Sunday, June 3, 2007

Technology - Random Trivia Answers

  • A1) Illinois. The mobile phone, computer, and radio company began as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928.
  • A2) Integrated. The Integrated Electronics Corporation was born in Santa Clara, California in 1968.
  • A3) Common. The COmmon Business Oriented Language has been used to program computers since 1959. As recently as 1997, the Gartner Group estimated that four-fifths of the lines of code used for business was in COBOL.
  • A4) Gateway. Known as Gateway 2000 before the turn of the century, the company is now based in Irvine, California but continues to honor its Sioux City, Iowa roots with its trademark black-and-white cow-patterned boxes.
  • A5) Symbolics registered http://www.symbolics.com on March 15, 1985. The Cambridge, Massachusetts company spun out of the MIT AI Lab and manufactured LISP machines until the market crashed in the early 1990s. A company bearing the same name still supports the old products, but the original company is dead.
  • A6) Nokia Corporation. The Finnish company was officially created by a 1967 merger of three companies, including the Finnish Rubber Works.
  • A7) Tux. Linus Torvalds began the Unix-like operating system in 1991, and the penguin was adopted five years later.
  • A8) Bluetooth. The wireless protocol, created by Ericsson in 1994, allows short-range radio communication between mobile phones, headsets, computers, printers, and more.
  • A9) Sosumi. Added to System 7, the pseudo-Japanese name is a respelling of "So sue me".
  • A10) Subscriber. Digital Subscriber Lines evolved from the mostly unsuccessful ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), which never managed to supplant dial-up lines in any significant number of households.
  • A11) Mouse. Engelbart created the first wheeled device for SRI International in the mid-1960s, applied for a patent in 1967, and received his X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System patent on November 17, 1970.
  • A12) BubbleBoy. The October 7, 1992 Seinfeld episode revolved around a fan who suffered from immune deficiency, and hence was susceptible to viruses. This episode is famous for its "Moops" Trivial Pursuit typo that leads to the Bubble Boy's demise.

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