it quiz study guide
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IT QUIZ STUDY GUIDE – Mihir Paul © Mihir Paul 2010
IT QUIZ STUDY GUIDE – Mihir Paul © Mihir Paul 2010 ~THE AWESOME Mihir Paul 11/30/2010
IT QUIZ STUDY GUIDE – Mihir Paul © Mihir Paul 2010
History of the Internet
1. The first domain name registered was Symbolics.com. It was registered on March 15, 1985. (Link: 100 Oldest Domain Names (whoisd.com))
2. Father of the World Wide Web (WWW): Tim Bernes-Lee. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, along with Robert Cailliau, wrote the first Internet client (a browser-editor running under NeXTStep) and the first WWW server along with most of the communications software, defining Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Links: CERN Article: History of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal in 1989
3. The term hypertext was the contribution of Ted Nelson in his paper "Literary Machines" to the ACM in 1965. Link: LivingInternet.com: Ted Nelson
4. The first Smiley or Emoticon was used by Scott E. Fahlman on a Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Bulletin Board on September 19, 1982. He suggested the use of :-) to mark posts which were jokes. Fahlman's original post, which was considered lost for ever, was retrieved by CMU facility staff member Jeff Baird on 10 September 2002 as part of an effort started by Microsoft Researcher Mike Jones in February 2002. Links: Original Bboard Thread in which :-) was proposed, The First Smiley :-) by Mike Jones, Smiley Lore :-) by Scott Fahlman.
5. The popular GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) for web images was developed by CompuServe. 6. E-mail was invented by Ray Tomlinson in 1971 (Then there were only 23 computers on the Internet). The @ sign in
e-mail addresses was also his contribution in 1972. 7. The first RFC (Request For Comments) titled "Host Software", was submitted by Steve Crocker in 1969. 8. William Gibson is called the father of cyberspace. It was he who coined the name in his 1982 novel "Neuromancer". 9. The Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) was developed by Vinton Cerf and Robert E. Kahn. 10. The first graphical browser was NCSA Mosaic written by Marc Andreesen. 11. ICQ, the chat program, stands for I Seek You.
Domains and Websites
1. Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, two Ph. D. students at Stanford University. The name is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle", and it started as a tiny directory of their personal interests on the then nascent Web. The first name that they gave to it was "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web". Current CEO is Terry Samuel. Links: www.yahoo.com, A brief history of Yahoo!, Yahoo Executives.
2. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Current CEO: Dr. Eric E. Schmidt. Links: www.google.com, History of Google, The Google Timeline, Google's Yahoo Moment, Early Google History.
3. Jeff Bezos: Founded Amazon.com, which pioneered successful e-tailing. Links: The Seattle Times Article: Momentous moments at Amazon.com.
4. Hotmail, the first Web based E-mail, was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. Hotmail was online on July 4, 1996 and had 100 users within an hour. Microsoft bought Hotmail in 1997 for $400m worth of Microsoft stocks, when it had around a billion subscribers. It suffered a major fiasco on August 30, 1999 when any user could enter the account of any other user. Links: hotmail.com, Wired Article: HotMale (On Sabeer Bhatia and Hotmail).
5. Napster was founded by Shawn Fanning in May 1999. It offered peer-to-peer file sharing, allowing users to share their personal MP3 files with anyone on the Web.
6. The ZD in ZD-Net stands for Ziff-Davis.
History of Computers
1. VAX minicomputers: The VAX range of minicomputers was released by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) on October 25, 1977. It was the first commercially available 32-bit machine and was intended to replace the older PDP-11 series. The letters VAX stand for Virtual Address eXtension. VAX machines used the VMS (later called OpenVMS) operation system. VAX Links: vaxarchive.org; VAX History at WilliamBader.com; VAX History at webmythology.com.
2. Random Access Memory (RAM) was invented by Robert Dennard. Intel's 1103, released in 1970, was the world's first available dynamic RAM chip.
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3. The Winchester Drive, and the floppy disk drive were invented at IBM. 4. Ethernet was invented by Dr. Robert (Bob) Metcalfe at Xerox PARC. In 1981, Xerox introduced the Ethernet LAN in
the form of Star Ethernet Series. The first Ethernet card was the 'Etherlink' released by 3Com, which Bob founded. 5. Lady Ada Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron, is considered the world's first programmer. She worked with
Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine. 6. The IBM PC, which featured the 16-bit Intel 8088 microprocessor, came in 1981. 7. The Xerox Star 8010, developed by Xerox in 1981, featured the mouse and a desktop with icons. This was the first
computer with a graphical user interface (GUI). The GUI was first developed by Xerox in 1973 for Alto, an experimental predecessor to the Xerox Star.
8. Apple Computers: formed on April 1, 1976 by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Apple I, developed by Steve Wosniak, was based on the MOS Technologies 6502 chip. Apple II came in 1977. The operating system for Apple III, which came out in 1980, was called SOS! The Lisa, which was the first PC with a graphical user interface (GUI), was released in 1983. The Macintosh (Mac), which used the 16-bit 68000 processor from Motorola, was debuted on Jan 9, 1984.
9. Jack Kilby invented the transistor in 1958 at Texas Instruments. 10. The TRS-80 computer was brought out by Tandy. 11. Other than the GUI and the ethernet, Xerox is responsible for the invention of the notebook computer and the bit-
mapped display. 12. In 1969, Honeywell released the H316 Kitchen Computer, the first home computer. The computer could plan
menus and take care of other household businesses. 13. John Vincent Atanasoff invented the world's first electronic digital computer in 1942. It was called the Atanasoff-
Berry Computer (ABC). It was built by Atanasoff and Clifford Berry at Iowa State University during 1937-42. It incorporated several major innovations in computing including the use of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, parallel processing, and separation of memory and computing functions. The patent on the ENIAC, developed by Mauchly and Eckert, was invalidated by the US Federal Court in Oct 19, 1973.
14. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) has its root at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and the Xerox Star computer. Then they found their way into the Apple Macintosh in 1984.
15. George Shannon is regarded as the father of Information Theory. He proposed that all information could be reduced to ones and zeroes.
16. The first personal computer was the MITS Altair brought out in 1975. It used the Intel 8080 chip. MITS is short for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. The Altair was designed by Ed Roberts.
17. The first electronic computer was the Electronic Numerical and Integrator And Calculator (ENIAC) formally dedicated on 15 February, 1946, at the Moore School of Engineering of the University of Pennysylvania led by John Eckert and John Mauchly.
18. The first automatic computer was the IBM-Harward Mark I developed under Howard Heiken at the Howard University, Cambridge, Massachussets in 1944,. It was also called the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator.
19. The first Multimedia PC was the Amiga in 1985 by Commodore. Commodore was founded by Jack Tramiel. 20. Cards with holes (the idea of punched cards) were first used by Joseph Jacquard. 21. Charles Babbage is considered the Father of Computing, as he proposed the idea in 1812. 22. Abacus: was used by the Babylonians in around 3000 BC. 23. The Mouse: Original design on the mouse dates back to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and the wooden
prototype by Douglas Engelbart in 1963. The first commercially available mouse was for the IBM PC in 1982 by Mouse Systems.
24. The first Word Processor for microcomputers was the Electric Pencil written by Michael Shrayer. 25. The Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) was the first one to adopt the binary equation
system. 26. The 1977 Trinity: The 3 companies that came out with ready to run PCs in the year 1977. They were Apple, Tandy
(Of RadioShack) and Commodore. 27. The first fully transistorized supercomputer was the CDC 1604. 28. Calculi: also called counting pebbles were used by the Romans.
Operating Systems
1. Microsoft code-names. Blink.nu: Code names, phm.lu: Windows codenames and Bitsenbytes.com forum all have a good collection of code-names related to Windows OS and other Microsoft products.
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2. Microsoft Product Code-Names
Code-name Final Name Comments
Lonestar Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 OS for Microsoft Tablet PC
Whidbey Visual Studio 2005 Will ship with Longhorn
3. Whistler was the code name for Windows XP. XP stands for eXPerience. XP shared the Whistler code-name with Windows 2003 Server.
4. History of DOS gives a brief timeline of MS-DOS with features. There was also a MS-DOS 4.0, which (and not OS/2) was Microsoft's first non-Unix multitasking operating system.
5. Longhorn: Microsoft's upcoming version of Windows XP, which features a new 3D user interface code-named Avalon, security based on Palladium and a database code-named Yukon and based on SQL Server 2003. The name comes from the name of a saloon at the foot of the Whistler mountain. Whistler was the code-name for Windows XP. Links: Windows "Longhorn" FAQ, which will tell you all that you want to know about Longhorn.
6. Longhorn code names: Longhorn is the code-name for the next release of Windows. Here are some code-names related to Longhorn. Avalon is the code name for the graphics presentation technologies in Longhorn; ClickOnce is the technology in Longhorn designed to speed and simplify deployment of applications; Indigo is the .NET communications technologies; SuperFetch is the technology designed to help applications launch more quickly; Whidbey is the next generation of the Microsoft Visual Studio system of software-development tools; WinFS is the search and data storage system that provides a unified storage model for applications running on Longhorn; WinFXTM is the programming model for applications in Longhorn and Yukon is the next generation of Microsoft SQL Server database software on which the Longhorn file-system is expected to be based. Lot of code-names there! Links: See sidebox in this Microsoft PressPass.
7. Linux: The Linux kernel, which was written by Linus Torwalds in 1991, and the GNU software together makes the Linux OS, more correctly called the GNU/Linux system. Linus first announced his new OS, then unnamed, on August 25, 1991. The name Linux was coined by Ari Lemmke, who first made GNU/Linux available for download using FTP. [Links: History of Linux; linux.org]
8. Windows for Mobile: Windows CE (CE for Consumer Electronics) has roots in the Pegasus project at Microsoft. WinCE began to be called Pocket PC OS, when Microsoft came out with their own mobile device which was named Pocket PC. The latest version of WinCE is called Windows Mobile 2003 (code-named Ozone) was released on June 23, 2003. Links: Microsoft Windows Mobile Home Page, A personal look at Windows CE's history by Jason Dunn, History of Windows at the PCMuseum.
9. Blackcomb: Next release of Windows Server 2003, expected after 2005. Blackcomb will be preceded by a version of Windows XP called Longhorn.
10. UNIX: developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Labs on a PDP-7 machine in 1969. It was first called UNICS (UNIplexed operating and Computing System), a pun on its predecessor MULTICS (MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service).
11. Puma: The code name for Mac OS X 10.1. 12. Windows NT was the first network operating system from Microsoft. NT stands for New Technology. Its successor
Windows 2000 (NT version 5.0) was launched on February 17, 2000. 13. Linux was started in 1992 by Linus Torwalds, a Swedish hacker. 14. Warp is a version of OS/2, IBM's operating system. 15. Windows 3.0 was announced in 1983 and it was finally released in 1990. Windows 3.1 was released in 1992. 16. 'Project Chicago' was the code name for Windows 95 development. 17. Windows 1.0 was shipped in 1985. 18. Novel Netware, the network OS, was first released as 'Sharenet' in 1981. 19. The first two letters in any EXE program that runs on DOS, OS2 or Windows NT are "MZ". These are the initials of a
Mark Zbikowski, a Microsoft programmer. 20. Gary Kindall wrote CP/M (Control Program/Monitor) in 1974. His company Intergalactic became Digital Research in
1976. 21. GNU was developed by the Free Software Foundation started by Richard Stallman. 22. Windows 95 was released on August 24, 1995. 23. The concept of desktop was introduced in the Apple Macintosh. 24. The X11 GUI library for UNIX was developed at MIT.
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25. Tim Patterson is associated with QDOS, owned by Seattle Computer Products. Microsoft purchased the rights to
QDOS for $50,000 and renamed it as PCDOS 1.0. The first IBM PC, the ACORN, was released with PCDOS 1.0 on August 12, 1982.
26. ntoskrnl.exe is the core file for the Windows NT Kernel.
Software Products and Applications
1. Bob Scheifler wrote the X Window system, a windowing system for Unix. 2. History of GNU: GNU (GNU's Not Unix) is a complete free Unix-like software system which was conceived by
Richard Stallman in 1983. GNU, along with the Linux kernel is the base for all the Linux-based operating systems like Slackware, Debian and Red Hat. GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) is the desktop environment for GNU/Linux.
3. GNOME, the GNU Network Object Model Environment, is GNU's desktop project and was started in 1997 by Miguel de Icaza. It is GNU's replacement for free desktop libraries like Motiff and Qt and environments like CDE and KDE. Harmony is a compatible replacement library, designed to make it possible to run KDE software without using Qt.
4. Brian Fox: Wrote the BASH (Bourne Again Shell), which is most popular shell on GNU/Linux systems. 5. Roland McGrath: wrote the GNU C Library. 6. Richard M. Stallman: Started work on GNU in 1984; wrote Emacs; founded Free Software Foundation in 1985. 7. MP3 is short for MPEG Audio Layer 3 -- where MPEG stands for Motion Picture Experts Group -- and it is a
compression format for digital audio files. MP3 is the result of the work of Karlheinz Brandenburg at the Frauenhofer Institute in Erlangen, Germany in joint co-operation with Prof. Dieter Seitzer of University of Erlangen. The MP3 patent was awarded to Frauenhofer Institute in 1989. In 1997 Tomislav Uzelac, a developer at Advanced Multimedia Products, created the AMP Playback Engine for MP3. Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev added a Windows GUI to the AMP engine and created Winamp, which was offered as a free MP3 player. Links: MP3 Overview (lycos.com); Fraunhofer Institute website: History of MP3; Karlheinz Brandenburg and The Secret History of MP3 (bbc.co.uk); MP3 history with timeline by Yu-Chin Chang; Interview with Karlheinz Brandenburg (intel.com); Karlheinz Brandenburg speaks out (BBC News).
8. TeX, the text formatter, and METAFOND was written by Donald Knuth. He also authored the book "The Art of Computer Programming," considered a must read for any Computer Science student. [Links: Donald Knuth, a portrait]
9. The Apache Web Server: Apache is a widely-used free HTTP server. It was originally developed on top of the NCSA httpd server as a series of patches; hence came to be called "a patchy server", which later became the name "Apache." The first public release of Apache (version 0.6.2) came out in April 1995. Version 0.8.8 release, based on the new server architecture, codenamed Shambhala and designed by Robert Thau, was also released in 1995. Websites: Apache Software Foundation, Apache History - Timeline.
10. Jaguar is the code name for Apple's operating system Mac OS X v10.2. The code name for Max OS X v10.0 was Cheetah and for v10.1 was Puma.
11. WordStar was originally written by Seymour Rubenstein. He formed MicroPro International Inc. in 1978. WordStar for CP/M was released by MicroPro in 1979. It was later ported to MS/PC DOS by Jim Fox.
12. Opera, the popular and fast Web browser: Jon S. von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy started writing this browser in 1994 while working for Norwegian telecom Telenor. The company Opera Software ASA was founded in Oslo, Norway in 1995. The first public release was Opera 2.1 in 1996. Version 3 came in 1998, Version 4 in 2000 and Versions 5 and 6 in 2001.
13. Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) was code named as 'Denali' during development. 14. Winamp, the popular MP3 player for Windows is developed by Nullsoft. The development of Winamp was started
in 1997 by Justin Frankel in 1997. Nullsoft is now owned by AOL. 15. The first computer graphics application was the Sketchpad designed by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 on a TX-2
computer at Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT). 16. A computer game Pong was written by Nolan Bushnell in 1971. 17. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) was developed by Philip Zimmerman. It uses the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman)
algorithm for encryption. 18. Microsoft Powerpoint, the presentation software, was a product of Forethought, California. It was originally
named as 'Presenter' and was designed for Windows 2.0. Two developers worked on a Lisa machine for 16 months
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to complete the first version PowerPoint 1, which was released in April 1987. Microsoft acquired Forethought in August 1987.
19. VERONICA stands for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives. It was one of the first search application on the primitive Internet.
20. Bill Joy: Wrote ed (editor for mortals), the UNIX text editor in 1975 and vi in 1978. In 1976, he wrote a Pascal compiler for UNIX. He also wrote the utilities rsh, rcp, rlogin and the first BSD (Berkeley Software Development) release of utilities.
21. HotJava, a Java-based web browser, was developed by Patrick Naughton and Jonathan Payne (a Sun engineer) in 1994. It was initially named WebRunner.
22. Visicalc was the first spreadsheet application (Microsoft Excel is a popular example of spreadsheet software). It was written in 1979 first for the Apple II by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston and sold by Software Arts which the authors founded. VisiCalc was soon sold to Lotus Development Corporation, where it was developed into the Lotus 1-2-3.
23. PostScript, Photoshop, PageMill, Aldus PageMaker and Acrobat are all from Adobe.
Programming Languages
1. Smalltalk: The first version of Smalltalk is deployed at Xerox PARC in 1971. Smalltalk is the first object- oriented programming language with an integrated user interface, overlapping windows, integrated documents, and cut & paste editor.
2. Javascript was released by Sun and Netscape in December 1995. It is a scripting language for browsers based on the Java language. It was originally called LiveScript.
3. Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 because the Unix sed and awk tools (used for text manipulation) were no longer strong enough to support his needs. Perl is an acronym for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. Geeks expand it as Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.
4. Forth was introduced by Charles Moore in the early 1970s. It was used to control the submersible sled that located the wreck of the Titanic in 1985.
5. Pascal was written by Niklaus Wirth. Work began in 1968. Wirth also developed Modula (1977), which was intended as a successor to Pascal, and then Modula-2 (1980), and Oberon (1988), which was a successor to Modula-2.
6. Work on LOGO began at Bolt, Beranek, & Newman (BBN) in 1966. The development team was headed by Wally Fuerzig and included Seymour Papert. Logo was best known for its 'turtle graphics'.
7. Java was written by James Gosling, Patrick Naughton, Chris Warth, Ed Frank and Mike Sheridan at Sun Microsystems. They took 18 months for the first working version. It was called Oak at first and then renamed Java, after a brew, in 1995, when it was publicly announced.
8. C++, originally called 'C with classes' was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1979 at Bell Labs. 9. C was invented and first implemented by Dennis Ritchie on a DEC PDP-11 running UNIX in 1970. The predecessors
of C were the BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) by Martin Richards and then the B written by Ken Thompson. C was standardised in December 1989 by American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
10. LISP, which is short for LISt Processing, was developed by John McCarthy at MIT. It was released in 1959. LISP 2 appeared in 1966.
11. ALGOL 60 was the first block-structured language. It was introduced in 1960. 12. Kenneth Iverson is responsible for the language APL (A Programming Language), which was released in 1962. It
used a specialized character set that required APL-compatible devices. 13. SNOBOL (StriNgent Oriented symBOlic Language) was released in 1962. FASBOL was a compiler for SNOBOL (1971),
and SPITBOL (1971) was a SPeedy ImplemenTation of snoBOL. SNOBOL3 was released in 1965 and SNOBOL4 in 1967.
14. BASIC stands for Beginners' All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was invented in 1964 by Thomas E. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny. The first BASIC program was run on May 1, 1964.
15. APL\360 came out in 1964. In 1969, 500 people attended an APL conference at the IBM headquarters in Armonk, New York. This event is sometimes referred to as "The March on Armonk".
16. ALTRAN is a FORTRAN variant which appeared in 1968. 17. COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) was defined by the Conference on Data Systems and Languages
(CODASYL) in 1959. An ANSI standard for COBOL was introduced in 1968. 18. Work on PL/1 (Programming Language 1) began in 1963 and it was released in 1964.
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19. FORTRAN, acronym for FORmula TRANslating system, came in 1957. It was developed by an IBM team headed by
John Backus from 1954 onwards. John Backus was later involved in the development of the language ALGOL and also the Backus-Naur Form (BNF), which is a formal notation used to describe the syntax of a given language. FORTRAN II came in 1958. FORTRAN III also came out in 1958, but it was never released to the public. FORTRAN IV was released in 1961. FORTRAN 66, which was a result of standardization by the ASA was released in 1966.
20. A rudimentary compiler called Autocode was developed by Alick E.Glennie in 1952 at the University of Manchester. 21. The first computer language actually used on an electronic computing device was Short Code, which appeared in
1949. It had to be compiled by hand! 22. The language Plankalkul was developed by Konrad Zuse, a German engineer, when he was alone hiding out in the
Bavarian Alps. Chess was one area the language was used for. 23. Grace Murray Hopper developed A0 in 1951, which could translate programming code into binary code.
Remington Rand, for whom she worked, released it in 1957 as Math-matic.
Chips and Processors
1. Niagara: Code-name for Sun's next generation UltraSPARC microprocessor. Expected in late 2005 or early 2006, it incorporates a concept that Sun calls chip multithreading, designed to vastly speed up Web content delivery by embedding eight UltraSPARC II-like cores on a single die. It will have a high-end successor called "Rock," which combines multithreading with virtual cores that can be dedicated to application-specific functions. The Niagara design was acquired by Sun along with the startup Afara Websystems Inc. in 2002. Links: eWeek Article: Sun Completes 'Niagara' Design.
2. Not a quiz item but I couldn't resist giving this useful link here. The Geek.com ChipGeek Processor Specs has plenty of information on microprocessor chips and chipsets.
3. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is the biggest competitor to Intel in the processor space. AMD processors include the K5, which was positioned against Intel's Pentium I; K6 which competed against Pentium II and Pentium MMX; Athlon or K7; Duron (originally code-named Athlon Select, then Spitfire), which is the low end of AMD's Athlon line, ClawHammer and Opteron.
4. Crusoe: This low-power microprocessor ideal for mobile computing was released by Transmeta Corporation on January 19th, 2000. Links: Transmeta Corporation; Geek.com article on Crusoe.
5. Intel - CEO is Craig Barrett. Chips include x86, Pentium and Xeon. Itanium is the first 64-bit microprocessor from Intel. McKinley is the successor version of Itanium.
6. PowerPC Alliance was IBM, Apple, and Motorola. 7. The name Pentium was selected during a contest among Intel employees in 1993. The first Pentium came out in
1994.
Peripheral Devices
1. The floppy was invented by IBM engineers led by Alan Shugart in 1971. The nickname "floppy" came from its flexibility. The first floppies were of 8" diameter and were designed for loading microcodes into the controller of the Merlin (IBM 3330) disk pack file (a 100 MB storage device). The 5 1/4" floppy was developed by Alan Shugart in 1976 for Wang Laboratories. The 3 1/2" floppy drives and diskettes were introduced by Sony in 1981. (Data from About.com)
2. DVD or Digital Versatile Disc was mainly developed by the company Matshusita and it was announced in November 1995. There is no one person who can be called the inventor of DVD.
3. The Compact Disk (CD) was invented by James Russell in 1965. Russell holds 22 patents for different aspects of the technology.
4. Haptics is the science of applying touch (tactile) sensation and control to interaction with computer applications. The Wingman Force Feedback Mouse (WFFM) from Logitech is an example of a haptic device.
Computer Viruses
1. Mydoom, also known as Novarg or Shimgapi: E-mail worm discovered in January 2004, got activated during February 2004. Inside the virus code, the author had mispelled "my domain" as "my doomain" and thus the name Mydoom. The virus mail comes with extensions like .exe, .bat, .cmd, .pif, .scr or .zip. Mydoom.A was programmed
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to start a denial of service (DoS) attack on the SCO website www.sco.com from 1st February 2004. The virus also had a trigger to stop spreading on 12th February 2004. SCO had to temporarily take off their www.sco.com site and use www.thescogroup.com during the period of the attack. MyDoom.B was coded to attack the Microsoft website.
2. The Mydoom e-mail worm, also called Novarg, is programmed to start a denial of service attack on 1st February 2004. The virus infested e-mail comes with extensions like .exe, .bat, .cmd, .pif, .scr or .zip. The virus also has a trigger to stop spreading on 12th February 2004. Link: Symantec page on Mydoom.
3. The first virus: Fred Cohen, a PhD student at University of South California, demonstrated the first documented computer virus on November 10, 1983 as an experiment in computer security. The name 'virus' was given by Len Adleman, Fred's seminar advisor. The virus was added to a graphics program called VD that ran on a VAX mini computer. Links: History of Viruses at cknow.com.
4. Slammer or Sapphire is a worm (or a virus) program that attacks Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 and MSDE 2000 - Microsoft Data Engine. It appeared in the early hours on 25th January 2003, although there are reports of it existing since 20th January. Links: Description of the Slammer worm at F-Secure website, Initial report of the Slammer or Sapphire Worm, at securityfocus.com.
5. Prisilla is a PRI and Melissa variant.
Software Companies and Organisations
1. Project Hudson: Made up of Intel, Nokia, Samsung, Toshiba and Matsushita formed to fight piracy. 2. Oracle Corporation: In 1977, Lawrence J. (Larry) Ellison, Robert N. (Bob) Miner and Ed Oates formed a company
called Software Development Laboratories (SDL) and bid successfully on a top-secret contract code-named Oracle for the CIA. The project died and in 1978, SDL developed the first version of Oracle for the DEC PDP-11, which was never publicly released. In the same year (1978), SDL became Relational Software Incorporated (RSI) and in 1979, Oracle v2 for the PDP-11 was publicly released. It was the first ever Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) based on the relational database model published by Dr. E F Codd (and sponsored by IBM) in 1970. In 1983, RSI changed its name (possibly due to general confusion associated with a competitor company called RTI) to Oracle Systems Corporation, which was later shortened to Oracle Corporation. Sources and links: oracle.com: History of Oracle, FAQ about Oracle Corporation (orafaq.org), Article at informit.com on Oracle History.
3. History of Texas Instruments (TI): Founded on May 16, 1930 as Geophysical Service by J. Clarence "Doc" Karcher and Eugene McDermott as a specialist in siesmological exploration of oil and incorporated in New Jersey as Geophysical Service Inc. (GSI) on December 23, 1938 with Eugene McDermott as Chairman and Erik Jonsson as President. The name changed to Coronado Corporation in 1939, with GSI as a subsidiary. The company started work in electronics for US Army and Navy in 1942, and in January 1951, the company name was changed to General Instruments Incorporated, and GSI became a wholly owned subsidiary. In the same year, it was renamed Texas Instruments Inc. with Eugene McDermott as Chairman and Erik Jonsson as President. Early innovations include the first commercial silicon transistor in 1954, first commercial transistor radio, Regency in 1954 and first integrated circuit (IC) by Jack Kilby in 1958. Links: Changing the Name to Texas Instruments; Key Innovations at TI; About TI, at ti.com.
4. The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which opened on July 1, 1970, is one of the temples of computing advances. The GUI and related concepts like menus and icons, Object Oriented Programming, laser printers, Ethernet and client-server computing are just of the few technologies that were invented here. PARC became an independent company PARC Inc. on January 4, 2002. Links: www.parc.com, History of PARC.
5. Netscape: Founded in March 1994 by Marc Andreesen (who wrote Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser) along with SGI founder Jim Clark and Erin Bina (also on the Mosaic team). It was first named as "Mosaic Communications Corporation." Link: History of Netscape
6. America Online (AOL): AOL was founded as Quantum Computer Services by Steve Case in 1985. It got the new name in 1989. Links: www.aol.com, History of AOL.
7. Adobe: Adobe was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, employees of Xerox PARC where they were developing a page description language (PDL) called InterPress which Xerox was very reluctant to commercialise. The name Adobe came from Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of Warnock in Los Altos, California. Adobe released PostScript, a powerful and flexible PDL in 1984. Adobe's wide range of products include the Portable Document Format (PDF) along with Distiller and Acrobat, Photoshop & Imageready, PageMaker (originally developed by Aldus), Illustrator, FrameMaker. For more info see Jones Encyclopedia page on Adobe Systems, Adobe Inc. Company Profile.
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8. History of IBM: The Tabulating Machines Company was founded in 1896 by Herman Hollerith, an US Statistician,
who is also credited with the invention of punched cards. In 1911, TMC merged with the International Times Recording Company, Dayton Seale Company and Bundy Manufacturing Company to form the Computing, Tabulating and Recording Company (C-T-R). C-T-R was renamed as International Business Machines (IBM) on February 14, 1924.
9. Cisco: Founded in 1984 by Sandra Lerner and Leonard Bosack, both from Stanford University. Legend has it that they stumbled upon the need to invent routers because they could not otherwise send love letters via email across the different computer networks in their respective departments. Current President and CEO: John Chambers.
10. 3Com: Founded by Bob Metcalfe, the father of Ethernet technology in 1979. The name 3Com represents computers, communication and compatibility.
11. Motorola: founded by Paul V. Galvin as the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928. The name Motorola was given in 1947. The name was first used as a brand name for car radios which the company marketed in 1930s.
12. Compaq: Compaq Computer Corporation was founded in February 1982 by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto, three senior managers who left Texas Instruments. The first product was a portable personal computer, which was able to run all software then available for the IBM PC.
13. NeXT: Started by Steve Jobs 1985, when he left Apple. The company produced UNIX workstations. 14. Seagate: Manufactures Hard disks. Originated the concept of SCSI (Small Computer System Interface). 15. Hewlett Packard (HP): Founded on January 1, 1939 by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, electrical engineers from
Stanford University. The company's name was decided with a coin toss! HP's first product was the resistance-capacity audio oscillator (HP 200A), an electronic instrument used to test sound equipment. HP introduced the HP 9100A, the world's first desktop scientific calculator, in 1969. The HP-35, released in 1972, was the world's first scientific handheld calculator. Current Chairman and CEO: Carleton (Carly) S. Fiorina.
16. Sun Microsystems: Sun was originally an acronym for Stanford University Network! The company was incorporated in February 1982 with four employees. The four were Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, Andreas Bechtolsheim (all three from Stanford University) and Bill Joy.
17. Microsoft: Started by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1977. It was first named Micro-soft. The hyphen was later dropped. One of the first applications that they wrote was the BASIC interpreter for the ALTAIR.
18. DEC was started by Ken Olsen. 19. Autodesk: Founded in 1982 by John Walker and 12 of his associates. Brought CAD to the PCs.
SSRI - Secure Storage and Retrieval of
Information
SSR - Satellite System Receiver
OBER - Office of Biological and
Environmental Research (US DOE)
SSPS - Solid State Protection System
MPC - Milk Protein Concentrate
OSL - Open Source Lab
BDD - Business Desktop Deployment
(Microsoft)
MoFo - Mozilla Foundation
SPA - Society of Professional
Accountants
WFM - Workflow Management
ACU - Arithmetic & Control Unit
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BESA - Biomedical Engineering Students
Association
FACS - Frame and Cable System (telecom)
IBBM - Internet-Based Business Model
SSBTC - State Street Bank and Trust
Company
WDI - Walt Disney Imagineering
MMB - Medium Messaging Benchmark
IFAK - Individual First Aid Kit
TIFRAC (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator) was the first computer developed in India, at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. Initially a TIFR Pilot Machine was developed in the 1950s. It was started in 1955 and commissioned in November 1956.
The full TIFRAC machine was in use in the early 1960s (until 1965). It was started in 1957 and commissioned in February 1960. It included 2,700 vacuum tubes, 1,700 germanium diodes and 12,500 resistors. It had 2,048 40-bit words of memory.
Jughead is a search engine system for the Gopher protocol. It is distinct from Veronica in that it searches a single server at a time.
Jughead is officially an acronym for Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display, though it was originally chosen to match that of the FTP search service known as Archie—Jughead Jones being the name of another character from the Archie Comics.
Jughead was developed by Rhett Jones in 1993 and the University of Utah.
It was released by the original author under the GPL license in 2006, and its source code has been modernized to better run on current POSIX systems.
2004-10-07: the very first website was nxoc01.cern.ch, and the very first web page was
http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
A special thanks goes to Jason Ford of Elo TouchSystems, the company whose founder invented touch screen
technology, for providing the following historical information.
In 1971, the first "touch sensor" was developed by Doctor Sam Hurst (founder of Elographics) while he was an instructor at the University of Kentucky. This sensor called the "Elograph" was patented by The University of Kentucky Research Foundation. The "Elograph" was not transparent like modern touch screens, however, it was a significant milestone in touch screen technology.
In 1974, the first true touch screen incorporating a transparent surface came on the scene developed by Sam Hurst and Elographics. In 1977, Elographics developed and patented five-wire resistive technology, the most popular touch screen technology in use today. On February 24, 1994, the company officially changed its name from Elographics to Elo TouchSystems.
In 1952, A.S. Douglas wrote his PhD degree at the University of Cambridge on Human-Computer interraction. Douglas created the first graphical computer game - a version of Tic-Tac-Toe. The game was programmed on a EDSAC vaccuum-tube computer, which had a cathode ray tube display.
William Higinbotham created the first video game ever in 1958. His game, called "Tennis for Two," was created and
played on a Brookhaven National Laboratory oscilloscope. In 1962, Steve Russell invented SpaceWar!. Spacewar!
was the first game intended for computer use. Russell used a MIT PDP-1 mainframe computer to design his game.
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In 1967, Ralph Baer wrote the first video game played on a television set, a game called Chase. Ralph Baer was then part of Sanders Associates, a military electronics firm. Ralph Baer first conceived of his idea in 1951 while working for Loral, a television company.
In 1971, Nolan Bushnell together with Ted Dabney, created the first arcade game. It was called Computer Space,
based on Steve Russell's earlier game of Spacewar!. The arcade game Pong was created by Nolan Bushnell (with
help from Al Alcorn) a year later in 1972. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney started Atari Computers that same
year. In 1975, Atari re-released Pong as a home video game.
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Companies
Alienware - hardware, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dell, Inc., mainly produces desktops and laptops
specialized for video editing, audio editing, and gaming.
CEO - Nelson Gonzalez
*******************
Adobe Systems Incorporated
Headquarters - San Jose, California
Found by John Warnock and Charles Geschke.
Acquired Macromedia, in December 2005.
Bruce Chizen, CEO
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*******************
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Founded by - Jerry Sanders, III, Ed Turney, John Carey, Sven Simonsen, Jack Gifford and three members
from Gifford's team, Frank Botte, Jim Giles, and Larry Stenger.
Headquarters - Sunnyvale, California.
Hector Ruiz, AMD CEO
Took over ATI in 2006.
Slogan - "Smarter Choice"
Phenom- Dual core and Quad core processors.
Bulldozer and Bobcat - New processor cores, to be released in 2009.
Puma, Griffin - Mobile processors to be released in 2008.
Fusion - merges a CPU and GPU on one chip.
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********************
Autodesk, Inc.
Headquarters - San Rafael, California.
Carl Bass, CEO
********************
Apple Inc.
CEO - Steve Jobs
Apple Computer headquarters complex, Building 1, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California.
Lisa (1983), the first commercial personal computer to employ a graphical user interface (GUI), also the
first personal computer to have the mouse.
Macintosh (1984)
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PowerBook (1991)
Apple was founded on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne[10] (and later
incorporated January 3, 1977[3] without Wayne, who sold his share of the company back to Jobs and
Wozniak) to sell the Apple I personal computer kit.
*******************
Borland Software Corporation is a software company headquartered in Austin, Texas.
Founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.
Best known for its Integrated Development Environment (IDE) business consisting of software
development tools, including the award-winning Borland Developer Studio (Delphi®, C++Builder®, and
C#Builder®) and JBuilder® product lines.
Tod Nielsen - CEO
Slogan - "The Open ALM Company"
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In November 2006, the company announced its decision to separate the Developer Tools Group into a
wholly owned subsidiary called CodeGear.
First product was Turbo Pascal.
******************
Colours - Blue Red Yellow Blue Green Red
Google started as a research project at Stanford University, created by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and
Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively (a combined 47 years old).
Google's name is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred
zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and
was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman.
Google's play on the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of
information available on the web.
Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica.
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On August 23, 1999, Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs. In February 2003, Pyra Labs was acquired by
Google under undisclosed terms.
Google has a world-class staff of more than 2,668 employees known as Googlers. The company
headquarters is called the Googleplex.
The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank™, and assigns an "importance" value to each
page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that's not why it's called
PageRank. It's actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.
Googlers are multifaceted. One operations manager, who keeps the Google network in good health is a
former neurosurgeon. One software engineer is a former rocket scientist. And the company's chef
formerly prepared meals for members of The Grateful Dead and funkmeister George Clinton.
Executive Management Group
Dr. Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Executive Officer
Larry Page, Co-Founder & President, Products
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Sergey Brin, Co-Founder & President, Technology
***************************************************************************
The Hewlett-Packard Company
World's largest information technology corporation (by revenue).
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California
Slogan - "Invent."
William (Bill) Hewlett and David (Dave) Packard both graduated from Stanford University in 1934. The
company originated in a garage in nearby Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with a past professor at
Stanford during the Great Depression. Hewlett and Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the
company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett. Packard won the coin toss
but named their electronics manufacturing enterprise the "Hewlett-Packard Company".
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One of the company's earliest customers was The Walt Disney Company, who bought eight Model 200B
oscillators (at $71.50 each) for use in certifying the Fantasound surround sound systems installed in
theaters for the movie Fantasia.
Mark Hurd, CEO
HP is recognized as the symbolic founder of Silicon Valley.
HP bought Compaq in 2002.
LoadRunner is an industry-leading performance and load testing product by Hewlett-Packard.
The HP Bobcat was an early computer made by Hewlett Packard.
PowerHouse is a trademarked name for a family of byte-compiled programming languages originally
produced by Quasar for the Hewlett-Packard HP3000 mini-computer. It was composed of three
components:
Quiz: a report writer
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Quick: an interactive, character-based screen generator
QTP, a batch transaction processor.
*******************
International Business Machines Corporation (known as IBM or "Big Blue")
Headquarters - Armonk, New York, USA
Founded in 1888 as the Tabulating Machine Company by Herman Hollerith.
The Xbox 360 contains the Xenon tri-core processor, which was designed and produced by IBM in less
than 24 months. Sony's PlayStation 3 features the Cell BE microprocessor designed jointly by IBM,
Toshiba, and Sony. Nintendo's seventh-generation console, Wii, features an IBM chip codenamed
Broadway. The older Nintendo GameCube also utilizes the Gekko processor, designed by IBM.
Samuel J. Palmisano - CEO
Slogan - "THINK", "I think, therefore IBM" (old)
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***************************************************************************
Microsoft Corporation
Headquartered in Redmond, Washington.
Founded to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the
home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s.
In 2006, Bill Gates announced a two year transition period from his role as Chief Software Architect,
which would be taken by Ray Ozzie.
Microsoft Office 2007 Interface - Ribbon.
Microsoft online magazine - Slate.
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Slogan - "Your Potential, Our Passion."
***************************************************************************
McAfee, Inc. is an antivirus and computer security company headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
***************************************************************************
Opera Software - Norwegian corporation
Headquarters - Oslo, Norway
Vision - "to deliver the best Internet experience on any device."
Hardware
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Mouse
The name mouse, coined at the Stanford Research Institute, derives from the resemblance of early
models (which had a cord attached to the rear part of the device, suggesting the idea of a tail) to the
common eponymous rodent.
The first marketed integrated mouse - shipped as a part of a computer and intended for personal
computer navigation - came with the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981.
Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute invented the mouse in 1963.
The computer industry often measures mouse sensitivity in terms of counts per inch (CPI), commonly
expressed less correctly as dots per inch (DPI) - the number of steps the mouse will report when it
moves one inch.
Keyboard
The QWERTY layout is an invention of Christopher Sholes.
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Alternative layouts do exist, the best known of which is the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard; however, these
layouts are not in widespread use.
Christopher Latham Sholes patented the typewriter that we commonly use today in 1868.
Monitor
The first cathode ray tube scanning device was invented by the German scientist Karl Ferdinand Braun in
1897.
Floppy Disk
In 1971, IBM introduced the first "memory disk", as it was called then, or the "floppy disk" as it is known
today.
The "floppy" was invented by IBM engineers led by Alan Shugart. The first disks were designed for
loading microcodes into the controller of the Merlin (IBM 3330) disk pack file (a 100 MB storage device).
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Printer
In 1953, the first high-speed printer was developed by Remington-Rand for use on the Univac computer.
In 1938, Chester Carlson invented a dry printing process called electrophotography commonly called a
Xerox, the foundation technology for laser printers to come.
Compact Disc (CD)
James Russell invented the compact disk in 1965.
In 1979, Philips and Sony set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc.
The task force, led by prominent members Kees Immink and Toshitada Doi, progressed the research into
laser technology and optical discs that had been started by Philips in 1977.[2] After a year of
experimentation and discussion, the taskforce produced the Red Book, the Compact Disc standard.
Touch Screen
In 1971, the first "touch sensor" was developed by Doctor Sam Hurst (founder of Elographics) while he
was an instructor at the University of Kentucky.
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Technologies
*
Resistive
* Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW)
* Capacitive
* Infrared
* Strain Gauge
* Optical Imaging
* Dispersive Signal Technology
* Acoustic Pulse Recognition
* Frustrated Total Internal Reflection
* Graphics tablet/screen hybrid technique
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Technology in Sports
Hawk-Eye is a computer system used in cricket, tennis and other sports to track the path of the ball. It
was developed by engineers at Roke Manor Research Limited in 2001; the patent being held by Paul
Hawkins and David Sherry. SkyScope is a very similar system developed by some other company.
Snick-o-Meter
A device used to measure the distinct sound generated when a batsman snicks the ball. The distinct
sound is shown as a high spike (like one generated by a seismograph during an earthquake) on the
Snick-o-Meter.
Cyclops (computer system) is a system used on the ATP and WTA tennis tours to help determine
whether a serve is in or out. It was invented by Bill Carlton. The machine projects five or six infra-red
horizontal beams of light along the court 10 mm above the ground to determine this.
The most famous involvement with this technology was when Ilie Năstase got down on his hands and
knees at Wimbledon and looked at and talked to the equipment after it judged one of his serves to be
out that he believed was in.
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The cyclops computer system was introduced to the Wimbledon Championships in 1980 and has been
used ever since. But, it has recently been removed from court No1 and centre court to allow the use of
the Hawk-Eye.
Trinity is a device used to indicate net faults in tennis during a players' service. It sits on the net and
measures vibrations, when the vibrations exceed a certain value this is indicated to the referee visually
and audibly. The circuitry is designed in such a way that it is not sensitive to atmospheric conditions
(wind). The introduction of TRINITY in 1995 meant that net judges were no longer required. However, a
net judge is often called upon during a match if it is thought that the device is not working properly.
In F1 Racing :-
Total Computer Systems & Solutions Ltd (TCSS) is marketing a system called 'Gamebreaker' that could
detect when a car has completely left the track at the inside of a corner. The officials judge the corner to
have been cut when all four wheels have left the track. Inexpensive cameras would be mounted at each
corner. The 'Gamebreaker' system would detect that a car has cut a corner by analysing the video
footage. Race Marshals or another computer system would compare sector times to judge whether an
advantage had been gained.
In Football :-
Another potential future system called 'Sportrack', used to track the players, officials, and ball, is under
development by Israeli electronics company Orad Hi Tec Systems. This system works by placing a
transponder about half the size of a credit card into the shirts of players and officials. This device
receives microwaves from a transmitter a small distance away from the pitch and it transmits to two
receivers at the side of the pitch. This allows a computer to accurately find the position of a player.
Although this system is marketed for use in the broadcast of games over the Internet it could equally be
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put to use in offside detection.
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ADF Automatic Document Feeder
ADSL Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line
AGP Accelerated Graphics Port
AIFF Audio Interchange File Format
AIX Advanced Interactive Executive
ANSI American National Standards Institute
API Application Program Interface
ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange
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ASP Active Server Page or Application Service Provider
ATA Advanced Technology Attachment
ATM Asynchronous Transfer Mode
BASIC Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
Bcc Blind Carbon Copy
BIOS Basic Input/Output System
Blob Binary Large Object
BMP Bitmap
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CAD Computer-Aided Design
Cc Carbon Copy
CCD Charged Coupled Device
CD Compact Disc
CD-R Compact Disc Recordable
CD-ROM Compact Disc Read-Only Memory
CD-RW Compact Disc Re-Writable
CDMA Code Division Multiple Access
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CGI Common Gateway Interface
CISC Complex Instruction Set Computing
CMOS Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor
CMYK Cyan Magenta Yellow Black
CPA Cost Per Action
CPC Cost Per Click
CPL Cost Per Lead
CPM Cost Per 1,000 Impressions
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CPS Classroom Performance System
CPU Central Processing Unit
CRM Customer Relationship Management
CRT Cathode Ray Tube
CSS Cascading Style Sheet
CTP Composite Theoretical Performance
CTR Click-Through Rate
DBMS Database Management System
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DDR Double Data Rate
DDR2 Double Data Rate 2
DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
DIMM Dual In-Line Memory Module
DLL Dynamic Link Library
DMA Direct Memory Access
DNS Domain Name System
DOS Disk Operating System
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DPI Dots Per Inch
DRAM Dynamic Random Access Memory
DRM Digital Rights Management
DSL Digital Subscriber Line
DSLAM Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer
DTD Document Type Definition
DV Digital Video
DVD Digital Versatile Disc
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DVD+R Digital Versatile Disc Recordable
DVD+RW Digital Versatile Disk Rewritable
DVD-R Digital Versatile Disc Recordable
DVD-RAM Digital Versatile Disc Random Access Memory
DVD-RW Digital Versatile Disk Rewritable
DVI Digital Video Interface
DVR Digital Video Recorder
EDI Electronic Data Interchange
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EPS Encapsulated PostScript
EUP Enterprise Unified Process
FAQ Frequently Asked Questions
FIFO First In, First Out
FiOS Fiber Optic Service
FPU Floating Point Unit
FSB Frontside Bus
FTP File Transfer Protocol
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GIF Graphics Interchange Format
GIGO Garbage In, Garbage Out
GIS Geographic Information Systems
GPS Global Positioning System
GPU Graphics Processing Unit
GUI Graphical User Interface
HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface
HDTV High Definition Televsion
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HDV High-Definition Video
HFS Hierarchical File System
HSF Heat Sink and Fan
HTML Hyper-Text Markup Language
HTTP HyperText Transfer Protocol
I/O Input/Output
ICANN Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers
ICF Internet Connection Firewall
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ICMP Internet Control Message Protocol
ICS Internet Connection Sharing
IDE Integrated Device Electronics or Integrated Development Environment
IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
IGP Integrated Graphics Processor
IM Instant Message
IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol
InterNIC Internet Network Information Center
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IP Internet Protocol
IPX Internetwork Packet Exchange
IRC Internet Relay Chat
IRQ Interrupt Request
ISA Industry Standard Architecture
ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network
ISO International Organization for Standardization
ISP Internet Service Provider
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IT Information Technology
IVR Interactive Voice Response
JPEG Joint Photographic Experts Group
JRE Java Runtime Environment
JSP Java Server Page
Kbps Kilobits Per Second
KVM Switch Keyboard, Video, and Mouse Switch
LAN Local Area Network
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LCD Liquid Crystal Display
LDAP Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
LIFO Last In, First Out
LPI Lines Per Inch
LUN Logical Unit Number
MAC Address Media Access Control Address
MANET Mobile Ad Hoc Network
Mbps Megabits Per Second
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MCA Micro Channel Architecture
MIDI Musical Instrument Digital Interface
MIPS Million Instructions Per Second
MP3 MPEG-1 Audio Layer-3
MPEG Moving Picture Experts Group
MTU Maximum Transmission Unit
NAT Network Address Translation
NetBIOS Network Basic Input/Output System
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NIC Network Interface Card
NNTP Network News Transfer Protocol
NOC Network Operations Center
NTFS New Technology File System
OASIS Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards
OCR Optical Character Recognition
ODBC Open Database Connectivity
OEM Original Equipment Manufacturer
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OLAP Online Analytical Processing
OLE Object Linking and Embedding
OSPF Open Shortest Path First
P2P Peer To Peer
PC Personal Computer
PCB Printed Circuit Board
PCI Peripheral Component Interconnect
PCI-X Peripheral Component Interconnect Extended
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PCMCIA Personal Computer Memory Card International Association
PDA Personal Digital Assistant
PDF Portable Document Format
PHP Hypertext Preprocessor
PIM Personal Information Manager
PNG Portable Network Graphic
POP3 Post Office Protocol
PPC Pay Per Click
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PPGA Plastic Pin Grid Array
PPI Pixels Per Inch
PPL Pay Per Lead
PPP Point to Point Protocol
PPTP Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol
PRAM Parameter Random Access Memory
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks
RAM Random Access Memory
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RDF Resource Description Framework
RDRAM Rambus Dynamic Random Access Memory
RGB Red Green Blue
RISC Reduced Instruction Set Computing
ROM Read-Only Memory
RPC Remote Procedure Call
RPM Revenue Per 1,000 Impressions
RSS RDF Site Summary
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RTE Runtime Environment
RTF Rich Text Fomat
RUP Rational Unified Process
SATA Serial Advanced Technology Attachment
SCSI Small Computer System Interface
SD Secure Digital
SDRAM Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory
SDSL Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line
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SEO Search Engine Optimization
SIMM Single In-Line Memory Module
SLI Scalable Link Interface
SMART Self-Monitoring Analysis And Reporting Technology
SMB Server Message Block
SMS Short Message Service
SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol
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SO-DIMM Small Outline Dual In-Line Memory Module
SOA Service Oriented Architecture
SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol
SQL Structured Query Language
SRAM Static Random Access Memory
sRGB Standard Red Green Blue
SSH Secure Shell
SSID Service Set Identifier
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SSL Secure Sockets Layer
TCP/IP Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
TFT Thin-Film Transistor
TIFF Tagged Image File Format
TTL Time To Live
TWAIN Toolkit Without An Informative Name
UDDI Universal Description Discovery and Integration
UDP User Datagram Protocol
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UML Unified Modeling Language
UNC Universal Naming Convention
UPnP Universal Plug and Play
UPS Uninterruptible Power Supply
URL Uniform Resource Locator
USB Universal Serial Bus
VCI Virtual Channel Identifier
VFAT Virtual File Allocation Table
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VGA Video Graphics Array
VLB VESA Local Bus
VoIP Voice Over Internet Protocol
VPI Virtual Path Identifier
VPN Virtual Private Network
VRAM Video Random Access Memory
VRML Virtual Reality Modeling Language
WAIS Wide Area Information Server
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WAN Wide Area Network
WEP Wired Equivalent Privacy
Wi-Fi Wireless Fidelity
WPA Wi-Fi Protected Access
WWW World Wide Web
XHTML Extensible Hypertext Markup Language
XML Extensible Markup Language
XSLT Extensible Style Sheet Language Transformation
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People
Alan Turing Alan Kay Jack Kilby Shawn Fanning Bram Cohen Niklas
Zennstrom
Father of Computers First GUI IC Napster BitTorrent
Skype/KaZaA/Joost
Shantanu Narayen Michael Dell Pierre Omidyar Eric Schmidt L-R Larry Page and
Sergey Brin
CEO, Adobe Dell Founder, eBay CEO, Google Founders, Google
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Mark Zuckerburg Mark Hurd Bill Hewlett David Packard Samuel Palmisano
Facebook CEO, HP Founder, HP Founder, HP CEO, IBM
Ajay Bhatt Craig Barrett Gordon Moore Robert Noyce Paul
Otellini
Co-creator of USB Chairman, Intel Founder, Intel Founder, Intel CEO,
Intel
+IC
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Eugene Kaspersky Steve Ballmer Sanjay Jha Larry Ellison Orkut
Buyukkokten
Kaspersky AV CEO, Microsoft CEO, Motorola Oracle
Orkut
Jon Rubinstein Howard Stringer Scott McNealy Vinod Khosla Andy Bechtolsheim N
Chandrasekaran
CEO, Palm CEO, Sony Sun Founder, Sun Founder, Sun
CEO, TCS
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Jack Dorsey Carol Bartz Jerry Yang David Filo Douglas Engelbart Herman
Hollerith
Twitter CEO, Yahoo Founders, Yahoo Mouse Punched
Cards+IBM
Blaise Pascal Charles Babbage James Russell Lady Ada Lovelace George Boole
Pacaline Difference Engine CD Boolean Algebra
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Lee de Forest John Bardeen Dennis Ritchie Bjarne Stroustrup Niklaus Wirth Larry Wall
Vacuum Tubes Transistor C, UNIX C++ Pascal Perl
William Shockley John von Neumann Mark Shuttleworth Tim Berners Lee Steve
Jobs
Transistor owner of Ubuntu/Canonical WWW Apple
+ Pixar
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Steve Wozniak Robert Metcalfe Hector Ruiz Jeff Bezos
Founder, Apple 3COM + Ethernet CEO, AMD
Amazon.com
Jen Hsun Hwang Jonathan Schwartz Jorma Ollila Kiran Karnik CP Gurani
CEO, nVidia CEO, Sun CEO, Nokia Chairman, Satyam CEO, Satyam
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John Riccitello Ramalinga Raju Linus Torvalds Richard Stallman Nolan
Bushnell
CEO, EA Founder, Satyam Linux FSF Pong,
Atari
Jack Tramiel Alan Shugart Joseph Weizenbaum David Bradley Jim Kimsey
Commodore First Floppy ELIZA Ctrl+Alt+Del AOL
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Seymour Cray Kevin Rose Jim Adkisson Sabeer Bhatia
Supercomputing Digg.com 5’ floppy Hotmail.com
Jarkko Oikarinen Jonathan Sachs Mark Andreessen Phil Zimmermann
IRC Lotus 1-2-3 Mosaic, Netscape PGP
Jordan Mechner Christopher Sholes Philip Rosedale Scott Fahlman Ray Tomlinson
Prince of Persia QWERTY SecondLife Smiley Email + @
History Hardware :P
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Abacus
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Slide
Rule
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Pascaline
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Engine –
Babbage
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Analytical engine
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o
Joseph Marie Jacquard's loom.
Punch Cards
1. Early punch cards.
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Punch card workers.
By 1890 The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).
Its first logo
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Mark 1
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Mark 1
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Rear view (note vacuum tubes).
Eniac
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Edvac
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The Manchester University Mark I (prototype).
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Univac
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UNIVAC publicity photo.
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1. ). 1. Vacuum tubes as their main
logic elements.
2. Punch cards to input
and externally store data.
3. Rotating magnetic drums
for internal storage of data and programs
Programs written in
Machine language
Assembly language
Requires a compiler.
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2. The Second Generation
(1959-1963).
0. Vacuum tubes replaced
by transistors as main logic
element.
AT&T's Bell Laboratories, in the 1940s
Crystalline mineral materials
called semiconductors coul
d be used in the design of a
device called a transistor 1. Magnetic tape and disks
began to replace punched cards
as external storage devices.
2. Magnetic cores (very small
donut-shaped magnets that
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could be polarized in one of two
directions to represent data)
strung on wire within the computer became the primary
internal storage technology.
High-level programming
languages
E.g., FORTRAN and COBOL
3. The Third Generation (1964-
1979).
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0. Individual transistors were
replaced by integrated
circuits.
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Magnetic tape and
disks completely replace punch cards as
external
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Company Lists
1. AMD
2. APPLE COMPUTERS
3. AMAZON
4. CISCO
5. Dell
6. eBay
7. Google
8. HP
9. INtel
10. Mozilla
11. Nvidia
12. Opera
13. ORacle
14. Yahoo
15. Sony
16. IBM
17. Digital Equipment
18. Alienware
19. Adobe
20. Autodesk
21. Ubisoft
22. Borland
23. EA
24. INfinity Ward
25. Facebook
26. Kaspersky
27. Lenovo
28. Microsoft
29. Mcafee
30. Myspace
31. Motorola
32. Nokia
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33. Sony
34. Android
35. Orkut
36. Phillips
37. Satyam
38. Kingston
39. Seagate
40. .Sony
41. Symantec
42. Sun
43. TCS
44. Twitter
45. Wipro
46. Xerox
47. HTC
48. ATI
49. ASUS
50. Hi5
51. Creative
52. AOL
53. Scribd
54. Bing
55. Opera
56. Dell
57. Dreamcast
58. Sega
59. Samsung
60. RIM
61. Lenovo
62. Paypal
63. VeriSign
64. Bell Labs
65. Skype
66. Sun Microsystems
67. HP
68. Konami
69. Java
70. Wikipedia
71. Alohanet
72. Mphasis
73. Nintendo
74. Texas Instruments
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75. Kazaa
76. Mozilla
77. Sify
78. Twitter
79. Ning
80. Linkdln
81. 4 square
82. Eidos
83. MSN
84. Benq
85. Blackberry
86. Sony ericsson
87. Nokia
88. Micromax
89. Napster
90. Compaq
91. Epson
92. Xerox
93. Vodafone
94. Motorola
95. Netscape
96. Pixar
97. Next
98. DEC
99. ATAR
100. Youtube
101. Homtail
102. CDAC
103. Nupedia
104. Digg
105. Kodak
106. PARC
107. Canon
108. RIM
INDIAN IT
1. Reliance Communications
2. Bharti Airtel
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3. Tata Consultancy Services Limited
4. Infosys
5. Wipro Technologies Limited
6. Aftek
7. Educomp
8. HCL Technologies
9. Hexaware Technologies Limited
10. Oracle Financial Services Software Limited (formerly called i-flex Solutions Limited
11. Intelenet Global Services
12. Ittiam Systems
13. Kalki Communication Technologies
14. Moser Baer
15. ESDS
16. Marketelligent is
17. NIIT
18. Patni Computer Systems Ltd.,
19. Persistent Systems
20. Rediff.com India
21. Robosoft Technologies
22. Mahindra Satyam (
23. Sterlite Optical Technologies Ltd
24. Tally Solutions Ltd
25. Tech Mahindra Ltd. (TechM)
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IT AWARDS
IT awards
Computer science, engineering, technology and invention
1. ACM Turing Award
2. Alfred Noble Prize
3. Charles Stark Draper Prize
4. CODiE Award
5. Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award
6. EFF Pioneer Award
7. Enrico Fermi Award - for lifetime achievement in the development, use, or production of energy.
8. Faraday Medal - notable scientific or industrial achievement in engineering or for conspicuous
service rendered to the advancement of science, engineering and technology
9. FSF Free Software Awards
10. Gibbs Brothers Medal - Naval architecture, Marine engineering (National Academy of Sciences).
11. Gödel Prize Award for outstanding papers in theoretical computer science
12. Herbrand Award for outstanding contributions to the field of automated deduction
13. IEEE David Sarnoff Award
14. IEEE John von Neumann Medal
15. IEEE Medal of Honor
16. IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal
17. IEEE Edison Medal - a gold medal for achievement in electrical science, engineering or arts
18. IEEE Nikola Tesla Award - for electric power
19. IJCAI Award for Research Excellence
20. Knuth reward check
21. Knuth Prize
22. Lemelson-MIT Prize
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23. Loebner Prize - prize for artificial intelligence that can pass a Turing test
24. Longitude prize - precise determination of a ship's longitude
25. Marconi Prize - advancements in communications
26. Millennium Technology Prize - for outstanding technological achievements
27. Mountbatten Medal
28. Netflix Prize
29. Newton Faller Award (Brazilian Computer Society)
30. Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility
31. Pirelli Internetional Award
32. Tony Kent Strix award
33. Timoshenko Medal (ASME)
34. The ASME Medal (ASME)
35. Elmer A. Sperry Award (ASME)
36. Theodore von Karman Medal (ASCE)
37. Emerging Leaders of the Digital World (Diplo Foundation)
38. Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer Sciences
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IT JARGON
GeoCloud - geographic data and visualisation tools via cloud computing, we used it in a
paper last year and it still feels timely.
Digital Recursion - the activity of representing and accessing digital media which is
nested in some form within computer networks. A phrase by Mike Batty, again in a joint
paper from last year (see our publications page), he has a tendency to come up with
catchy terms.
Web 3.0 - although annoying to many after the over use of Web 2.0, Web 3.0 is
arguably read/write/execute with the operating system and the web being one and the
same.
Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) - is the harnessing of tools to create,
assemble, and disseminate geographic data provided voluntarily by individuals
(Goodchild, 2007). Not a new term by any means but still a good one to use in any
paper or grant involving geographic information. Indeed its one of the those phases you
wish you had come up with yourself.
Steady
Mirror Worlds - representations of the real world in scaled down simplified form that
were originally pictured as working in parallel to the reality itself but with strong
interaction both ways between reality and it mirror. The term was first popularized by
David Gerlernter.
Social Shaping - although not a new term by any means it crops up a lot in papers and
grant applications at the moment. In short the term can be linked back to MacKenzie
and Wajcman's 1985 publication 'The Social Shaping of Technology' where they state
that the characteristics of a society play a major part in deciding which technologies are
adopted.
With the rise of browser technologies the concepts behind social shaping provide an
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interesting take on which tech comes to the forefront and we would argue their ever
shortening lifespan.
Buzz words on the way down...
Digital - technology that uses discrete (discontinuous) values. By contrast, non-digital
(or analog) systems use a continuous range of values to represent information. Slightly
worrying as that's the name of the blog, it just feels a bit 90's...
Neogeography - a diverse set of practices that operate outside, or alongside, or in a
manner of, the practices of professional geographers. As we mentioned in a previous
post, that was 2006-2009, its time to move on.
Far Down -
The Grid - increasingly being replaced in papers by mentioning Web Based Services,
which it could be argued can also be seen as The Cloud. The Oxford e-Science
Centre define The Grids as:
The name that describes the next significant development in Internet computing. A term
first coined in the mid '90s to describe a vision for a distributed computing infrastructure
for advanced science projects, the Grid was first properly explained by Ian Foster and
Carl Kesselman in their book The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure.
The Grid is currently lost in the trough of disillusionment and all those hours sat at
conferences talking about it feel a bit wasted.
Web 2.0 - the term Web 2.0 has been around since 2004 and is still at the forefront of
many academic discussions on the future of technology. Coming about as the result of
a discussion between Tim O'Reilly andDale Dougherty on the status of the web, Tim
puts forward a list from 2004 which puts the term into context:
Web 1.0
Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
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page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication
Wikipedia notes that Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based
communities and hosted services — such as social-networking
sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing
between users. Web 3.0 is nipping at its heals as a new dawn of read/write/execute
leaves Web 2.0 behind.
The launch Monday of the iPhone 4 was full of new tech buzzwords from Apple
— things like a “retina display” and “FaceTime.” What do they all mean?
Apple says its new retina display will make text clearer and easier to read.
Retina Display
The retina display is Apple’s marketing language for a higher-definition iPhone
screen. Why the name? As Apple CEO Steve Jobs explained during the iPhone
unveiling, the new display shows 326 pixels per inch — four times as many pixels
as in the previous iPhone. The human retina, Mr. Jobs said, can differentiate only
300 pixels per inch (at a certain distance), so the new display will show more
continuous curves.
According to Apple, this is the “highest-resolution phone screen ever,” with pixels
so small that the human eye can’t differentiate them individually. Reporters
looking at the screen images at Apple’s demonstration couldn’t see much
difference between the new screen and the old. But, as technology blog
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Gizmodo put it, the resolution is “fantastic for a phone,” even if the name is
“mostly marketing hype.”
Gyroscope
Gyroscopes are gadgets that detect orientation — usually they involve a disk that
spins on an axle that can move around. The iPhone has always had something
called an accelerometer that helps it detect motion. So why does the phone need
a gyroscope? Mobile gaming. The gyroscope promises to allow for finer controls
on game applications — telling the phone to a greater degree of precision when
it’s tilted, for example. Apple says the gyroscope and accelerometer together will
detect acceleration, angular velocity and rotation rate. App developers could also
come up with other uses for the more specific detection.
FaceTime
Apple’s term for its video-calling service on the iPhone, FaceTime was the “one
more thing” that Mr. Jobs unveiled at the end of his iPhone launch. It makes use
of the phone’s front-facing camera, a feature available on other phones that
iPhone watchers have long wanted. (It can also use the rear-facing camera, if the
user needs to.) According to the Journal’s report on the launch, the new feature
works only between the newest iPhones, not from phone to PC — strange, given
how long video-chat services have been in use on computers.
A4
The A4 is the processor that powers the iPhone. Designed by Apple’s team, the
chip enables the phone to perform tasks such as video editing, which also was
introduced for the iPhone at the conference. In particular, Mr. Jobs touted the
improvements in battery life that the chip would bring. He said users would five to
seven hours of talk time, 10 hours of Wi-Fi browsing, 10 hours of video, 40 hours
of music and 300 hours of standby time. The talk time is a 40% improvement over
the older phone, Mr. Jobs said.
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The web is a fast-moving industry, and it seems as if a new web
technology buzzword emerges every time you blink. From Ajax to WOFF,
the array of buzzwords — and the technologies behind them — can be
quite bewildering at times.
How are you, dear web developer, to keep up with it all?!
In this article I list 25 key web buzzwords that every modern web
developer should understand. For each buzzword, I explain its meaning,
talk about why the technology is useful, and include a few links for
further reading.
Enjoy!
960 Grid System
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The 960 Grid System is a set of standardised templates that make it
easier to create web layouts. Each template consists of a number of
columns (12 or 16 being the most common), with 10 pixels of margin on
each side of each column.
To create your actual web page columns, you just combine columns in
the grid. For example, you might base a 2-column page layout on the
12-column template, with the main left-hand column taking up 8
columns and the right-hand sidebar taking up 4 columns.
As well as templates for Fireworks, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and
many more apps, 960.gs also comes with battle-tested CSS files that
include handy classes for creating multi-column layouts using any
combination of column widths you desire. It's a very nice system that
makes it easy to design, prototype and build web layouts.
Here's a good tutorial on using the 960 Grid System.
Ajax
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Ajax — Asynchronous JavaScript and XML — is a collection of
technologies that allows a web page to exchange data with a web server
without having to reload the page.
Typically, when a browser wants to request more information from the
server, or send data such as a form to the server, the browser needs to
reload the page. With Ajax, JavaScript in the page can communicate
directly with the server using theXMLHttpRequest object, sending
data and retrieving new data.
Writing reliable cross-browser Ajax code is quite a lengthy, tedious
process, but libraries such as jQuery make life a lot easier.
Ajax makes it possible to give a web page the feel of a desktop
application, and this has spawned a whole new generation of web-based
applications.
Here's a basic tutorial showing how to create an Ajax-enabled web page.
Canvas
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Canvas is an HTML5 technology that makes it easy to draw shapes,
manipulate images, and create animations within the browser window.
To use it, you add a Canvas element to your page with
the <canvas> tag. You can then call various JavaScript methods to
draw within the element. For example, you can draw lines, rectangles and
circles; draw filled shapes in any colour; and insert bitmap images.
Here's a tutorial that shows how to create an animated pie chart using
Canvas.
CDN
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CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. Typically, a CDN is a collection
of servers placed at strategic points on the internet. Each server holds a
copy of the data to be delivered (such as a movie file or code library).
When a user requests the file from a central server, the server redirects
them to the optimal server on the CDN (typically the server closest to the
user). The user's browser or app then downloads the file from this new,
closer server.
A CDN can improve download speeds and reliability for the end user, as
well as reduce the load on the hosting server's network.
Google's Libraries API is a well-known example of a CDN.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is a fairly nebulous (pun intended) phrase, and can
mean different things to different people. Broadly speaking, it's a new
way of thinking about how to deliver computing resources over the
internet such as applications, services, and storage.
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Cloud computing differs from more traditional client-server models in
that a cloud service is more like a utility — for example, an electricity
provider. Rather than purchasing or renting a specific server (or group of
servers) to perform a service, you instead pay a subscription to use the
service you want. The details of how that service is delivered, including
the nature and location of the servers, are abstracted away.
Cloud computing offers a number of advantages over the traditional
approach:
o No upfront costs: You don't need to spend money on servers and
software upfront; you just rent what you need.
o Scalability: No worries about running out of server disk space or RAM.
If you have a spike in demand, the service scales to handle it.
o Ease of use: Since you don't have to know the low-level details of how
a service is provided, cloud computing tends to be more
straightforward to set up and use.
Common examples of cloud computing services that are currently being
offered include:
o Web hosting (for example, Rackspace Cloud)
o Data storage (such as Amazon S3)
o Software as a service (for example, Google Apps)
CSS3
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CSS level 3 (CSS3) is the current specification of CSS (Cascading Style
Sheets). CSS lets you style elements in a web page, giving you control
over things like fonts, colours, sizes, borders, margins, padding, and
positioning.
CSS3 adds all sorts of fun new features to the mix, including:
o Rounded corners on elements
o Drop shadows
o Using images for borders
o Multi-column layouts
o Transitions, transforms, and animations
o @font-face for including downloadable web fonts
o Multiple backgrounds on an element
As always, current browser support for many of these features is patchy.
However, support is getting better all the time, and there are many
excellent JavaScript fallbacks available for things like rounded corners
and drop shadows.
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CSS3.Info is a good site for keeping up to date on the latest CSS3
developments.
CSS sprites
CSS sprites are a way of getting a single image to serve the purpose of
many images in a web page. This can make the page quicker to load,
since the browser only has to request one image.
The basic idea is that you use the same image as the background of
several different page elements (buttons, headings, and so on). The
image is typically quite large, and contains many smaller images, such as
icons, buttons, and logos, within it.
Since the page elements are smaller than the image, only a small part of
the image is shown within each element. By controlling the position of
the background image for each element, you can display a different part
of the sprite image for the element.
This technique is also often used to create rollover buttons.
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Find out how to create CSS sprites.
Doctype
A doctype — or Document Type Declaration, to give it its full name — is a
line of code at the top of an SGML or XML document, such as an HTML or
XHTML web page.
The doctype typically links to a document type definition (DTD), which is
a formal definition of the language used by the document in question. In
other words, the doctype is used to specify exactly which language the
document is written in.
Here's a doctype for an HTML4 Strict web page:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC
"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
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"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
HTML5 works a bit differently to older versions of HTML, in that it doesn't
reference a document type definition at all. Here's the doctype for an
HTML5 page:
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
While required, the HTML5 doctype is purely there for legacy reasons.
Including the doctype line prevents browsers from entering quirks
mode and introducing strange layout bugs.
Find out more about the HTML5 doctype.
DOM
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The DOM, or Document Object Model, is a way of representing the
elements and attributes in a web page as objects. A programming
language — typically JavaScript — can then access these objects through
the DOM API (application programming interface).
A web page's DOM can be viewed as a tree of elements, with
the html element at the root of the tree.
As a simple example, say you have the following markup in your web
page:
<p id="myParagraph">Here's a bit of text</p>
You could then use JavaScript to access the paragraph as a DOM object,
and display its contents, as follows:
alert( document.getElementById("myParagraph").first
Child.nodeValue );
Want to know more about the DOM? I've written a few tutorials on the
subject that you might enjoy.
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Geolocation API
An increasing number of websites and web apps are including
functionality that depend on knowing on the user's location. Examples
include messaging services such as Twitter, photo sites such as Flickr,
and mapping applications like Google Maps.
The Geolocation API gives JavaScript apps a standard interface for
accessing information on the user's current location. All an app has to do
is call
thenavigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition() m
ethod to retrieve information about the user's position, including latitude,
longitude, and the time that the location was retrieved.
The Geolocation API is currently supported by Firefox, Chrome and Opera,
as well as iPhone and Android. IE7+ support can be added by using Gears.
Find out more about geolocation, and try out a demo, over at Mozilla.com.
HTML5
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HTML5 is currently one of the hottest buzzwords on the web, but
what is it exactly?
At its core, HTML5 is the latest version of HTML — the markup language
that has powered all websites since the birth of the web. It's backwards-
compatible with HTML4, and also introduces some new — and very useful
— elements, such as <canvas> and<video>.
However, there's a lot more to HTML5 than some new tags. HTML5
features include:
o Canvas
o Audio and video playback without needing to use Flash
o Geolocation
o Powerful, self-validating Web forms
o Web workers
o Microdata
o ...and lots more!
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HTML5 also introduces new APIs for controlling all this stuff through
JavaScript, making it possible to write powerful web apps that can run
without plugins such as Flash.
HTML5 is a work in progress, and support for HTML5 features varies
wildly between different browsers. However, support is improving all the
time, and it's already perfectly possible to write useful HTML5 pages and
applications.
Want to learn more about HTML5? Here's a good visual overview, and
here's an excellent online book on the topic. For an example of the power
of HTML5, check out The Wilderness Downtown. Amazing stuff!
HTML5 Boilerplate
What with all these new emerging web technologies — HTML5,
CSS3, @font-face and Ajax — it's quite a challenge for the average
web developer to keep on top of all the latest tricks needed to make
everything run smoothly, across all browsers. When building a new site,
our poor developer has to contend with CSS resets, mobile browsers, site
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performance, progressive enhancement, future-proofing, and of course,
Internet Explorer!
Enter HTML5 Boilerplate. This is a set of HTML, CSS and other files to use
as a basis for a new site. The files are loaded with tons of useful tricks
and code snippets to help you build awesome sites. You just download
the files, strip out the chunks of code you don't need, and start adding
your own code and content. Couldn't be easier!
jQuery (and friends)
As the web has evolved, web apps have been getting more and more
complex. Since it's quite tedious (and hard) to write lots of complex,
cross-browser JavaScript code, many JavaScript libraries have sprung up
to make life easier.
jQuery is a very popular JavaScript library. It abstracts away a lot of the
nitty-gritty of building web apps, such as selecting page elements for
manipulation, creating animated effects, and making Ajax calls.
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While jQuery is currently the most popular JavaScript library, there are
many others out there, including:
o MooTools
o Dojo
o Prototype
o YUI
Each library has its strengths and weaknesses. For example, MooTools
provides a complete framework to help you write more elegant, modular
JavaScript, but it has a steeper learning curve than jQuery.
Here's a good discussion on choosing a JavaScript library.
JSON
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a simple way to exchange data
between 2 applications. It's typically used by Ajax-enabled web pages to
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receive data from the server. It's often used as an alternative to XML
because it's more lightweight.
Here's a simple example of a JSON message:
{
"widgetName": "MegaWidget",
"price": 39.99,
"stockLevel" : 14,
"options": {
"colour": "red",
"size: "large"
}
}
There are free code libraries — written in practically every programming
language — that you can use to create and parse JSON messages.
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Find out more about JSON, and read the spec, over at json.org.
LAMP
LAMP is an acronym that stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — the 4
cornerstones of an open-source web server setup. This is one of the
most commonly-used setups on the web, and is used to power a huge
number of websites and web applications.
The 'P' in LAMP can also stand for Perl or Python — 2 other popular web
programming languages.
Other variants include LAPP (which uses PostgreSQL instead of MySQL),
WAMP (which runs on Windows instead of Linux), and MAMP (which runs
on Mac OS X).
There are many free LAMP software packages that you can download and
install to get a web server running on your computer. A popular one
is XAMPP.
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Minification
Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters from
source code, in order to make it download and/or run faster. It's often
used with JavaScript, and sometimes HTML and CSS too.
Many unnecessary elements can be removed from a typical source code
file, including:
o Whitespace
o Newlines
o Comments
o Block delimiters (braces)
In addition, a minifier can reduce long variable names (such
as myLongVariableName) to shorter names (such as x).
There are many free minifiers out there. Here's one for JavaScript, and
here's one for HTML.
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Minification differs from compression, in that a compressed file needs to
be decompressed before it can be used. A minified file, while no longer
human-readable, can still be run as-is by the interpreter. Often
minification is used along with compression to achieve the smallest
possible file sizes.
Modernizr
Modernizr is a small JavaScript library to make it easy to detect which
cutting-edge HTML5 and CSS3 features the currently-running browser
supports. We're talking things like border-radius (for rounded
corners), box-shadow (for drop shadows), HTML5 audio/video (and
which codecs are supported), Canvas, and so on.
You can then use this feature detection to progressively enhance your
web pages — that is, start with a basic design and only add cutting-edge
features if the browser supports it.
Modernizr makes it very easy to determine which features are supported,
because it adds classes to the page's html element. For example, if the
browser supports border-radius then Modernizr adds the
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class borderradius to the html element. If the browser doesn't
support it then Modernizr adds no-borderradius. You can then
write CSS like this:
.borderradius #myDiv {
/* properties for browsers that support border-
radius */
}
.no-borderradius #myDiv {
/* fallback properties for browsers that don't */
}
For example, if your chosen border looks great when curved, but terrible
when straight, then you can place properties under .no-
borderradius #myDiv to style the border differently for browsers
that don't support border-radius.
There's a good Modernizr tutorial over on A List Apart.
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Non-blocking JavaScript
Many web pages include external JavaScript files by using <script
src="...">. Unfortunately, while a JavaScript file is downloading, the
browser stops downloading the rest of the page. If the JavaScript file is
large, or the network connection is slow, then this can mean a frustrating
wait for users.
One way to alleviate the problem is to put all <script
src="..."> tags at the end of the page, so that other elements can
download first. However, users still have to suffer that pause towards the
end of the page load while the JavaScript is downloaded and executed.
The solution to this problem is to write non-blocking JavaScript. This
causes the script file to load in parallel with the other elements in the
page, without holding everything up. Typically, you do this by adding the
script dynamically to the DOM, rather than using a <script
src="..."> tag. For example:
var myscript = document.createElement( 'script' );
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myscript.src = 'myscript.js';
var head =
document.getElementsByTagName( 'head' )[0];
head.appendChild( myscript );
For a thorough explanation of non-blocking JavaScript, see Non-blocking
JavaScript Downloads.
Quirks mode
Back in the dark old days of the web, browsers were pretty terrible at
sticking to the HTML and CSS standards. They would do things like
including an element's paddinginside the element, instead of the padding
being outside the element's width and height (the so-called IE box model
bug). They would also handle tables and images in odd ways.
Fortunately, modern browsers follow the standards much more faithfully.
However, many web pages — both old and new — are coded to fit in with
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the quirks of these old browsers, rather than following standards. In
order to provide backwards compatibility, many modern browsers include
a quirks mode, which attempts to render pages using the old, quirky way
of doing things.
Generally speaking, you put a browser into quirks mode by omitting
the doctype, although you can also trigger it by using some specific
doctypes. Here's a useful tableshowing how to trigger quirks mode in
various browsers.
Unicode
Unicode is a universal way to encode text written in practically any of the
world's writing systems, including Western, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and
Thai. Contrast Unicode with ASCII, which can only work with a limited
number of (mainly Western) character sets.
Although it's been around for a couple of decades now, Unicode has only
recently started to hit the mainstream in terms of web development, as
various popular web browsers, platforms and programming languages
start to embrace it fully.
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Whereas ASCII characters are 1 byte long, Unicode characters are usually
2-4 bytes in length. This can cause problems with programming
languages and scripts that expect 1 character to equal 1 byte. Such
languages and scripts need to be updated to cope with Unicode.
The most common way to use Unicode in a web page is using UTF-
8 encoding. You can indicate that a web page is encoded using UTF-8 by
placing the following line of code inside the page's head element:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=UTF-8" />
The Unicode Consortium has a list of useful Unicode character charts for
reference.
UX
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Many web designers these days talk about the "UX" of a website, meaning
"user experience". This term encompasses the whole relationship that a
user has with a website, from usability and accessibility through to their
feelings on the site's visual design, interface, branding, and marketing
message.
By definition, UX is a highly subjective thing. That said, it can be
beneficial for a website designer to think about the whole experience that
users have with the site, rather than focusing on a single area such as the
visual design.
UX Booth is a good blog covering UX and usability issues.
WebSockets
WebSockets is a new HTML5 feature that enables a JavaScript web
application to open a bidirectional TCP connection between the browser
and the server. What this means in English is that the server can
now push new data to the browser, rather than the browser having to
continuously check for new data.
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It also means much faster data transfer compared to the current Ajax
approach, where a new connection is opened each time the web app
wants to talk to the server.
The result of all this should be much smoother web apps and, ultimately,
the death ofAjax as a means of transferring data between a JavaScript
web app and a web server.
WebSockets are currently supported by Firefox 4, Chrome 4 and Safari 5.
Opera will likely support it at some point. IE9... who knows?
Web storage
Web storage is a new specification (often lumped together with HTML5)
that allows JavaScript apps to store data in the user's browser. In many
ways, web storage is "cookies on steroids", being both more powerful and
more flexible than cookies.
You can store a lot more data than with cookies (typically 5MB of data per
domain). You can store data per tab or window session using
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the sessionStorage object, or store data longer term using
the localStorage object.
Here's a good tutorial on web storage that explains how to use both
session storage and local storage.
Web Workers
One of the snags with JavaScript running in a browser is that it's single-
threaded. In other words, a script can only do one thing at a time.
For simple scripts that run quickly, this isn't usually a problem. However,
as web applications get ever more complex, they can tend to become
sluggish for the user, especially on mobile devices. One of the main
reasons for this is JavaScript's single-threaded nature. If a script is
performing complex calculations, the user has to wait until it's finished
before they can continue using the app's user interface.
Web Workers are a new specification that attempts to alleviate this
problem. While not the same as true multi-threading, they do allow
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chunks of heavyweight JavaScript code to run in the background, without
slowing down or blocking the user interface. The result is a snappier web
application that responds more quickly to the user.
Web Workers are currently supported by Firefox, Safari, Chrome and
Opera. IE doesn't support them currently, but IE9 might support it.
Fingers crossed, eh!
The Opera dev site has a good intro to Web Workers, with some code
examples.
WOFF
For a while now, web developers have been able to include downloadable
fonts in their pages using the CSS @font-face rule. This is great, as
it means that designers are no longer limited to using the small range of
system fonts (Arial, Times and so on) for text in their web pages.
Unfortunately, @font-face has been slow to take off, mainly due to
licensing and browser compatibility issues. Services like Typekit and Font
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Squirrel have sprung up to help with these issues, by providing a way to
use properly-licensed fonts that work across all modern browsers.
WOFF — the Web Open Font Format — aims to solve these problems once
and for all. It's a new file format that can contain TrueType, OpenType
and Open Font Format fonts. It offers built-in compression, as well as
licensing information to help ensure that fonts are properly licensed for
use. What's more, since it's a standard, we can expect all modern
browsers to support it soon (yes, even IE9 seems likely).
This means that web designers will be able to download a WOFF web font
(whether free or paid), upload it to their site, link to it with @font-
face, and have their text look gorgeous, without any extra fussing.
Lovely!
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1. HTTP — HyperText Transfer Protocol is used for HTML (HyperText
Markup Language) files. Not to be confused with text on too much
Starbucks.
2. Flash — As in Flash Memory. ―Flash‘ is easier to say than ― I brought
the report on my EEPROM chip with a thin oxide layer separating a
floating gate and control gate utilizing Fowler-Nordheim electron
tunneling‖.
3. God Particle – The Higgs boson, thought to account for mass. The
God Particle has eluded discovery since its existence was first postulated
some thirty years ago.
4. Cloud Computing – Distributing or accessing programs and services
across the Internet. (The Internet is represented as a cloud.)
5. Plasma (as in plasma TV) — Refers less often to blood products than
to a kind of television screen technology that uses matrix of gas plasma
cells, which are charged by differing electrical voltages to create an
image.
6. IPOD – What the Alpha Whale calls his personal pod. Actually, Apple
maintains that the idea of the iPod was from the film 2001: A Space
Odyssey. The origin of the word IPAD is a completely different story.
7. Megapixel – Either a really large picture element (pixel) or a whole
mess of pixels. Actually, one million pixels (that‘s a lotta pixels) OK,
what‘s a pixel? Computer-ese for picture element.
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8. Nano – Widely used to describe anything small as in
nanotechnology. Like the word ‗mini‘ which originally referred to the
red hues in Italian miniature paintings, the word nano- is ultimately
derived from the ancient Greek word for ‗dwarf‘.
9. Resonate – Not the tendency of a system to oscillate at maximum
amplitude, but the ability to relate to (or resonate with) a customer‘s
desires.
10. Virtualization – Around since dinosaurs walked the planet (the late
‗70s) virtualization now applies to everything from infrastructures to
I/O.
11. Solution — Ever popular yet still an amorphous description of high
tech packages of hardware, software and service
12. Cookie — Without cookies with their ‗persistent state‘ management
mechanism the web as we know it, would cease to exist.
13. Robust — No one quite knows what it means, but it‘s good for your
product to demonstrate robustness
14. Emoticon A smiley with an emotional component (from emotional
icon). Now, what‘s a smiley? :‘)
15. De-duping – Shorthand for de-duplication, that is, removing
redundant data from a system.
16. Green washing – Repositioning your product so that its shortfalls are
now positioned as environmental benefits: Not enough power? Just re-
position as energy-saving.
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17. Buzzword Compliant — To include the latest buzzwords in literature
about a product or service in order to make it ‗resonate‘ with the
customer.
18. Petaflop — A thousand trillion (or quadrillion) floating point
operations per second Often mistaken as a comment on a failed
program by an animal rights‘ group.
19. Hadron – A particle made of quarks bound together by the strong
force; they are either mesons (made of one quark and one anti-quark) or
baryons (made of three quarks).
20. Large Hadron Collider – The ‗atom smasher‘ located underground
outside Geneva. Primarily built to re-create the conditions of creation, 1
trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
21. Versioning – Creating new revisions (or versions) with fewer bugs
and more features.
22. VoIP – Voice Over IP, itself shorthand for Voice over Internet
Protocol, which in plain English means the ability to talk on the phone
over the Internet.
23. Web 2.0 – Now there‘s talk of Web 3.0, just when we were finally
getting used to the advances web services called Web 2.0.
24. Word Clouds – Graphic representations of the words used in a text,
the more frequently used, the larger the representation.
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25. WORM — Not only not a computer virus anymore, let alone a
slithery creature of the soil, but ―a Write Once, Read Many file system
used for optical disk technol
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GOOGLE DOODLES
Aug 30, 1998
Happy Thanksgiving! - (US)
Oct 29, 1998
While we were in beta we used this logo - (Global)
Dec 25, 1999
Season's Greetings with a Google Doodle - (Global)
Nov 30, 1999
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'Uncle Sam' search - (US)
Nov 30, 1999
'Uncle Sam' search - (US)
Nov 23, 1999
Happy Thanksgiving - (US)
Oct 31, 1999
Happy Halloween - (US)
Mar 28, 2010
Jan Amos Komensky's 418th Birthday - (Czech Republic, Slovakia)
Mar 24, 2010
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First Transmission of Israeli TV - (Israel)
Mar 23, 2010
Akira Kurosawa's Birthday - (Selected Countries)
Mar 21, 2010
Persian New Year - (Selected Countries)
Mar 17, 2010
St. Patrick's Day - (Selected Countries)
Mar 15, 2010
Hungarian National Day - (Hungary)
Mar 14, 2010
Pi Day - (Selected Countries)
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Mar 14, 2010
Mother's Day - (Ireland, UK)
Mar 14, 2010
Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente's Birthday - (Spain)
Mar 13, 2010
Holmenkollen Ski Festival - (Norway)
Mar 12, 2010
Arbor Day - (China, Taiwan)
Mar 08, 2010
Women's Day - (Russia)
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Mar 07, 2010
Vasaloppet - (Sweden)
Mar 07, 2010
Alessandro Manzoni's Birthday - (Italy)
Mar 04, 2010
Vivaldi's Birthday - (Global)
Mar 03, 2010
Girl's Day - (Japan)
Mar 03, 2010
Election Day - (Netherlands)
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Mar 03, 2010
Doodle 4 Google Ireland Winner - (Ireland)
Mar 01, 2010
Doodle 4 Google Japan Winner - (Japan)
Mar 01, 2010
St. David's Day - (UK)
Mar 01, 2010
Martisor - (Romania)
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Mar 01, 2010
Holi Festival - (India)
Mar 01, 2010
Frederic Chopin's 200th Birthday - (Poland)
Feb 28, 2010
Chinese Lantern Festival - (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan)
Feb 28, 2010
Winter Olympics - Closing Ceremony - (Global)
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Feb 27, 2010
Winter Olympics - Speed Skating - (Global)
Feb 26, 2010
Winter Olympics - Short Track - (Global)
Feb 25, 2010
National Day of Kuwait - (Kuwait)
Feb 25, 2010
Winter Olympics - Nordic Combined - (Global)
Feb 24, 2010
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Winter Olympics - Ice Hockey - (Global)
Feb 23, 2010
Winter Olympics - Freestyle Skiing - (Global)
Feb 22, 2010
Winter Olympics - Figure Skating - (Global)
Feb 21, 2010
Winter Olympics - Bobsleigh - (Global)
Feb 20, 2010
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Winter Olympics - Ski Jumping - (Global)
Feb 19, 2010
Winter Olympics - Alpine Skiing - (Global)
Feb 18, 2010
Winter Olympics - Skeleton - (Global)
Feb 17, 2010
Winter Olympics - Skiing - (Global)
Feb 16, 2010
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Winter Olympics - Curling - (Global)
Feb 15, 2010
Winter Olympics - Cross Country Skiing - (Global)
Feb 14, 2010
Lunar New Year - (China, Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam)
Feb 14, 2010
Winter Olympics - Pairs Skating - (Global)
Feb 13, 2010
Lunar New Year's Eve - (China)
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Feb 13, 2010
Winter Olympics - Snowboarding - (Global)
Feb 12, 2010
Carnival - (Brazil)
Feb 12, 2010
Winter Olympics - Opening Ceremony - (Global)
Feb 11, 2010
Napoleon Orda's Birthday - (Belarus)
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Feb 11, 2010
New Year Celebration: Window Paper Cutout - (China)
Feb 09, 2010
Natsume Soseki's Birthday - (Japan)
Feb 06, 2010
Sami National Day - (Sweden, Norway, Finland)
Feb 03, 2010
Doodle 4 Google New Zealand Winner - (New Zealand)
Feb 03, 2010
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Norman Rockwell's Birthday - (Global)
Jan 31, 2010
Tapati Rapa Nui Festival - (Chile)
Jan 29, 2010
150th Anniversary of Anton Chekhov's Birthday - (Russia)
Jan 26, 2010
Australia Day - (Australia)
Jan 26, 2010
Republic Day of India - (India)
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Jan 23, 2010
100th Anniversary of Django Reinhard's Birthday - (France, Belgium)
Jan 22, 2010
Porridge Day - (China)
Jan 21, 2010
Grandparent's Day - (Poland)
Jan 20, 2010
Festival of San Sebastian - (Spain)
Jan 18, 2010
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Day - (US)
Jan 15, 2010
Istanbul, Capital of Culture - (Turkey)
Jan 14, 2010
Celebration of Chinese Culture - (China)
Jan 14, 2010
Festival of Kites - (India)
Jan 11, 2010
Coming of Age Day - (Japan)
Jan 09, 2010
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120th Birthday of Karel Capek - (Czech Republic, Slovakia)
Jan 04, 2010
Sir Isaac Newton's Birthday [Click the doodle] - (Global)
Jan 01, 2010
Happy New Year - (Global)
Birthday of Taha Hussein - (Egypt)
Nov 14, 2010
D4G India Winner / Children's Day - (India)
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Nov 13, 2010
Robert Louis Stevenson's 160th Birthday - (Global)
Nov 12, 2010
Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Birthday - (Taiwan)
Nov 11, 2010
Veterans Day - (US)
Nov 11, 2010
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Polish Independence Day - (Poland)
Nov 08, 2010
Discovery of X-Rays - (Global)
Nov 02, 2010
Day of the Dead - (Mexico, Costa Rica)
Nov 02, 2010
Melbourne Cup - (Australia)
Oct 31, 2010
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Happy Halloween - Part 1 - (Selected Countries)
Oct 31, 2010
Happy Halloween - Part 2 - (Selected Countries)
Oct 31, 2010
Happy Halloween - Part 3 - (Selected Countries)
Oct 31, 2010
Happy Halloween - Part 4 - (Selected Countries)
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Oct 31, 2010
Happy Halloween - Part 5 - (Selected Countries)
Oct 31, 2010
Birthday of Katsushika Hokusai - (Japan)
Oct 31, 2010
2500 years from the first Marathon - (Greece)
Oct 29, 2010
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Turkish National Day - (Turkey)
Oct 26, 2010
Austrian National Holiday/Declaration of Neutrality - (Austria)
Oct 24, 2010
Menino Maluquinho's Birthday - (Brazil)
Oct 23, 2010
Hungary National Day - (Hungary)
Oct 21, 2010
Dizzy Gillespie's Birthday - (Selected Countries)
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Oct 16, 2010
Double Ninth Festival - (China)
Oct 16, 2010
Ahmad Shawqi's Birthday - (Selected Countries)
Oct 16, 2010
Oscar Wilde's Birthday - (Selected Countries)
Oct 12, 2010
Regional Doodle 4 Google Winner - (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico)
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Oct 11, 2010
Cahit Arf's 100th Birthday - (Turkey)
Oct 11, 2010
Canadian Thanksgiving - (Canada)
Oct 09, 2010
Hangul Proclamation Day - (South Korea)
Oct 09, 2010
John Lennon's 70th Birthday. Courtesy of Yoko Ono Lennon/Bag One Arts, Inc. - (Global) Oct 08, 2010
César Milstein's Birthday - (Argentina)
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Oct 05, 2010
Nachum Gutman Birthday - (Israel)
Oct 03, 2010
German National Day - (Germany)
Oct 01, 2010
China's National Day - (China)
Oct 01, 2010
Nigeria's Independence Day - (Nigeria)
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« Previous
50th Anniversary of the Flintstones - (Global)
Sep 27, 2010
Happy 12th Birthday Google by Wayne Thiebaud. Image used with permission of VAGA NY - (Global)
Sep 23, 2010
Saudi Arabia's National Day - (Saudi Arabia)
Sep 22, 2010
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Moon Festival - (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan)
Sep 22, 2010
Korean Thanksgiving - (South Korea)
Sep 21, 2010
Belize's Independence Day - (Belize)
Sep 21, 2010
115th Birthday of Juan de la Cierva - (Spain)
Sep 20, 2010
140th Anniversary of Rome - (Italy)
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Sep 18, 2010
Doodle4Google Winner Chile - (Chile)
Sep 18, 2010
Oktoberfest - (Germany)
Sep 16, 2010
Mexico's Independence Day - (Mexico)
Sep 15, 2010
Agatha Christie's 120th Birthday - (Selected Countries)
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Sep 15, 2010
Doodle4Google Mexico Winner - (Mexico)
Sep 15, 2010
Costa Rica's Independence Day - (Costa Rica)
Sep 15, 2010
El Salvador's Independence Day - (El Salvador)
Sep 14, 2010
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163
Akatsuka Fujio's Birthday - (Japan)
Sep 12, 2010
Discovery of Grotte de Lascaux - (France)
Sep 10, 2010
Teacher's Day - (China)
Sep 10, 2010
1000th Anniversary of Yaroslavl - (Russia)
Sep 07, 2010
Brazil's Independence Day - (Brazil)
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164
Sep 04, 2010
25th Anniversary of Buckyball - (Global)
Sep 02, 2010
Vietnam's National Day - (Vietnam)
Sep 01, 2010
First Day of School - (Poland)
Aug 30, 2010
Mary Shelley's 213th Birthday - (UK)
Aug 24, 2010
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165
Ukraine's Independence Day - (Ukraine)
Aug 21, 2010
Australian Federal Elections - (Australia)
Aug 21, 2010
August Bournonville's 205th Birthday - (Denmark)
Aug 19, 2010
Anniversary of Belka and Strelka Space Flight - (Russia)
Aug 17, 2010
Indonesia's Independence Day - (Indonesia)
IT QUIZ STUDY GUIDE – Mihir Paul © Mihir Paul 2010
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166
Aug 16, 2010
Chinese Valentine's Day - (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan)
Aug 16, 2010
Gozan no Okuribi, iconic festivals of Kyoto - (Japan)
Aug 15, 2010
South Korea's Independence Day - (South Korea)
Aug 15, 2010
India's Independence Day - (India)
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167
Aug 12, 2010
Doodle 4 Google Winner: Her Majesty the Queen's Birthday - Mother's Day - (Thailand)
Aug 12, 2010
71st Anniversary of The Wizard of Oz - (Selected Countries)
Aug 10, 2010
Ecuador's Independence Day - (Ecuador)
Aug 09, 2010
Singapore's National Day - (Singapore)
IT QUIZ STUDY GUIDE – Mihir Paul © Mihir Paul 2010
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168
Aug 06, 2010
Bolivian Independence Day - (Bolivia)
Aug 01, 2010
Swiss National Day - (Switzerland)
Jul 24, 2010
Arthur Boyd's Birthday - (Australia)
Jul 24, 2010
Alfons Mucha's 150th Birthday - (Selected Countries)
IT QUIZ STUDY GUIDE – Mihir Paul © Mihir Paul 2010
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169
Jul 23, 2010
Peder Severin Krøyer's 159th Birthday - (Denmark)
Jul 21, 2010
Belgian National Day - (Belgium)
Jul 20, 2010
Doodle 4 Google Colombian Winner - (Colombia)
Jul 20, 2010
Nam June Paik - (Korea)
IT QUIZ STUDY GUIDE – Mihir Paul © Mihir Paul 2010
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170
Jul 15, 2010
Josef Frank's 125th Birthday - (Selected Global)
Jul 14, 2010
Bastille Day - (France)
Jul 13, 2010
Naomi Shemer's 80th Birthday - (Israel)
Jul 11, 2010
World Cup Final - (Global)
Jul 09, 2010
IT QUIZ STUDY GUIDE – Mihir Paul © Mihir Paul 2010
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171
Doodle for Google Winner and Argentina's Independence Day - (Argentina)
Jul 07, 2010
Tanabata - Star Festival - (Japan)
Jul 06, 2010
Frida Kahlo's 103rd Birthday - (Selected Countries)
Jul 04, 2010
Happy 4th of July and Happy Birthday Rube Goldberg! - (US)
Jul 01, 2010
East Africa Common Market - (Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda)
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Jul 01, 2010