www what you see is what you get

Back in the 1980′s when Tim Berners Lee worked at CERN, he developed a program for storing information including using random associations. This was named “ENQUIRE” and never published, but it formed the basis for the developement of the world wide web. Based on this Enquire work he later wrote the first world wide web server, httpd, and the first client, world wide web, a what you see is what you get hypertext browser/editor. In 1990 the program “World wide web” was made available at CERN, and then to the internet in the summer of 1991. The world wide web program has evolved and spread beyond his wildest dreams, and continued work in this field has seen him awarded severel times for his vision, and that vision, there can be no doubt, has benefited the whole of the human race, and me, and it would be hard to imagine trundling around the internet without the “world wide web”.

I love you Tim

Here is an interview with the man himself off bbc youtube.

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Greatest discovery in a graph

I'd like to know who they asked.

Not quite what I expected, I thought it was a very small poll, and not much of a choice.

I think mobile phone and world wide web would be top for the average person, especially teens, probably conducted in a lab full of white coats.

Poll Update

It is interesting to see that while the desk top computer is still popular, the quest for smaller, faster and more mobile computing marches on relentlessly, and while the laptop is very popular the netbook is fast becoming a contender. How long do you think before we have proper computing power the size of a mobile phone.

Microprocessor greatest discovery in 50 years

What the engine did to extend our physical capacity, the computer has undoubtedly done to extend our mental capacity, and this power is provided by the microprocessor.

Semiconductor technology enabling smaller electronic components, has ensured that microprocessors are now all around us. They are everywhere, from the p.c. to your clever electric toothbrush.

In recognition Microprocessors have been voted number one greatest discovery in 50 years.

Poll Report: Which discovery has had the biggest impact on the world in the last 50 years?

13:03 09 April 2010

	Answer Text	Votes	%
	The microprocessor	258	47.51
	The world wide web	170	31.31
	Other answer…	31	5.71
	Space exploration	19	3.5
	The mobile phone	15	2.76
	The global optical fibre network	15	2.76
	Lasers	13	2.39
	Magnetic resonance imaging	8	1.47
	Error correcting codes	7	1.29
	Green chemistry	6	1.1
	Public key encryption	1	0.18
		543

http://www.newscientist.com/special/big-impact

Did You Know

More on Tim Berners Lee later, for now just “Thanks Tim“.

Excellent video, loads of mad and intresting facts, perfect for a techno geek like me.

I love the tune too “dokashiteru – home tonight” I’ll be using it for a slideshow I’m putting together.

Thanks Leia, where do you get these from?

Some laptop

Here are what some famous companies and people have said about computers and computing.

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
- Popular Mechanics, 1949

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

“I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.”
- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice-Hall, 1957

“But what…is it good for?”
- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of DEC

“Hey, I know this! This is Unix!”
- Jurassic Park

“Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry for the past decade as a massive effort to keep up with Apple.”
- Byte, December 1994

“So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’”
- Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple Computer

“I’m not dumb. I just have a command of throughly useless information.”
- Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes

Thanks to http://ifaq.wap.org/computers/famousquotes.html for some giggles over this.

Today’s Technology

Released on the market today is the latest in computing technology. This new computing system will revolutionize the industry. In one fell swoop it has done away with the need for the keyboard and mouse, instead it is using the technoskull cap. This new gizmo moves a pointer around the screen by detecting eye movements, and can type by sensing the letters that the user is thinking about. Obviously as the letter is being typed the user has to think of the punctuation and grammar to insert as well. This also works for the insertion of symbols, doing away with the character map. To select items from a drop down menu the user simply follows the menu with their eyes and nods their head on selection. To close a program the operator stamps their foot the resulting vibration tells the “techno skull-cap”  the operation is over and to close. Shown opposite is a prototype version, the marketed version we are told is smaller and a lot less cumbersome.

Sir Clive Sinclair

Inventor and business man Sir Clive Sinclair. Famous for his more lateral thinking inventions EG the C5 bicycle, first threw his hat in the ring with the electronic market in 1972 with the development of his range of calculators. Ten years later he entered the personal computer market with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This mini computer was on the cusp of computer development, boasting specifications like, a 3.5 MHz Zilog Z80A CPU, with 16K-49KB of RAM and eye popping 256×192 resolution. Not powerful by any stretch of the imagination today, but eye popping at the time.

As testement to the mans business acumen his company is still trading today.

Your Choice

Superfast Computing

This will give you an idea of the speeds that can be achived with a little effort.