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Ahhhhh,
computers. Where would we be without them? I trust visitors to this page will enjoy the factoids, trivia and history
of computers presented here for your consideration.
PAGE CONTENTS:
The First Dot Com
Trivia
Spyware
Computer Proverbs
The First Dot Com
by Jennifer Rosenberg
Half a century ago, no one in the world would have had a personal
computer of their own and most would not even have been able to describe a computer to you. Now, in the 21st century, we live
in a world filled with dot-somethings. We have .com extensions on website addresses for companies and .edu extensions for
schools. We have URL extensions for nearly every country (such as .ls for Lesotho) and newer extensions such as .nom for personal
websites and .travel for travel-related websites.
Surrounded by dot extensions, have you ever stopped to wonder what website was
the very first to be a dot-com? That honor was claimed on March 15, 1985, when Symbolics.com registered their domain name.
© 2007 IAC Search & Media. All rights reserved.
The Internet itself evolved out of ARPANET - invented in 1969, also not by Al Gore -- a network established by the military
to link universities to each other. It was used only to exchange research papers. But people with terminals on the same university
system had been leaving messages for each other for some time. Finally, in 1971, Ray Tomlinson, who worked for ARPANET, broke
the ice. He sent a message over the new network to himself:” Testing 1-2-3.” He also established the convention
for email addresses, as in aeinstein@mailbits.com. Yes, I guess it's safe to say we’ve come a long way from “Testing
1-2-3.” Source: www.let.leidenuniv.nl
In 1945 a computer at Harvard malfunctioned and Grace Hopper,
who was working on the computer, investigated, found a moth in one of the circuits and removed it. Ever since, when something
goes wrong with a computer, it is said to have a bug in it.
ENIAC, the first electronic computer, appeared 50 years ago.
The original ENIAC was about 80 feet long, weighed 30 tons, had 17,000 tubes. By comparison, a desktop computer today
can store a million times more information than an ENIAC, and is 50,000 times faster.
How much more powerful are today’s personal computers
compared to the first machines in widespread use?
Compared to users of the first widely used personal computers
two decades ago, you are the master of the universe when you press the “on” button. (Crashes? What crashes?)
Since the original IBM PC set the standard for computing, let’s look at it (the Apple machine of that day had
similar specs). Debuting in 1981, the PC plodded along at 4.77 MHz, about a hundred times slower than the slowest
business machine today. It’s 64K of ram was puny compared to today’s 128. It also sported a single 5 ½ diskette
drive holding 160 kilobytes of data. Today’s 20-gigabyte hard drive stores 125,000 times as much. Modems, operating
at about 300 bits per second and physically attached to the telephone, were optional. Your built-in 56K modem is 186 times
as fast. And they didn’t have Windows. (Well, some things were faster then!)
(Source: THE FRIENDLY COMPUTER BOOK
by Gene Brown)
What was the first computer virus?
We
can trace the germ of the idea to John von Neumann, the father of the computer program. In the late 40s, he came up with the
notion of a program that could reproduce itself.
In the '60s, when time-sharing on large computers was still
common, two programmers at the Bell Labs invented a routine that could steal time on the machine from other programmers. By
the early 80s, several harmless programs that we would recognize as computer viruses had been demonstrated on Apple computers.
With self-replication and the potential ability to cause mischief
in place, the stage was set for real digital deviance. In 1985, the EGABTR virus, disguised as a graphics program, was spread
via email. It wiped out everything on a hard disk, leaving only the message, “Arf, arf, Gotcha!” Oh, you
dog. Source: www.digitalcraft.org
What are the most common types of infections your computer can acquire?
When you listen to the news, you hear about many different forms of electronic infection.
The most common are: Viruses - A virus is a small piece of software that piggybacks on real programs. For example, a virus
might attach itself to a program such as a spreadsheet program. Each time the spreadsheet program runs, the virus runs, too,
and it has the chance to reproduce (by attaching to other programs) or wreak havoc; E-mail viruses - An e-mail virus moves
around in e-mail messages, and usually replicates itself by automatically mailing itself to dozens of people in the victim's
e-mail address book; Worms - A worm is a small piece of software that uses computer networks and security holes to replicate
itself. A copy of the worm scans the network for another machine that has a specific security hole. It copies itself to the
new machine using the security hole, and then starts replicating from there, as well; and Trojan horses - A Trojan horse is
simply a computer program. The program claims to do one thing (it may claim to be a game) but instead does damage when you
run it (it may erase your hard disk). Trojan horses have no way to replicate automatically.
How does your PC stack up against its ancestors?
A chip of silicon a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer,
which occupied a full city block.
Who published the first computer program?
In 1843, mathematician Ada Byron published the first computer programs. She based them on Jacquard's
punch-card idea. Her programs were for the first general-purpose mechanical digital computer that had just been invented by
Charles Babbage.
Why are computers so small?
A chip of silicon a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a full
city block.
WAS A COMPUTER MOUSE ALWAYS CALLED A MOUSE?
No.
The original device, patented by Douglas Englebart in 1970, was named "An X-Y Position Indicator."
What's the function of characters such as "?," "=" and "~"
in URL's?
Even computer cognoscenti don't always know about that stuff after the first "/." Is it the machine's
way of cursing you out, as in &%$!!*%+?&?"
No, but it is letting you know where it's at. The familiar part of the
address, as in www.cmonupandseemesometime.com/, is the location of the page on the Web. It's like the street address of
a house. But what if it's an apartment house or office building? You also have to know where in the house or building you're
going. The "~" is one of those direction marks, in this case indicating that the page is on a personal folder on the server.
But maybe you need to ring the bell and use the intercom. The "?" and "="
refer to scripts that handle the information you are asked to input to further narrow your search.
Source: THE NEW YORK TIMES
Can you move your computer while it's running?
Computers
and hard drives aren't as fragile as they were a few years ago, but you're asking for trouble if you move your PC around while
it is running. While your computer is running, its hard disk is very vulnerable. A tiny magnet literally floats less than
a hair's breadth above a platter where data is stored. A minor bump can send the magnet skittering into the disk's surface.
The damage can't be repaired. Not only will you need a new hard disk, but you'll likely lose the information the disk held.
Spyware
Spyware differs from viruses and worms in that it does not usually self-replicate.
Like many recent viruses, however, spyware - by design - exploits infected computers for commercial gain. Typical tactics
furthering this goal include delivery of unsolicited pop-up advertisements; theft of personal information (including financial
information such as credit card numbers); monitoring of Web-browsing activity for marketing purposes; or routing of HTTP requests
to advertising sites.
In the field of computing, the term spyware refers to a broad category of malicious
software designed to intercept or take partial control of a computer's operation without the informed consent of that machine's
owner or legitimate user. While the term taken literally suggests software that surreptitiously monitors the user, it has
come to refer more broadly to software that subverts the computer's operation for the benefit of a third party.
Spyware is a type of program that watches what users do with their computer
and then sends that information over the internet. Spyware can collect many different types of information about a user. More
benign programs can attempt to track what types of websites a user visits and send this information to an advertisement agency.
More malicious versions can try to record what a user types to try to intercept passwords or credit card numbers. Yet other
versions simply launch popup advertisements.
The first recorded use of the term spyware occurred on October 17, 1994 in a
Usenet post that poked fun at Microsoft's business model. Spyware later came to refer to espionage equipment such as tiny
cameras. However, in early 2000 the founder of Zone Labs, Gregor Freund, used the term in a press release for the ZoneAlarm
Personal Firewall. Since then, computer-users have used the term in its current sense.
What's the difference between spyware and adware?
The term adware frequently refers to any software which displays advertisements,
whether or not it does so with the user's consent. Many of the programs frequently classified as spyware function as adware
in that their chief observed behaviour consists of displaying advertising. Other spyware behaviours, such as reporting on
websites the user visits, frequently accompany the displaying of advertisements. Monitoring web activity aims at building
up a marketing profile on users in order to sell "targeted" advertisement impressions. The prevalence of spyware has cast
suspicion upon other programs that track Web browsing, even for statistical or research purposes.
Copyright 2006, Arcamax Publishing. All rights reserved.
COMPUTER PROVERBS
* Home is where you hang your @.
* The E-mail of the species
is more deadly than the mail.
* A journey of a thousand sites begins with a single click.
* You can't teach
a new mouse old clicks.
* C: is the root of all directories.
* Don't put all your hypes in one home page.
* Pentium wise; pen and paper foolish.
* The modem is the message.
* Too many clicks spoil the browse.
* The geek shall inherit the earth.
* A chat has nine lives.
* Don't byte off more than you can view.
* Fax is stranger than fiction.
* What boots up must come down.
* Windows will never cease.
*
Virtual reality is its own reward.
* Modulation in all things.
* A user and his leisure time are soon parted.
* Know what to expect before you connect.
* Oh, what a tangled website we weave when first we practice.
*
Speed thrills.
* Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to use the Net and he won't bother you for
weeks.
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