Fun Facts About Computers (Stolen from other website!!!)
The only capability a computer has is the circuitry to detect the difference between two voltages. A digital signal is either 'high' or low, 'true' or 'false'. Computer Engineers use this capability as the building block to create all the amazing features of modern computers.
- Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, is sometimes quoted as asserting that the world would probably never need more than 5 computers. He was referring, of course, to main frame computers, which his company built.
- Bill Gates dropped out of college (Harvard) before founding Microsoft.
- Early hard drives in Personal Computers held 20 MB, or 20 Megabytes, and cost about $800. By comparison, an $8 flash drive holds 2 GB, or 2 Gigabytes. That's a 100-fold decrease in price and a 100-fold increase in capacity.
- Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first Apple computers from parts they got for free from their employers. They originally approached their employers with their idea for a 'personal computer', but they were rebuffed. They were actually encouraged to scrounge spare parts from work and complete their project in their spare time.
- The computer mouse, the windowing GUI, laser printing, and the network card were all developed at one company; Xerox in Palo Alto, California.
- The computer in your cell phone has more processing power than all the computers in the Apollo 11 Lunar Lander that put 2 men on the moon.
- Static electricity so mild that humans don't even feel it can destroy computer circuitry.
- The popular programming language COBOL was invented by Admiral Grace Hopper, the first female admiral in the US Navy.
- Edsger Dijkstra is credited with the quote "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
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