Test your nerd knowledge: Nov. 21, 2022

Thanks for playing Test Your Nerd Knowledge! Here’s a quick reivew of today’s questions:

1. In 1985, Intel introduced a microprocessor known as 80386, which was later renamed as what? 
2. What is the name of the online platform, developed in China, that connects farmers with consumers directly through its interactive social commerce shopping experience?
3. What term is Norwegian computer engineer Halvor Bothner-By famous for coining in the 1970s?

And here are the answers:

1. Answer: i386. The i386 was a 32-bit microprocessor, backwards compatible with previous generations of 80×86 CPUs. Intel released the microprocessor in October of 1985, following its success with 16-bit technology. The initial versions contained 275,000 transistors and were the CPU for many workstations and high-end computer systems at the time. Intel kept on cranking them out until 2007, long after the technology was obsolete. OpenBSD was the last OS to utilize i386, which was followed by i486 in 1989.
2. Answer: Pinduoduo. Founded in 2015, Pinduoduo started as an agriculture online retailer before transitioning to a third-party platform model connecting merchants and consumers across multiple product categories. Its founder, Colin Huang, was educated in the U.S., and is also credited with helping to launch Google in China. Huang’s personal wealth is currently valued at $25 billion. Shanghai-based Pinduoduo, known as PDD, had 733.4 million monthly users  in the final quarter of 2021. In September of 2022, Pinduoduo introduced Temu, its online e-commerce platform, in the U.S. Temu lists items across several categories, including clothing, jewelry, pet supplies and home and garden, and could mark a new challenge to U.S. e-commerce leader Amazon.
3. Answer: Datagram. In the early 1970s, the term datagram was created by combining the words “data” and “telegram.” Halvor Bothner-By, who at that time had the hardest name to pronounce as well as the hardest title to remember: “CCITT rapporteur on packet switching,” is credited with originating the term, and while the word datagram was new, the concept already had a long history. Louis Pouzin and his team had fiddled with the concept years earlier, as they were pioneering the practice of packet communications networks. Datagrams were a pivotal component of the development of Internet Protocol, and since we still haven’t mentioned what it actually is, here’s the definition: “A self-contained, independent entity of data carrying sufficient information to be routed from the source to the destination computer without reliance on earlier exchanges between this source and destination computer and the transporting network.”