Personalities on Tech Field

1.Bill Gates home was designed using a Mac!
2.The most frequently occuring company name or trademark on the World Wide Web is IBM.
3.Apple programmers named a beta version of a novel software application 'Sagan', in honour of the renowned astronomer Carl Sagan. Sagan sued Apple, and won the case.
4.On Bill clinton's last day in the White House, his departing aides played a curious practical joke on the incumbent president, George W Bush. When his staffers arrived, they were astonished to find that none of the building's computer Keyboards had Ws
5.Bill Gates computer-geek image was established well before his days at Microsoft. Steve Ballmer, a college buddy who later became that company's president, recalled that Gates never put sheets on his bed, and once left for vacation in the middle of a thunderstorm-with the windows and door wide open.
6.Bill Gates once said," There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no-one who like the PC, who doesn't like Microsoft.
7.Before joining Apple, John Sculley was CEO of Pepsi.
8.Bill Gates visited Belgium in February 1998, and was hit in the face with a cream pie. you'd expect him to have pressed charges or to have left the venue immediately. But Gates just remarked that the pie wasn't very tasty.
9.Astronaut David Wolf was the first American to exercise his right to vote from space. He e-mailed his vote for the Houston Mayoral elections in November 1997, while aboard the Russian space station Mir.
10.Steve Jobs announce Apple's partnership with Microsoft during the August 1997 Macworld trade show. The audience booed for 42 seconds!
11.Fifth grade student Laney Rupp drew his vision of Bill Gate's $42 million mansion, which was published in Harper's Magazine in February 1999. The only thing he missed out on was the electronic doggy door.
12.Microsoft asked Rolling Stones front-man, Mick Jagger, if they could use the Stone' hit 'start me up' in promotion for Windows 95. Almost jokingly, he asked for a ridiculous $ 12 million, thinking they'd turn him down. He was shocked when they agreed almost immediately.
13.Mashyoshi Son founded Soft-bank at age 23. The companyholds large stakes in Yahoo!, comdex and Kingston Technologies.
14.The original retail price of the Apple I computer was $666,66, because Steve Wozniak like numbers with repeating digits!
15.The legendary magazine "byte" which ceased publication with its July 1998 issue, began in September 1975.
16.Of the many rumours, about Microsoft, one was a spoof news release in 1994 that claimed Microsoft was purchsing the Catholic Church.
17.Did you know that composer, computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier coined the term 'virtual reality'?
18.The term 'cyberspace' was coined by Sci-fi author William Gibson, and appeared in his 1984 novel Neuromancer.
19.The term 'bit' was coined by John Tuckey. The word first appeared in print relatio to computer science sense in 1949.
20.The code name for the 12 engineers who designed the first IBM PC was 'The Dirty Dozen'.
21.John Brunner is credited with writing the first cyberpunk novel called Shockwave Rider.
22.Did you know that the three founders of Compaq all came from Texas Instruments?
23.Ted Nelson coined the term Hypertext in 1965, and was also the author of the book Literray Machines.
24.Sanai Mito, a former Osaka Municipal University working for Sharp in the early 1970s invented the LCD
25.A widely-circualted Internet hoax claimed that Intel engineers ahd etched a tiny, hidden message on the surface of the Pentium processor, saying 'Bill Sux'
26. Bill Gates' The Road Ahead' has been translated into 25 languages.
27.Hotmail founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, went online on 4th July 1996. When Microsoft acquired Hotmail in January 1998, Hotmail had over 9 million customers.
28.'Adobe' came from the name of the river Dobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
29.'Apache' got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA's httpd daemon. The result was ' A Pachy' server; thus,the name Apache.
30.Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whhther the company they founded would be called Hewlett Packard Hewlett.
31.The name IBM was started by an ex-employee of National Cash Register. To one-up them in all respects he called his comapny International Business Machine.
32.Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA. The code name for the project was Oracle. Later they kept the same name for the company.
33.The term ' Silicon Valley' was coined by journalist Don Hoefler.
34.Charles Wang, an immigrant from Shanghai, founded Computer Associates in 1976.
35.Sandra Kesinor and Leonard Bosack started Cisco in 1984. The name was simply a shortened version of 'San Francisco'.
36.Scott McNealy founded Sun Microsystems in 1982.
37. In 2001, the Guinness Book of World Records listed MSN HOtmail as the worlds largest free-mail provider, with more than a 100 million subscribers.
38. Adobe or Adobe Systems Incorporated, the company behind Photoshop, Acrobat, and so on , was founded in 1982.
39. Steven Gray founded the Amateaur computer Society in 1966 and began publishing the ACS newsletter.
40. Jeff Hawkins invented the Palm Pilot.
41. In 1952, Heniz Nixdorf founded Nixdorf computer Corp. in Germany. It remained an independent corporation until merging with Siemens in 1990.
42.In 1969, Xerox Corp. bought Scientific Data Systems for nearly $ 1 billion-90times the latter's earnings.
43. Bill Gates' first company was called Traf-o-Data, which made software to analyse traffic, which enabled country governments to get federal money for taod projects. The company was driven out of business by a huge monopoly- the federal government that gave away similar software for free.
44. Bill Gates'math SAT score was a perfect 800.
45. The earliest reference by Bill Gates made to the company name 'MIcrosoft' was in a letter sent by Gates to co-founder Paul Allen on 29th November,1975. In the letter, the name was spelt 'Microsoft', but the hyphen was eventually dropped.
46. 3com changed the name of the PalmPilot to simply 'Palm' because PilotPen Company threatened trademark lawsuit, citing possible brand confusion. so 3com backed down and changed the name to 'Palm', The irony is that the Palm Pen Company makes stylus usable on Palm, Windows CE and other pen based devices.
47. Brad Chase, Senior Executive at Microsoft in charge of Windwos 9, left the company in 1999 and created a board game called Derivation, which is about English words and phrases and their origins and meanings.
48.Apple co-founder Steve Woznaik earned money in college by selling "blue boxes" to other students. A blue box attached to a proper signals to allow a user to make free phone calls.
49.Bill Gates launched his business carrer in 1969 at age 14 by forming a company named Lakeside Programming Group. Gates and his friend Paul Allen signed an agreement with Computer Center corporation to report bugs in PDP-10 software, in exchange for computer time.
50.One of the largest companies in the world,AT&T is beleived to have employed over a million people at one point.