Computers have changed the way we live today. And much of this began way back in 1979 – which isn’t too long ago. But within three decades, it has become almost a part of our working DNA. Here are some Did You Knows that you might not be privy to. If nothing else, it is interesting trivia that you can boast of when you get together with friends and family.
• An AMD 1400 chip running without a heatsink gets as hot as 370 degrees.
• When Seagate first introduced the HDD for PCs in 1979, it merely held 5 MB of data.
• If you opened the case of the original Macintosh, you will find 47 signatures – one for each member of Apple’s Macintosh division of 1982.
• The technology contained in a single game boy unit in 2000 exceeds all the computing power that was used to put the first man on moon in 1969.
• Hewlett Packard was started at a garage in Palo Alto in 1939.
• The most expensive game ever developed was ‘ShenMue’ for Sega Dreamcast – it cost $20 million.
• The QWERTY keyboard layout is 129 years old.
• Macquariums are aquariams made from old macintosh computers.
• According to the University of California, 1,693,000 terabytes of information are produced and stored magnetically every year.
• One terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of data stored in a computer is equivalent to storing a stack of documents that is more than 16 times the height of New York’s Empire State Building.
• Hard drives in the near future are expected to have a track density of about 100,000 tracks/inch. This means that tracks are spaced 10 millionths of an inch apart.
• James Gosling created java at Sun Microsystems. He came up with the name Java while debating over it at a coffee shop.
• The code name for the 12 engineers who designed the IBM pc was ‘The dirty dozen’.
• When the CD was invented, it was decided that a CD should be long enough to hold Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at any tempo which was precisely 72 minutes.
• Bill Gates’ home was designed using a Mac!
