Tech Trivia : Did You Know? This Week in History …
Computers Before Keyboards Computing was a lot more challenging before July 4th 1956 because that’s when MIT revolutionised their Whirlwind Computer … by introducing a keyboard ! Before that, interacting with computers was a laborious, time-consuming process. Programmers would offer instructions to these mammoth machines by the manual insertion of punched cards, an operation requiring […]
Tech Trivia : Did You Know? This Week in History …
‘Wireless World’ This week, on June 28th 1965, ‘Early Bird’ (Intelsat I) was activated. It wasn’t just another satellite; it was the first commercial communications satellite to be nestled in a geosynchronous orbit. This is where it ‘parked’ at 22,236 miles above the equator in the line of the earth’s rotation, appearing stationary to observers on […]
Tech Trivia : Did You Know? This Week in History …
QWERTY Keyboards. Mightier Than The Gun? In a world where typing has long outstripped writing, few people know the story of how the Qwerty keyboard came about or that famous gun manufacturer Remington was involved On June 23rd, 1868, the Sholes and Glidden typewriter was patented. This was the first commercially practical device of its […]
Tech Trivia : Did You Know? This Week in History …
Consider all the atoms in 10 million galaxies … At midnight on June 18th, 1997, the DESCHALL Project bore fruit. The challenge had been to use ‘Brute Force’ to discover the meaning of a message which had been encrypted. Going through up to seven billion possibilities per second, the key was cracked after 96 days […]
Tech Trivia : Did You Know? This Week in History …
Would E.T. Be Better Off With Zoom? In the iconic movie E.T (1982), a memorable scene shows the alien rigging up a child’s toy (Speak & Spell) with an umbrella, a record player and other paraphernalia to make a makeshift intergalactic communicator, while uttering the unforgettable line “E.T. phone home.” This moment demonstrates Spielberg’s genius, […]
Tech Trivia : Did You Know? This Week in History …
For a Few Bits More On June 8th, 1978, a technological milestone was born, significantly shaping the future of computing because this was the day that marked the introduction of the Intel 8086, Intel’s inaugural 16-bit microprocessor. In the world of computing and microprocessors, the term “bit” signifies the basic units of data a processor […]
Tech Trivia : Did You Know? This Week in History …
02 June 1966 : Getting Off The Ground Isn’t Always Easy! Chuck Yeager (famous for being the first to break the sound barrier) mentioned in his excellent autobiography that whilst he was training Neil Amstrong in high-altitude flying, he found him a little a bit cocky. In fairness, Neil did have a training crash at one […]
Tech Trivia : Did You Know? This Week in History
Let There Be Light On May 16th, 1960, a new kind of light existed that nobody had ever seen before. This kind of light has unique properties and doesn’t exist in nature and as far as we know, it had never existed anywhere in the universe since it began, 13.8 billion years ago. Theodore Maiman […]
Tech Trivia : Did You Know? This Week in History …
The Wonderful Wizard of Woz! Steve Wozniak – business partner of Steve Jobs and co-founder of Apple – was born on August 11, 1950. Most people know that Apple went on to become one of the most valuable companies in the world and even though Steve the company way back in left in 1985, there […]
Tech Trivia : Did You Know? This Week in History …
August 6, 1997 : Microsoft & Apple Cooperate By the mid-1990s, Apple was in dangerously bad shape. The company’s market share was dwindling, its product line was confused, and it was bleeding money. Their future looked bleak, and it needed a lifeline and they all knew it. Enter Microsoft, led by Bill Gates (the then-richest […]