Test Your Nerd Knowledge: Sept 9, 2022
Here’s a review of this week’s questions:
- The Intel 8008 was introduced in 1972. What was it?
- What is the name of Google’s parent company?
- In what year was the first .com domain name registered?
And here are the answers:
- The world’s first 8-bit programmable microprocessor. Intel had already introduced 8008’s predecessor, the 4-bit 4004, five months before it rolled out the 8-bit version. The 8008 had been developed on a separate track and had very different specifications, including 50 percent more transistors, and eight times the clock speed and capabilities for data/character manipulation. Development of the 8008 had begun in 1969, when engineer Stan Mazor teamed with his colleague Ted Hoff to create a chip that Seiko Corporation could use in a new line of desktop calculators. The 4004 and 8008 were both hugely successful for Intel, which later created the 8080, which did much more to realize the full potential of the microprocessor to provide small, low-cost CPUs in general-purpose computers.
- Alphabet. Alphabet was founded in 2015 by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Recognized as the holding company for Google, as well as Google subsidiaries like YouTube, Android iOS and Calico, the company’s name was chosen because an alphabet is “a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search,” according to Larry Page. Alphabet boasts annual revenue of over $250 billion and employs 156,000 people worldwide.
- 1985. Massachusetts computer company Symbolics Inc. created the first .com name, symbolics.com, on March 15, 1985. It was also the first domain name to be registered through the DNS (Domain Name System) process. The market for these unique addresses would not heat up for years, but this “click heard ’round the world” would eventually lead to where we are today, when acquiring a domain name is as easy as, well, navigating to a web address. Symbolics, the company behind this tectonic development, was conceived at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and best known for designing and manufacturing a line of single-user computers, the first commercially available “general-purpose computers” or “workstations” in the industry.