The Chronicles
Sept 2010
Salutations dear readers and fellow Laurentian neighbors,
Welcome back! What a wonderful summer we had! This month I thought I would share some Fun Facts with you to ease you calmly back to your Friend the Computer …
- The word “computer” was first used to describe a mechanical calculating device in the year 1897. The word existed before, however at that time it was used to refer to a person.
- The first “modern” computer was called the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer). The contract to make it was signed in 1943 and the first one manufactured was on February 14, 1946. It was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania. It was also made to help humans to be better at spelling.
- In 2007 approximately 60 million computers were manufactured in the world. That's 2 every second!
- In 1963, Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute invented the common computer mouse. Initially, it was known as the “bug” and was made of wood. It later became popular as “mouse” because the cord on these early models reminded people of the tail of a rodent.
- While it took the radio 38 years and the television a short 13 years, it took the World Wide Web only 4 years to reach 50 million users.
- The first Web site saw the light of day in 1989. In 1995 there were 18,000 Web sites. In May 2009 this number passed the 109.5 million mark!
- Software writers sell their programs to businesses. They make this software available free of charge to home users for the market recognition it provides.
- Roughly 247 billion messages are sent per day which means more than 2.8 million emails are sent every second. Around 80% of these millions of messages are spam and virus’s. The genuine emails are sent by around 1.4 billion email users.
- There are approximately 6,000 new computer virus's released every month.
- The "@" used in e-mail addresses was chosen in 1972 by Ray Tomlinson (although the first email system existed as early as 1965). He wanted a symbol that was so weird it couldn't possibly appear in anyone's name thereby choosing the @ character.
- 80% of all pictures on the internet are of naked women.
- Google is a version of the word Googol, which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes, representing the large number of web pages Google searches.
- Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in the world. This word is formed from the Hawaiian word, wiki (meaning "quick") and the word encyclopedia.
- e-Bay was started in 1995; more than 1 billion dollars worth of merchandise are sold each month by its users.
- By the year 2012 there will be approximately 17 billion devices connected to the Internet.
Interesting is it not!
Take good care of yourselves,
questions.monamilordi@gmail.com
This article originally appeared in Main Street – The Laurentians' English Language Community Newspaper.
