.



Do files get embarrassed when they get un-

zipped?



Do you remember when you only had to pay for

windows when *you* broke them?



If you can’t beat your computer at chess,

try kickboxing.





123 | April 2010 mini

BITS & BYTES

If the automobile had followed the same

development cycle as the computer, a

Rolls-Royce today would cost $100, get a

million miles to the gallon, and explode once a

year, killing everyone inside.



One picture is worth 128K words.



Owners of digital watches: Your day’s are

numbered!



Programmers don’t die, they just GOSUB without

RETURN.



There can never be a computer language in which

you cannot write a bad program.



There were computers in Biblical times. Eve had

an Apple.



What boots up must come down.



Why do they call this a word processor?

It’s simple, ... you’ve seen what food proc-

essors do to food, right?



mini 124 | April 2010

BITS & BYTES

WORD SEARCH SOLUTION

U I R



A P P L E I P O D



I I M



D L N A X



G N O M E I



D D E L E C



A R M E



R O O S X



P I P R M



R A I D Y E L P





The Internet: where men are men, women are

men, and children are FBI agents.



A printer consists of three main parts: the

case, the jammed paper tray and the blink-

ing red light.



125 | April 2010 mini

BITS & BYTES

TECH CROSSWORD SOLUTION









mini 126 | April 2010

BITS & BYTES

WEB2.0 CROSSWORD SOLUTION









127 | April 2010 mini

BITS & BYTES

GAMING CROSSWORD SOLUTION









mini 128 | April 2010

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