According to www.top500.org, which lists the world’s fastest supercomputers, the world’s most powerful computer is Japan’s “K Computer” built by Fujitsu.
The cost to build the K Computer hasn’t been released but it’s speculated that it must have been in the billions. It’s estimated that it costs about $10 million per year to run it.
The K Computer can perform more than 8 quadrillion calculations per second
Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 and ended the need to type MS-DOS commands. Now all you had to do was move your mouse and point and click your way through windows and menus. It had drop-down menus, scroll bars, icons, and dialog boxes that made programs easier to learn and use. The name Windows stuck because it best described the boxes and menus that the operating system utilized.
Windows 1.0 shipped with several programs including Paint, Windows Writer, Notepad, Calculator, and a calendar, card file, and clock. It also included a game called Reversi.
ICANN Headquarters - Marina del Rey, California
According to Wikipedia, the US government controlled the domain name system of the Internet at first. Then on 9/30/98, in an effort to improve the technical management of Internet names and addresses, the government created ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN is a not-for-profit corporation managed by a global Board of Directors and is located in Marina del Rey, California.
Pierre Omidyar--Photo by Joi
According to Wikipedia, Ebay was founded in September of 1995 by Pierre Omidyar in his San Jose, California home. Omidyar, who was 28 at the time, originally named the online marketplace AuctionWeb. The first item sold there was a broken laser pointer for which he got $14.00. In 1997 Omidyar changed the name to the now famous Ebay.
Omidyar was born in Paris on June 21, 1967 to Iranian parents who had immigrated to France to attend college. His family moved to the United States when he was six.
Today Ebay is a multi-billion dollar corporation that does business in over thirty countries.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the first website ever built was http://info.cern.ch. It was launched online on 8/6/91. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee in Brittan. Its purpose was to explain what the Internet was and how to use it.
Larry Page(photo by aweigend)
Sergey Brin (photo by enlewof)
According to Wikipedia, Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google. The pair met when they were both enrolled in a Ph.D program in computer science at Standford University. Google started out as a research project nicknamed “BackRub.” The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their Ph.D studies to start up Google in a rented garage.
According to the Web information company Alexa, the following are the top 10 websites in the United States:
1. Google–google.com
2. Facebook–facebook.com
3. Yahoo–yahoo.com
4. YouTube–youtube.com
5. Amazon–amazon.com
6. Wikipedia–wikipedia.org
7. Blogger–blogger.com
8. Twitter–twitter.com
9. Ebay–ebay.com
10. Craigslist–craigslist.org
None of the top ten is a surprise. I did read that Facebook is soon going to take Google’s place in the number one spot. That was a little bit surprising to me.
Jeff Bezos
According to Wikipedia, Jeff Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986. He started Amazon.com in his garage in 1994, and in 1999 he was named Time mazagine’s person of the year. In 2000, he set-up a corporation called Blue Origin, a space travel company which is privately funded. Forbes reports that Mr. Bezos net worth as of 2010 is 2.6 billion.
According to Wikipedia, when Amazon’s Kindle debuted on November 19 2007, it sold for $399.00 and sold out in five and one-half hours. The e-reader stayed out of stock until April 2008.
