Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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.
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 bitmapped 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 AtanasoffBerry 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.
IT QUIZ STUDY GUIDE Mihir Paul 2. Microsoft Product Code-Names Code-name Final Name Lonestar Whidbey Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 Visual Studio 2005
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.
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.
19. 20.
21. 22.
23.
to complete the first version PowerPoint 1, which was released in April 1987. Microsoft acquired Forethought in August 1987. VERONICA stands for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives. It was one of the first search application on the primitive Internet. 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. HotJava, a Java-based web browser, was developed by Patrick Naughton and Jonathan Payne (a Sun engineer) in 1994. It was initially named WebRunner. 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. 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.
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.
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
2.
3.
4.
5.
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. 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. 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. 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. Prisilla is a PRI and Melissa variant.
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 resistancecapacity 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 SSR OBER SSPS MPC OSL BDD MoFo SPA WFM ACU
- Secure Storage and Retrieval of Information - Satellite System Receiver - Office of Biological and Environmental Research (US DOE) - Solid State Protection System - Milk Protein Concentrate - Open Source Lab - Business Desktop Deployment (Microsoft) - Mozilla Foundation Society Accountants of Professional
IT QUIZ STUDY GUIDE Mihir Paul BESA FACS IBBM SSBTC WDI MMB IFAK
- Biomedical Engineering Students Association - Frame and Cable System (telecom) - Internet-Based Business Model - State Street Bank and Trust Company - Walt Disney Imagineering - Medium Messaging Benchmark - 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.
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.
12
Companies
Alienware - hardware, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dell, Inc., mainly produces desktops and laptops specialized for video editing, audio editing, and gaming.
*******************
13
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.
14
********************
Autodesk, Inc.
********************
Apple Inc.
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)
15
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.
*******************
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.
16
In November 2006, the company announced its decision to separate the Developer Tools Group into a wholly owned subsidiary called CodeGear.
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.
17
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.
Dr. Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Executive Officer
18
***************************************************************************
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".
19
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.
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:
20
*******************
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.
21
***************************************************************************
Microsoft Corporation
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.
22
***************************************************************************
McAfee, Inc. is an antivirus and computer security company headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
***************************************************************************
Hardware
23
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
24
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).
25
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.
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.
26
Technologies
* Resistive
* Capacitive
* Infrared
* Strain Gauge
* Optical Imaging
27
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 Nstase 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.
28
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
29
30
31
BMP Bitmap
32
Cc Carbon Copy
CD Compact Disc
33
34
35
36
DV Digital Video
37
38
39
40
I/O Input/Output
41
IM Instant Message
42
IP Internet Protocol
43
IT Information Technology
44
45
46
47
PC Personal Computer
48
49
50
51
SD Secure Digital
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
Jack Kilby IC
Niklas
59
Paul CEO,
60
Orkut
61
Jerry Yang
David Filo
Herman Punched
Founders, Yahoo
James Russell CD
62
Steve Apple
63
Jeff Bezos
64
Nolan Pong,
65
History Hardware :P
66
Abacus
67
Slide Rule
68
69
Pascaline
70
71
Engine Babbage
72
Analytical engine
73
Punch Cards
1.
74
75
Its first logo
76
Mark 1
77
Mark 1
78
79
Eniac
80
Edvac
81
82
Univac
83
84
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.
85
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
86
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 (19641979).
87
88
89
Company Lists
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. AMD APPLE COMPUTERS AMAZON CISCO Dell eBay Google HP INtel Mozilla Nvidia Opera ORacle Yahoo Sony IBM Digital Equipment Alienware Adobe Autodesk Ubisoft Borland EA INfinity Ward Facebook Kaspersky Lenovo Microsoft Mcafee Myspace Motorola Nokia
90
33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.
Sony Android Orkut Phillips Satyam Kingston Seagate .Sony Symantec Sun TCS Twitter Wipro Xerox HTC ATI ASUS Hi5 Creative AOL Scribd Bing Opera Dell Dreamcast Sega Samsung RIM Lenovo Paypal VeriSign Bell Labs Skype Sun Microsystems HP Konami Java Wikipedia Alohanet Mphasis Nintendo Texas Instruments
91
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
92
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)
93
IT AWARDS
IT awards
94
95
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
96
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 DoubleClick Ofoto Akamai mp3.com Britannica Online personal websites evite domain name speculation Web 2.0 Google AdSense Flickr BitTorrent Napster Wikipedia blogging upcoming.org and EVDB search engine optimization
97
page views screen scraping publishing content management systems directories (taxonomy) stickiness
cost per click web services participation wikis tagging ("folksonomy") 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 Apples 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 cant differentiate them individually. Reporters looking at the screen images at Apples demonstration couldnt see much difference between the new screen and the old. But, as technology blog
98
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 its 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 Apples 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 phones 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 Journals 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 Apples 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.
99
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!
100
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.
Ajax
101
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.
Canvas
102
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
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
103
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.
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.
104
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.
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.
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 o o
Web hosting (for example, Rackspace Cloud) Data storage (such as Amazon S3) Software as a service (for example, Google Apps)
CSS3
105
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 o o o o o
Rounded corners on elements Drop shadows Using images for borders Multi-column layouts Transitions, transforms, and animations
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.
106
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.
107
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:
108
"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.
DOM
109
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
As a simple example, say you have the following markup in your web page:
You could then use JavaScript to access the paragraph as a DOM object, and display its contents, as follows:
110
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
111
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 backwardscompatible 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 o o o o o o
Canvas Audio and video playback without needing to use Flash Geolocation Powerful, self-validating Web forms Web workers Microdata ...and lots more!
112
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,
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
113
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!
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.
114
While jQuery is currently the most popular JavaScript library, there are many others out there, including:
o o o o
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.
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
115
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.
116
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.
117
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 o o o
There are many free minifiers out there. Here's one for JavaScript, and here's one for HTML.
118
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 corners),
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
119
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:
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.
120
Non-blocking JavaScript
<script
<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
121
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
122
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.
123
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 UTF8 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:
UX
124
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.
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.
125
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
126
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-
127
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
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,
licensing and browser compatibility issues. Services like Typekit and Font
128
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 Lovely!
@font-
face, and have their text look gorgeous, without any extra fussing.
129
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 (thats a lotta pixels) OK, whats a pixel? Computer-ese for picture element.
130
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 customers 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 its good for your product to demonstrate robustness 14. Emoticon A smiley with an emotional component (from emotional icon). Now, whats 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 reposition as energy-saving.
131
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 theres 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.
132
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
133
GOOGLE DOODLES
Oct 29, 1998 While we were in beta we used this logo - (Global)
134
Mar 28, 2010 Jan Amos Komensky's 418th Birthday - (Czech Republic, Slovakia)
135
136
137
138
139
Feb 28, 2010 Chinese Lantern Festival - (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan)
140
141
142
143
Feb 14, 2010 Lunar New Year - (China, Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam)
144
145
Feb 11, 2010 New Year Celebration: Window Paper Cutout - (China)
Feb 03, 2010 Doodle 4 Google New Zealand Winner - (New Zealand)
146
147
Jan 23, 2010 100th Anniversary of Django Reinhard's Birthday - (France, Belgium)
148
149
Jan 04, 2010 Sir Isaac Newton's Birthday [Click the doodle] - (Global)
150
151
152
153
Oct 31, 2010 2500 years from the first Marathon - (Greece)
154
155
Oct 12, 2010 Regional Doodle 4 Google Winner - (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico)
156
Oct 09, 2010 John Lennon's 70th Birthday. Courtesy of Yoko Ono Lennon/Bag One Arts, Inc. - (Global) Oct 08, 2010 Csar Milstein's Birthday - (Argentina)
157
158
Previous
Sep 27, 2010 Happy 12th Birthday Google by Wayne Thiebaud. Image used with permission of VAGA NY (Global)
159
160
161
162
163
164
Aug 19, 2010 Anniversary of Belka and Strelka Space Flight - (Russia)
165
Aug 16, 2010 Chinese Valentine's Day - (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan)
166
Aug 12, 2010 Doodle 4 Google Winner: Her Majesty the Queen's Birthday - Mother's Day - (Thailand)
167
168
169
170
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)
171
172