Raspberry Pi

Eben Upton - Founder Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi  is the awesome, amazing credit card sized computer aimed to promote the teaching of basic computer science in schools and developing countries.Many thanks to Eben Upton, the founder and the team Raspberry Foundation behind Raspberry Pi. The important people in the raspberry foundation were group of academics and technicians—Eben Upton, Rob Mulins, Jack Lang, Alan Mycroft, Pete Lomas, and David Braben. Thank you all...


The Official book.

The first commercially available Raspberry Pi unit was launched on February 19, 2012, and sales started ten days later. This version could run Linux-based desktop operating systems, and featured 256MB of RAM, one USB port, and no Ethernet port. This was named the Model A.

Flashback - It was during a Sept in 2000, I sat more than one hour in front of a computer.(And still a newbie ;-)) I still remember the ways we friends tried to explore - both software and hardware of so called machine - computer. Balancing the mouse for first time, then slowly becoming a pro unknowingly by playing some mouse-click games in Flash. Exploring the windows OS, Microsoft paint - drawing pictures, making presentations, loved those days. When we get into deeper in the subject - we all loved to have one for our own - both to learn more and play more. And you know the big hurdle was the cost - it was around 32,000 Rupees that time. Now you can buy the same device with just 3000 rupees and it comes in the size of a credit card!!! And you don't need to buy specially designed computer desks!!!... You can use your own at home :) Thanks to Eben Upton and Raspberry Foundation for this.

I tried two different versions of this, and the latest one i tried is Raspberry 3. Its good - it uses Linux as its OS base. You can install the OS in a memory card and insert into the pi. Raspberry 3 will detect your wifi and connects to internet, that gives you more easy to start with a new Raspberry Pi setup. You can buy it from Amazon India - Rasperry Pi 3. The full kit from here.

Buy it today, and try creating your own home web server, or buy some pi cameras and create your on home security system, or you can create entertainment systems (music, other wall displays) and its endless, Hope you will try one soon...

Picture courtesy - https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/author/eben/

Blockchain Technology

It was interesting fact that the man(or a group) who introduced bitcoin system hides behind the name Satoshi Nakamoto. You can search internet for different view related this. Coming back to the bitcoin system. The paper you can read here - Bitcoin White Paper in PDF - Satoshi Nakamoto

In general, Bitcoin system aims to avoid all intermediary (can be banks), which can act between a transaction - to make it direct from the sender to the receiver through a network with using amazing new technology named blockchain. Bitcoin was the first decentralized digital currency using peer-to-peer technology to function without an intermediary, such as a financial institution.The block chain is a shared public ledger on which the entire Bitcoin network relies. The integrity and the chronological order of the block chain are enforced with cryptography. Short words - entire sysytem relies on the network and certain algorithms to keep the transaction secure as well as public to verify its credibility. And all based on the revolutionary technology called blockchain.

Based on the latest new microsoft is working with bank of america - building up their own block chain facility/network and all the major information technology companies are researching on its potential, focusing it in various domains like retail, finance etc.

And last day news came - ICICI Bank executes India’s first banking transactions on blockchain in partnership with Emirates NBD. And ICICI becomes the first bank in india to apply this awesome technolgy, and below is the aticle published in icici portal after the transaction.

October 12, 2016 Undertakes pilot transactions in international trade finance and remittance on blockchain  Mumbai: ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank by consolidated assets, announced that it has successfully executed transactions in international trade finance and remittance using blockchain technology in partnership with Emirates NBD, a leading banking group in the Middle East. ICICI Bank is the first bank in the country and among the first few globally to exchange and authenticate remittance transaction messages as well as original international trade documents related to purchase order, invoice, shipping & insurance, among others, electronically on blockchain in real time. The usage of blockchain technology simplifies the process and makes it almost instant—to only a few minutes. Typically, this process takes a few days. ICICI Bank executed these pilot transactions via its blockchain network with Emirates NBD on a custom-made blockchain application, co-created with EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Infosys. Ms. Chanda Kochhar, MD & CEO, ICICI Bank said, “ICICI Bank has a rich legacy of leveraging the latest technology to bring in new paradigms in banking. Akin to pioneering new technologies in the country like software robotics, mobility and near-field communication among others, I am delighted that we are the first bank in India and among few globally to set up a blockchain application. We have also marked a milestone by piloting a blockchain network with Emirates NBD as a partner and have successfully executed cross-border open account trade finance and remittance transactions. I envision that the emerging technology of blockchain will play a significant role in banking in the coming years by making complex bilateral and multi-lateral banking transactions seamless, quick and more secure.

Hope this technology will boost the popularity of bitcoin. Also improve the applications in the other domains - predictions are the like this will increase the second hand resale market - where the credebility of the product is more visible and cannot be tampered because of the powerful blockchain technology backed with good network and cryptographic algorithms to keep track of each transaction happened to a product. Hope we can experience this technology in some of our real life scenarios soon!!!

AngryBirds - Rovio

AngryBirds fly over facebook from this valentines day 2012. And the creators are Rovio Entertainment Ltd. You can start playing here https://apps.facebook.com/angrybirds/

People started demolishing green pigs and their castles using angry birds on December 2009. And it is the most downloaded mobile application in 2011. Rovio is the firm behind this crazy game angry birds. they were into the gaming business since 2003 and has made 50+ games before Angry Birds. In an interview published in techmarketing(27 Dec 2011) the ceo Peter Vesterbacka explained the team behind this project. In his words "The team that created Angry Birds was 12 people. The game was built around the characters that Jaakko Iisalo, our game designer, came up with. The original idea was very different, but everybody loved the birds, so it was decided to build a game around the birds. Over the next 8 months Angry Birds became the game we know today. Hit the appstore Dec 2009, slow start, number one in Finland, then Sweden, number one in UK in April and then things really took off. Have been number one since in both UK and US. Number one in 77 countries. Number one longer than anybody else. 50M+ downloads across platforms.

In Angry Birds, players control a flock of multi-colored birds that are attempting to retrieve eggsthat have been taken by a group of hungry green pigs.^[9] On each level, the pigs are sheltered by structures made of various materials such as wood, ice^[10] and stone, and the objective of the game is to eliminate all the pigs in the level. Using a slingshot, players launch the birds with the intent of either hitting the pigs directly or damaging the structures, causing them to collapse and eliminate the pigs.^[11] In various stages of the game, additional objects such as explosive crates and rocks are found in the structures, and may be used in conjunction with the birds to destroy hard-to-reach pigs.

From the words of CEO of Rovio Mobile, Mikhail Hed -they are in the development of a new title which will be available in coming months. Lets wait and watch the next magic from Rovio.

The banner in http://www.rovio.com announcing their start in facebook.

Scott Fahlman

Scott Fahlman.

Creator of first “smiley”.Emoticon

United States of America.

Scott Fahlman is credited with originating the first "smiley" or "emoticon,".J

Scott Fahlman was born on March 21, 1948, in Medina, Ohio, USA. Fahlman received his bachelor's degree and master's degree in 1973 from MIT, and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. he is credited with originating the first "smiley" or "emoticon," which he thought would help people on a message board at CMU to distinguish serious posts from jokes. He proposed the use of :-) and :-( for this purpose, and the symbols caught on. The original message board post from which these symbols originated was posted on September 19, 1982. It was retrieved in 2002 by a team of computer specialists seeking to validate the claim, which is still disputed. Here is a part of Scott's original post:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)

From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark

things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(

Scott Fahlman is a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. He is notable for early work on Automated Planning in a blocks world, on semantic networks, on neural networks (and, in particular, the cascade correlation algorithm) and on Common Lisp (in particular CMU Common Lisp).

I call some of my friends by the name emoticon, so this amazing info is dedicated for you all emoticons…

Robert Dennard

Inventor of RAM

United States of America

Robert Dennard invented one of the most significant advances in computer technology: dynamic random access memory, best known as "RAM."

Robert Dennard was Born in Terrell, Texas; on Sep 5 1932 he received BS (1954) and MS (1956) degrees in Electrical Engineering from Southern Methodist University. In 1958 he received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Institute of Technology and joined IBM's Research Division.

In 1966, Dennard invented one-transistor Dynamic Random Access Memory (or DRAM, better known simply as RAM).At that time, he was at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he has worked on field-effect transistors, integrated circuit design, and memory cells and organizations.

Dennard received the patent for one-transistor DRAM in 1968.

Before his invention, computers were too large and heavy to be installed in private homes or desk tops. In fact, they required separate storage space and air conditioning to cool them.This invention of one-transistor Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) allowed major increases in computer memory density and decreases in cost.

The Founder of Oracle

Larry Ellison

Founder of The Oracle Corporation.

United States of America.

Larry Ellison was the founder and CEO of the major database software firm Oracle Corporation.

Lawrence Joseph Ellison was born in Bronx, NY on 17-Aug-1944. Ellison was born out of wedlock to a 19-year-old girl, and was raised by her aunt. He had an early aptitude for mathematics, and worked as a young man for Ampex Corporation. He founded Oracle in 1977, putting up $2000 of his own money, under the name Software Development Laboratories. In 1979 the company was renamed Relational Software Inc., later to be renamed Oracle after the flagship product Oracle database. He had heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and wanted Oracle to be compatible with it, but IBM stopped this by keeping the error codes for their DBMS secret. The initial release of Oracle was Oracle 2, even though there was no Oracle 1.It is a marketing tactic. The release number was intended to imply that all of the bugs had been worked out of an earlier version.

Ellison realized that Oracle had been slow to harness the Internet, to integrate and streamline business processes, and to create value for customers compared to the other digital pioneers at that time in 1998. With in two years Oracle was able to accomplish what took Cisco and other digital pioneers four years.

It is very proud of the fact that all ten of the world's largest Web sites, from Amazon.com to Yahoo!, rely on the Oracle database. It quickly adds that 98 of the Fortune 100 use Oracle for e-business. Now Oracle is also one of the world’s leading suppliers of application software.

Moreover oracle acquired Sun, and now Java and its future is in hands of this man, is it?

Robert Noyce.

Co-founder of Intel Corp.

Robert Noyce founded two companies that would largely shape today’s computer industry—Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Co inventor of Microchip.

Robert Norton Noyce was born on December 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa. He received a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from Grinnell College in 1949 and a doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953. Bob Noyce's nickname was the "Mayor of Silicon Valley."

In 1957 Noyce co-founded the Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. in Mountain View, CA. On April 25, 1960, Dr. Noyce was granted a patent for his invention of a ``Semiconductor Device-and-Lead Structure'' -- an integrated circuit. This discovery made the microchip possible and launched the modern electronics revolution. In July 1968 he co-founded Intel Corp. with Gordon E. Moore. Robert Noyce was also credited (along with Jack Kilby) with the invention of the integrated circuit or microchip.

He served for many years as a trustee of Grinnell College and as chair of the Board of Trustees.Noyce died from heart failure in 1990, at the age of 62.

Ted Nelson.

The term "hypertext" was coined by Ted Nelson
United States of America.


Ted Nelson is best known for: coining terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia," 1963 (first published 1965).

Theodor Holm Nelson, born 1937, obtained his BA in philosophy from Swarthmore College. In 1960, he was a masters student in sociology at Harvard. Shortly after enrolling in a computer course for the humanities, he was struck by a vision of what could be. For his term project, he attempted to devise a text-handling system which would allow writers to revise, compare, and undo their work easily. Considering that he was writing in Assembler language on a mainframe, in the days before "word processing" had been invented, it was not surprising that his attempt fell short of completion.

In 1965, he presented a paper at the Association for Computing Machineryin which he coined the term hypertext. Nelson later popularized the hypertext concept in his book Literary Machines. Nelson's conception of hypertext is a rich one. Dream Machines describes hypergrams (branching pictures), hypermaps (with transparent overlays), and branching movies.

Hypertext is the presentation of information as a linked network of nodes which readers are free to navigate in a non-linear fashion. It allows for multiple authors, a blurring of the author and reader functions, extended works with diffuse boundaries, and multiple reading paths.

Vinod K Dham

"Father of the Pentium"

India.

Vinod Dham is known as the father of the Pentium processor.

Vinod was born in Pune in 1950. He completed his initial education in pune.For his bachelor’s degree, Vinod went to the Delhi College of Engineering. In 1971, he graduated from the college with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. After graduation, he worked briefly in Delhi for Continental Devices – a semiconductor company. In 1975, he went to the US. There, he joined the University of Cincinnati to pursue a Masters in Electrical Engineering (Solid State). While he was making a presentation at the IEEE conference in Monterrey, California on re-programmable memory, he received an offer from the Intel to work with them.

In January 1990, Intel has made Vinod the in-charge of developing the 586 or Pentium processor. When the Pentium processor was ready, the market was not ready to accept it. The Pentium processor handled the task of providing graphics, audio and video as well as games on a home computer with aplomb. Soon, it became a big hit and the hardware manufacturers switched over to the Pentium processor. Dham was also the co-inventor of Intel's Flash memory technology. After 16 years at Intel, Vinod joined Nexgen Inc., a start up. In 1996 Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) acquired Nexgen. He quit AMD to join a start up – Silicon Spice Inc.

This time - the electrical engineer who in 1999 was named as one of the top 100 most influential Asian Americans of the decade makes a concession.

Ctrl+Alt+Delete

It was a sunday. And its raining outside. so we decided to stay in our room.Being bored we started watching the latest superhit movie in our old computer, damn its got struck. "Press Alt-Ctrl-Delete " Adarsh told. Thank god.. we can kill the not responding player program from the task window poped up, with out restarting....

Did you ever used Alt-Ctrl-Delete key combination?.
Did you know tha man behind it... He is David J. Bradley

David J. Bradley
Man behind "Control-Alt-Delete" (a.k.a. three-finger salute)


Bradley is most famous for inventing the "Control-Alt-Delete" (a.k.a. three-finger salute) key combination that was used to reboot the computer.Bradley received a doctorate in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1975. He was one of the original 12 engineers assigned to IBM’s PC project in Boca Raton, Fla., in 1980. Bradley also invented the CTRL-ALT-DELETE
sequence as a command in the BIOS. (CTRL-ALT-DELETE was originally used to reboot a computer and now calls up the Task Manager in Windows.) Bradley inserted the CTRL-ALT-DELETE sequence as a hidden command to let programmers reset their machines at the end of an unsuccessful programming routine. Word leaked out, and the public popularized the shortcut.
The original idea was simply to reset early PCs without turning them off. Microsoft adopted control-alt-delete to help ensure people powered down correctly, then to handle "administrative functions" such as the vital "end task" feature for computer software that crashes or otherwise gets stuck.

Bradley chose the control and alt keys because he needed two shift keys to make the operation work, and he chose the delete key because it was on the opposite side of the keyboard. He didn't want people to hit control-alt-delete by accident.

At the 20th anniversary celebration of the release of IBM’s first desktop computer, Bradley minimized his creation of the famous command. “I didn’t realize I was creating a cultural icon when I invented it,” Bradley stated. “I invented it, but Bill [Gates] made it famous.”

The Father of DNA Computing

One of my friends have a small display system with him to login to his bank account.It displays the security code needed to login his bank account for transactions. Similar systems are used to login secured servers. Did you know the algoritham used for this secure login.This time i like to tell about Leonard Adleman in the trio(Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman) behind RSA Cryptosystem userd for secure login.


Leonard Adleman –
The Father of DNA Computing


Leonard Adleman (born December 31, 1945) is a theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science and molecular biology at the University of Southern California. He is known for being the inventor of the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptosystem in 1977, and of DNA computing. RSA is in
widespread use in security applications, including digital signatures.

Leonard Adleman was interested in math and science ever since he was a child.In 1968, he completed his undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley in mathematics. He entered graduate school at the San Francisco State College only to drop out when he found work as a computer programmer for the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco. He returned to Berkeley later and completed a Ph.D in computer science in 1976. He then took an assistant professorship at MIT where he met two other young researchers, Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir. Rivest and Shamir interested Adleman in the work they were doing: building a public key cryptography system. The threeeventually pioneered the one-way function that is now used in public key crypto systems with Rivest and Shamir thinking up possible one-way functions
while Adleman attempted to break them. All together, 42 different functions were tried until they found one that Adleman could not break. This became the basis for the widely used cryptography system which came to bear the initials of the trio: RSA (Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman).


For his contribution to the invention of the RSA cryptosystem, Adleman was a recipient along with Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir of the 2002 ACM Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of Computer ScienceAfter the instant fame and recognition for his groundbreaking work, Adleman
became a professor of computer science at USC. At USC, he and student name Fred Cohen, tested the first computer “virus” in 1983.

In 1994, his paper Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial Problems described the experimental use of DNA as a computational system. In it, he solved a seven-node instance of the Hamiltonian Graph problem, an NP-Complete problem similar to the traveling salesman problem. While the solution to a seven-node instance is trivial, this paper is the first known
instance of the successful use of DNA to compute an algorithm. DNA computing has been shown to have potential as a means to solve several other large-scale combinatorial search problems.
Go on DNA computing, go on...

References: wikipedia, other websites.
friends, thanks for your comments...
Would like to know whether you liked this post or not.
do comments or mail me: "tojeevan@gmail.com"

Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds Created the kernel for the GNU/Linux OS
Helsinki, Finland
Hai readers,
Are you using a linux for reading this blog...?
Say thanks to Linus Torvalds, the man behind the first version of Linux.
lets go direct to the Heros details...At 21, he wrote the first version of the Linux (lin-ucks) operating system. The open-source nature of Linux is its greatest strength.

Linus Torvalds was born in 28-Dec-1969, Helsinki, Finland. Torvalds earned his masters degree in computer science at the University of Helsinki, where the computers ran UNIX, an operating system designed by Bell Labs. UNIX was common on huge computers with many users, but it was bulky, expensive, and impractical for personal computers. And there in his computer he installed Minix, a PC-compatible mini-mimic of UNIX, but he wanted something more flexible and user-friendly, so in 1991 Torvalds spent several months writing a compact operating system for his PC. He posted an announcement to the Minix group on USENET, and made the Linux source code available to other nerds free of charge. Programmers everywhere started adding their own improvements, and eventually companies like Red Hat, Corel, Caldera, and Turbo Linux began selling their own versions of Linux.

Linux rarely crashes and its users are largely immune to the gazillion worms and viruses designed to exploit Microsoft's myriad holes and bugs.
Linux? is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. The kernel written by Torvalds comprises about 2% of the current Linux, but he still makes the ultimate decisions about which modifications are added and which aren't.

Richard Matthew Stallman

Richard Matthew Stallman
Founder, GNU software project, Free Software Foundation.
United States of America

http://www.fsf.org/

Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software movement, the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation, and the League for Programming Freedom.

Stallman was born on March 16, 1953, Manhattan, NY. He had his degree from Harvard University in 1971.Stallman spent the summer after his high-school graduation writing his first program, a preprocessor for the IBM 7094 written in the PL/I programming language. Stallman also worked as Laboratory Assistant in the Biology Department at Rockefeller University.


He is perhaps better known by his initials, "RMS". In the first edition of the Hacker's dictionary, he wrote, '"Richard Stallman" is just my mundane name; you can call me "rms".In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix. The name GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix. Soon after, he incorporated the non-profit Free Software Foundation (FSF) to employ free software programmers and provide a legal framework for the free software community. He is a notable programmer whose major accomplishments include GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, and the GNU Debugger.
Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation says that
"The word 'Free' doesn't refer to price; it refers to freedom,"



The Logo..
Have a nice day...

Send your commentss...

Ray Tomlinson

Hai dear friends…

Wishing you all a very prosperous new year 2008…

Hotmail, Rediffmail, Yahoo, Gmail … and the list is endless. With various features and sizes all these e-mail providers are conncting several minds who like to write their expressions in long or short notes in a cost effective way.I am sure you are also a frequest user of e-mails. Do you know the man behind this idea…

He is Ray Tomlinson... Sir, We express our heartfelt thanks.

Ray Tomlinson

Inventor of e-mail.

Ray Tomlinson graduated in electrical engineering in the MIT and entered to work in the company BBN in 1967, shortly before which its company received the order to work for ARPANET

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson was assigned to a project called SNDMSG. This program was not new, in fact it had existed for a number of years. By today's standards it was more than primitive. All it did was allow users on the same machine to send messages to each other. Users could create text files which would then be delivered to mailboxes on the same machine.

Ray was assigned to make this simple application do a little bit more. As it turned out, he had been working on something called CYPNET, which was intended to transfer files between computers within the ARPANET. So he modified CYPNET to perform one additional task - to append to a file. This was pretty simple and the change was quickly made.

After that, Ray made a decision which changed history. He created the format of the email address. He defined it as a mailbox name, the @ sign, and the machine's node name. He used the @ sign because "it seemed to make sense. I used the @ sign to indicate that the user was 'at' some other host rather than being local." The first email message was unceremoniously sent between two PDP-10 nodes of the ARPANET network. The contents of the first email message is lost to history, but it was probably something like "QWERTYUIOP".

Tomlinson has changed the world and made a lot of others rich without cashing in himself.Email has changed the way business -- from huge corporations to mom-and- pop shops -- does business. It's altering the way millions shop and bank.

pls put your queries and comments..
All wishes for 2008

Douglas Engelbart.-Father of Computer Mouse

How are you friends…

First, Thanks for viewing the pages and sending comments.

This time, in this page you are going to read about the most respected inventor of the device at your hand now. Yeah, the inventor of computer mouse. His name is Douglas Engelbart. He changed the way computers worked, from specialized machinery that only a trained scientist could use, to a user-friendly tool that almost anyone can use. Engelbart received a patent for the wooden shell with two metal wheels (computer mouse U.S. Patent # 3,541,541) in 1970, describing it in the patent application as an "X-Y position indicator for a display system”. Read the brief description below…

Douglas Engelbart.

“Father of Computer Mouse”.

This mild-mannered computer scientist has received widespread recognition for his contribution to the technology that has revolutionized the way the world communicates. He developed mouse, the Device used by millions.

The mouse was first developed by Doug Engelbartz , at the Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park, California.In the 1960s, at Stanford Research Institute, he and his team developed a set of tools to harness the growing power of computers. The tools include heavy tracking ball, joystick etc. In the end, the mouse won all the tests for speed and accuracy. At the time it was called an x-y position indicator. One of the members of the team nicknamed the device a mouse and it caught on.

As well as the ever-present mouse, his team developed hypertext linking, the integration of text and graphics, networking, a web-style browser and even video conferencing.

Douglas Engelbart was awarded the 1997 Lemelson-MIT Prize of $500,000, the world's largest single prize for invention and innovation.

Currently, Douglas Engelbart is the director of his company, Bootstrap Institute in Fremont, California, which promotes the concept of Collective IQ.

“As fast as we get better, we are going to get better at getting better “

Douglas Engelbart

You can get more amazing information about Douglas Engelbart from answers.com and http://www.superkids.com/. We like to hear from you. Please send your comments about this blog using the add comments link provided below.

Phil Katz

Phillip W Katz.
Creator of PKZIP.

”Phil Katz changed your life and got very little for it. He felt lonely despite his success”.reported by Al Fasold , The Syracuse Newspapers .The much used ZIP format was created by this man(Phil Katz) who known as one of the "brains," and liked playing chess. He created and distributed his compression software as a shareware during that time. Big companies such as General Motors Corp. sent checks for the code, which became the computing standard.The ZIP format is used for compressing files for efficient storage and easy upload and download.You are responsible to read the pathetic end of this great man if you used the zip files atleast once in your life.So start reading …

Phillip Katz is the Creator of "PKZIP" and the ZIP archive format. His compression software PKZIP (PKWare, Inc) made communication between computers faster and less expensive.

Phillip W. Katz, better known as Phil Katz was born on November 3, 1962. He received a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Madison At home, Mr. Katz often worked late into the night at his IBM personal computer. He spends his spare time tackling a sticky problem: how to compress information so that downloading could be faster and more data stored on computer disks. The most popular of compressing programs at that time was ARC from System Enhancement Associates. ARC was slow at its task and prone to corrupt files. It also had a tendency to crash when compressing or decompressing.

He ultimately produced a breakthrough program that combined several techniques then in use and automatically determined the best in any situation. Mr. Katz posted his code, which he first called PKArc, on Mr. Mahoney's bulletin board, using the "shareware" approach, in which users are invited to try a program and send money to the inventor if they like it. This garnered the attention of SEA. They believed Katz had “borrowed” heavily from ARC’s source code, and took him to court. In a negotiated settlement with SEA, Phil paid their legal bills and agreed to stop selling PKArc. But Phil came back to stage with more powerful, vastly improved program that made both ARC and PKArc look like products of the stone age. It was named PKZip – “Phil Katz’s ZIP program”. PKZIP made Katz one of the most successful shareware authors of all time. Phil made the ZIP file format an open one and made a huge mistake by delaying a Windows version of PKZip, allowing Nicosoft (makers of WinZip) to gain the larger user share that it holds to this day.

Katz battled alcoholism for years. Katz was found dead in a hotel room with an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps in his hand on April 14, 2000 at the age of 37. And five more empties were scattered about the room. A coroner's report stated his death was a result of pancreatic bleeding caused by acute alcoholism. It was a miserable, lonely end for a man who had created a product now in use by millions of people; a product that revolutionized computer data storage and made file transfers less complicated and more efficient.

Send your comments about this topic using the link provided below for it.Your enquiries are also welcome. Send it to tojeevan@gmail.com

Father of the Video Game Industry

Nolan Bushnell
Amazing Fact:Father of the Video Game Industry.
Country:United States of America.

I am sure that you are interested in computer games. Am i right? All the persons using computers also know about the various games and atleast played one in their life time. Did u ever think about the first computer game.?

The man who came with the idea of computer entertainment ?.

Todays the computer games are categorized to strategy games, simulator games, war games, race games, puzzling ones and fun games. And the games list start from the old grandfather pong (The first game) to nintendo wi and its continuing.

This time I would like to tell about the Father of Computer Entertainment. Nolan Bushnell.In his interview with Tenaya Scheinman he told that the spark was ignited in Mrs. Cook's 3rd grade class when he was assigned to do the unit on electricity and got to play with the science box. He worked in an amusement park as a teenager.

He was a very curious man who told that the other mentors throughout his education or life that helped him are :

“A fellow who was a ham radio operator down the street who taught me a lot about radios and electronics. I had my boss at the amusement park who taught me a tremendous amount about business. I had Dr. Evans at the University of Utah, who taught me a lot about computer graphics at a very early age. “

He founded the famous game entertainment company Atari in 1972 - still entertaining people all over the world with different games. He sold Atari in 1976 for $28 million.and the following year opened the first Chuck E. Cheese's restaurant, which combines fast food and electronic games and amusements. He sold that, too, and since has been involved in several projects and start-ups.

Next post gives you a nice, brief description of Nolan Bushnell and more pictures of the first pong. .wait for it.

The first programmer

Augusta Ada King
First computer programmer.
England.

We are all enjoying the websites,computer games.. and using the various applications for our needs in a computer. All these are written in a computer language...And there are lot of programmers (persons who write the programs using the computer languge) behind this enthusiastic webpages, and stunning computer games.Last blog i told you about the first computer programmer. Ada Lovelace.I think u got a good picture of her.

I have very good experiences over the web while searching for more details of lady ada.One interesting page in the internet showed me various images with good captions. A picture can tell more than words, and its true.So iwould like to show that images here...

PictureAbove:(1)Ada in infancy (2)Ada, aged about 19

Image below:(3)Ada, aged about 27

Image above:(4)Ada on her deathbed, sketched by her mother

You can check it :http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/PictDisplay/Lovelace.html

Augusta Ada

Augusta Ada King.

Amazing Fact:First computer programmer.

Country:England.

Ada Lovelace was best known as the first computer programmer. She was also known as Analyst, Metaphysician, and Founder of Scientific Computing.

August Ada Byron was born in London, England on December 10, 1815, the daughter of the illustrious poet, Lord Byron. Five weeks after Ada was born Lady Byron asked for a separation from Lord Byron. Ada never met her father (who died in Greece in 1823) and was raised by her mother, Lady Byron. One night, in November 1834, at a dinner party, Ada heard Babbage's ideas for a new calculating engine, the "Analytical Engine." In 1842, an Italian mathematician, Louis Menebrea, published a memoir in French on the subject of the Analytical Engine. Babbage enlisted Ada as translator for the memoir, and during a nine-month period in 1842-43, she worked feverishly on the article and a set of Notes she appended to it. These are the source of her enduring fame.

Published in 1843, Lady Lovelace's prescient comments included her predictions that such a machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use. Her Notes anticipate future developments. Ada suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan is now regarded as the first "computer program."

A software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named "Ada" in her honor in 1979.She died very young at the age of 37 of cancer in 1852 and was buried beside the father she never knew.

courtesy for pictures:http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/PictDisplay/Lovelace.htm

The Father of computers

Name:Charles Babbage

Amazing Fact:Inventor of The Difference Engine.

Country:England

Babbage is known for his ideas about building an "analytical engine", the predecessor of the digital computer. Although he never built his computer, his ideas influenced those who later carried out his ideas.

He is widely known as “The Father of computers”.

Charles Babbage was born in Teignmouth, Devonshire, England on December 26, 1792.the son of Benjamin Babbage, a London banker and Elizabeth teape. He attended Cambridge University. In the 1820's Babbage began developing his Difference Engine, a mechanical device that can perform simple mathematical calculations. Babbage was unable to complete it because of a lack of funding. During his working career he was a professor of mathematics at Cambridge university.In the 1830's Babbage began developing his Analytical Engine, which was designed to carry out more complicated calculations, but this device was never built.

Through out his life Babbage worked in many intellectual fields typical of his day and made contributions that would have assured his fame irrespective of the difference Engine and Analytical Engines.He died at his home in Dorset Street, London .on October 18, 1871.

____________________________________________________

Like to know your comments related this topic...