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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.
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.
INTRODUCTION
01
COMPUTING
05
TECH FIRSTS
39
WWW
61
GAMING
98
BITS & BYTES
123
3 | April 2010 mini
First DIGIT Anniversary issue
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
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
I ntel’s code name for its effort to make the one GHz
microprocessor was codenamed Project Foster.
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.
T he first success-
ful high level pro-
gramming language,
IBM FORTRAN was
developed in 1954.
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.
T he first computer
game was developed
at MIT and was called
spacewar! The game
even had realistic star
charts. You can play the
I n 2000, Ericsson
gave a demo of
the first bluetooth
phone, the T36 at
the CommunicAsia
festival.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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)
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
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 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.
S omeone is a victim
of a cybercrime every
10 seconds, and it is on
the rise.
R ob Glasser’s company
Progressive Networks
launched the RealAudio
system on April 10, 1995.
T he absurdly tough
shooting game, Ikaru-
ga, that was sold in Japan,
came with a disc recording
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
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!
The Nazis
Too many games to count
Arthas
Warcraft III
Shodan
System Shock series
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,
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
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
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