Little known PC facts

Little known PC facts
The development of the modern day computer is the result of advances in technologies. How the PCs came to be what they are today is a story of inventions and innovations. Sometimes, these technological advances were driven by the man's need for faster calculations (abacus the first computing machine), sometimes man’s need to telecommute (laptops).

But ever wondered about viruses, crashes and animation, which too form an integral part of computing. The first computer sold commercially, origin of cyberspace… Here’s going down the time machine for some interesting facts that made computing history.

Crash saga begins
On September 9, 1945, Grace Hopper recorded the first actual computer “bug” -- a moth stuck between the relays and logged at 15:45 hours on the Harvard Mark II. Hopper, a rear admiral in the US Navy, enjoyed successful careers in academia, business, and the military while making history in the computer field.

She helped programme the Harvard Mark I and II and developed the first compiler, A-0. Her subsequent work on programming languages led to COBOL, a language specified to operate on machines of different manufacturers.


Machine of the Year
In 1982, Time magazine altered its annual tradition of naming a “Man of the Year,” choosing instead to name the computer its “Machine of the Year.”

While introducing the theme, Time publisher John A Meyers wrote, "Several human candidates might have represented 1982, but none symbolised the past year more richly, or will be viewed by history as more significant, than a machine: the computer."

His magazine, he explained, has chronicled the change in public opinion with regard to computers. A senior writer contributed, “computers were once regarded as distant, ominous abstractions, like Big Brother. In 1982, they truly became personalised, brought down to scale, so that people could hold, prod and play with them.”

At Time, the main writer on the project completed his work on a typewriter, but Meyers noted that the magazine's newsroom would upgrade to word processors within a year.


Animation comes to movies
In 1982, the use of computer-generated graphics in movies took a step forward with Disney's release of "Tron."

One of the first movies to use such graphics, the plot of "Tron" also featured computers -- it followed the adventures of a hacker split into molecules and transported inside a computer. Computer animation, done by III, Abel, MAGI, and Digital Effects, accounted for about 30 minutes of the film.


First PC sold
Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis built the ERA 1101, which was the first commercially produced computer. The company's first customer was US Navy.

It held one million bits on its magnetic drum, the earliest magnetic storage devices. Drums registered information as magnetic pulses in tracks around a metal cylinder.

Read/write heads both recorded and recovered the data. Drums eventually stored as many as 4,000 words and retrieved any one of them in as little as five-thousandths of a second.

Cyberspace arrives
In 1984, William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in his novel “Neuromancer.” He also spawned a genre of fiction known as “cyberpunk” in his book, which described a dark, complex future filled with intelligent machines, computer viruses, and paranoia.

Gibson introduced cyberspace as: “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...”


First laurel
In 1988, Pixar's "Tin Toy" became the first computer-animated film to win an Academy Award, taking the Oscar for best animated short film. A wind-up toy first encountering a boisterous baby narrated "Tin Toy." To illustrate the baby's facial expressions, programmers defined more than 40 facial muscles on the computer controlled by the animator.

Founded in 1986, one of Pixar's primary projects involved a renderer, called Renderman, the standard for describing 3D scenes. Renderman describes objects, light sources, cameras, atmospheric effects and other information so that a scene can be rendered on a variety of systems.

The company continued on to other successes, including 1995's "Toy Story," the first full-length feature film created entirely by computer animation.


Computer bombs
In 1941 the first Bombe is completed. Based partly on the design of the Polish “Bomba,” a mechanical means of decrypting Nazi military communications during World War II, the British Bombe design was greatly influenced by the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and others.

Many bombs were built. Together they dramatically improved the intelligence gathering and processing capabilities of Allied forces

Training bombers
Project Whirlwind begins. During World War II, the US Navy approached the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for building a flight simulator to train bomber crews. The team first built a large analogue computer, but found it inaccurate and inflexible.

After designers saw a demonstration of the ENIAC computer, they decided on building a digital computer. By the time the Whirlwind was completed in 1951, the Navy had lost interest in the project, though the US. Air Force would eventually support the project which would influence the design of the SAGE programme.

Pricy PC
In 1960, the precursor to the minicomputer, DEC's PDP-1 sold for $120,000. One of the 50 built, the average PDP-1 included a cathode ray tube graphic display, needed no air conditioning and required only one operator.

Its large scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first computerised video game, SpaceWar! for it. The SpaceWar! creators then used the game as a standard demonstration on all 50 computers.

Happy birthday virus
Regarded as the first virus to hit personal computers worldwide, “Elk Cloner” spread through Apple II floppy disks. The programme was authored by Rich Skrenta, a ninth-grade student then, who wanted to play a joke on his schoolmates.

The virus was put on a gaming disk, which could be used 49 times. On 50th time, instead of starting the game, it opened a blank screen that read a poem that read: “It will get on all your disks. It will infiltrate your chips. Yes it's Cloner! It will stick to you like glue. It will modify RAM too. Send in the Cloner!” The computer would then be infected.

Elk Cloner was though a self-replicating virus like most other viruses, it bears little resemblance to the malicious programmes of today. However, it surely was a harbinger of all the security headaches that would only grow as more people get computers -- and connected them with one another over the Internet.