Selasa, 04 Maret 2008

Telepon Pertama Di Dunia (First Phone in the World)




Did you know that the very first phone call was made on March 10, 1876 in the United States? By today’s standards it was a short call over a very short distance. Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, were literally just down the hall from each other in a Boston, Massachusetts machine shop. The message was a single sentence, “Watson come here, I want you!”

That was 125 years ago and a very different world than today! The electric light was barely used and cars hadn’t been invented! People wrote letters, or in an emergency sent a telegram. Letters took days or weeks to arrive depending on how far they had to travel. To send a telegram someone would have to go to the telegraph office, sometimes hundreds of miles away, and compose a very short message because they were charged a high price for each word. For the same reasons, news wasn’t immediate like it is now.

By 1880, just four years after the first phone call, there were over 60,000 phones in America. Making a call though, was different than it is today. You would pick up the receiver, speak into the phone and tell the operator the name of the person you wanted to talk to. There was no direct dialing because there were no phone numbers. There were no telephone directories. The operators knew everyone in town who had a phone and how to connect callers. Customers had the best ideas to improve the phone system. When a yellow fever epidemic hit Lowell, Massachusetts, the local doctor became alarmed. What if all four of the town’s operators were sick at once? How could replacement operators memorize the names of the town’s 200 customers and properly route the emergency calls? The doctor came up with a solution. Replace names with numbers. A caller could now request a number rather than a name, allowing the operator to connect without knowing the exact name and matching location of everyone in town.

An undertaker, who believed the operators were diverting his business to competitors, invented the dial telephone and an automatic switchboard. Callers could dial the number they wanted themselves and be connected by a mechanical switchboard. Operators would no longer be needed for everyday calls. The next big project was to create a direct line from New York to San Francisco. This job was as big as building the transcontinental railroad! Thousands of workers fanned out across America on foot and horseback encountering every kind of terrain from mountain to desert. They worked for a full year braving storms, lightening, blizzards and sweltering heat. It took 14,000 miles of copper wire and 130,000 telephone poles to link the East coast with the West coast!

Finally, on January 25, 1915, (39 years after the first telephone call), the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, now in New York, called his partner Thomas Watson in San Francisco. With everybody watching, they wanted to make absolutely sure nothing went wrong. They hired 15,000 men, 5 for every mile of telephone wire, and spaced them out across the nation, ready to fix any problem that would arise. The two old friends, Bell and Watson, chatted for 23 minutes. They made history and their invention, the telephone, changed America and eventually the world, forever.

(www.chevroncars.com)

Kamis, 28 Februari 2008

Mouse Komputer Pertama Di Dunia (First Computer Mouse in the World)




Proving that things were way cooler back in the day, is the world's first computer mouse. Made by Douglas Engelbart in 1964, it "consisted of two gear-wheels positioned perpendicular to each other -- allowing movement on one axis." Just look at this thing. Ergonomic shape, great button placement -- and it's made of wood. If that ain't style, then I don't know what is. Sure the front has rotted out, but who cares. My mouse looks like that, and it's brand new. That's just what happens when porn doesn't download fast enough and you start slamming the mouse on the desk.

One more of the underside after the jump.

(www.geekologie.com)

Virus Komputer Pertama di Dunia (First Computer Virus in the World)

Inkarnasi pertama virus ini muncul pada Januari 1986, disebut-sebut sebagai virus pertama untuk PC yang pernah dibuat. Virus ini menginfeksi boot sector media penyimpanan data dengan format DOS File Allocation Table (FAT). (c)Brain juga dikenal dengan sebutan virus Lahore, Pakistani, Pakistani Brain, Brain-A dan UIUC. Majalah Businessweek pada waktu itu menyebutnya Pakistani Flu.

(c)Brain dibuat oleh programmer berumur 19 tahun Basit Farooq Alvi dan saudaranya Amjad Farooq Alvi, yang tinggal di Chahmiran, Lahore, Pakistan. Kakak beradik ini mengaku pada majalah Time bahwa mereka membuat virus ini untuk melindungi software pengobatan karya mereka dari pembajakan. Virus ini bahkan melengkapi diri dengan alamat dua bersaudara ini berikut tiga nomor telepon yang bisa dihubungi, tak ketinggalan sebuah pesan yang menyebutkan bahwa jika komputer user terinfeksi maka dianjurkan menghubungi mereka untuk vaksinasi.

Ketika mereka mulai mendapatkan ribuan telepon dari orang-orang berbagai penjuru Amerika Serikat, Inggris, dan lainnya,yang meminta vaksinasi untuk komputer mereka, kakak-beradik ini terperangah dan berusaha menjelaskan bahwa motivasi mereka bukanlah untuk kejahatan.

Mereka akhirnya memotong kabel telepon dan menyesal telah membeberkan nomor telepon mereka sejak awal.

(portal.gembels.com)

Komputer Modern Pertama di Dunia (First Modern Computer in the World)







• ENIAC spanned nearly 17 metres and filled most of a 9-by-17 metre room. It could perform 38 divisions and 357 multiplications in less than a second.
• ENIAC was noisy and emitted an incredible heat because it had 17,000 vacuum tubes — sealed glass containers conducting electrical currents.
• Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania first invented ENIAC for the U.S. army in 1945.
• ENIAC was based on a device called the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), devised one year earlier for the U.S. Navy.
• International Business Machine Corporation (IBM) debuted ASCC in 1944. ASCC was a complex calculator invented by Harvard University. It weighed 4.5 tonnes and measured 15.5 metres.
• IBM unveiled its first calculating machine in 1938.
• The Complex Number Calculator was the first remote machine to perform simple math equations.
• In 1946, computers took just two hours to equate what it used to take 100 engineers a whole year to do.
• Although the sophistication of computing machines vary, all of them are based on a similar model. A desktop computer is more elaborate than a car odometer but both work on a system that tallies numbers.
• ENIAC's power is overshadowed by today's calculator, which contains more memory than the early computer.
• By 1971, Intel had developed a 12-millimetre computer chip with 12 times the capability of ENIAC.
• ENIAC is credited as being the first "large-scale, electronic, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems." But several other similar machines were developed in the early 1940s. These included Germany's Z3, America's Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) and Britain's Colossus computer.







(archives.cbc.ca)

Rabu, 13 Februari 2008

Laptop Pertama di Dunia (First Laptop in the World)




GRiD Compass

Jakarta - Meski tak sepopuler Osborne 1, GRiD Compass 1100 (1982) kerap disebut sebagai laptop pertama. Saat itu, pengguna yang mampu membeli hanya NASA dan Angkatan Bersenjata AS.
( wsh / wsh )
( Wicaksono Hidayat - detikinet )