Friday, July 13, 2007
Alex Bernstein
Alex Bernstein wrote a chess program in 1957 for an IBM 704, which could do 42,000 instructions per second and had a memory of 70K. This was the first full-fledged game of chess by a computer and it did a 4-ply search in 8 minutes.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Screensavers
Screensavers were originally designed to protect computer monitors from phosphor burn-in. Early CRT monitors had problems with the same image being displayed for a long time. The phosphors used to make the pixels in the display would discolor the glass surface of the CRT when they would glow at a constant rate for a long period of time. This discoloration would then be visible as a faint image overlaying whatever else was displayed on the monitor.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Alick Glennie
In 1952, Alick Glennie, who wrote the first computer compiler, defeated Alan Turing's chess program, TurboChamp. Alick was the first person to beat a computer program at chess.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
The Hackers Manifesto
The Hackers Manifesto is a small article written in 1986 by a hacker who went by the pseudonym of "The Mentor". The article is considered an important item of hacker culture, and it gives an insight into the psychology of early hackers.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Alan Turing
In 1946, Alan Turing made his first reference to machine intelligence in connection with chess-playing and in the following year specified the first program for chess. In 1950, he wrote the first computer chess program, and in the same year, proposed the Turing Test that in time, a computer could be programmed to acquire abilities that would rival human intelligence.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
NEC Turbografx-16
The NEC Turbografx-16, which was released in Japan in 1988 as the PC-Engine, was the first system to have a CD player attachment. It had an 8-bit CPU with a 16-bit graphics chip.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Cationic Cocktail
Cationic cocktail is a diluted fabric softener sprayed on computer room carpets to prevent static electricity from being built up by feet shuffling on carpet. It is also referred to as Downy cocktail.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Byzantine
A term used to describe any system that has so many labyrinthine internal interconnections that it would be impossible to simplify by separation into loosely coupled or linked components.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Casting the Runes
Casting the runes: What a guru does when you ask him or her to run a particular program because it never works for anyone else. The word is especially used when nobody can ever see what the guru is doing different from what everyone else has done.
Wrackground Image
Wrackground image is a background image or texture that ruins a Web page by making the text unreadable.
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