Top 10 com­put­ers facts

In 1939 - Atanasoff-Berry ABC. Atanasoff and Berry's computer work was not widely known until it was rediscovered in the 1960s, amidst conflicting claims about the first electronic computer. At that time ENIAC, created by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, was considered to be the first computer in the modern sense. In 1973 a U.S. District Court invalidated the ENIAC patent and concluded that the ENIAC inventors had derived the design of the electronic digital computer from Atanasoff 's work.

Being an astronaut. Shuttleworth founded Thawte in 1995, which specialized in digital certificates and Internet security. His South African company flourished thanks to American ban on export of cryptography, which limited foreign operations of US cryptographic companies. Mark sold Thawte to VeriSign in December 1999, earning US$ 575 million (he aged 26 then). Later he became the second space tourist in the world, and founded Canonical.

Single crystal silicon is used in the fabrication of semiconductors. On the quantum scale that microprocessors operate on, the presence of grain boundaries would have a significant impact on the functionality of field effect transistors by altering local electrical properties. Therefore, microprocessor fabricators have invested heavily in facilities to produce large single crystals of silicon.

Thermal printer. Registers typically use thermal printers to print receipts, although older dot matrix printers are still in use at some retailers. Thermo-sensitive coating used in thermal paper is sensitive to incidental heat, abrasion, friction (which can cause heat, thus darkening the paper), light (which can fade printed images), and water.

Ada Lovelace. She was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine.

Gary McKinnon . McKinnon was accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers. McKinnon states that he was merely looking for evidence of free energy suppression and a cover-up of UFO activity and other technologies potentially useful to the public. Web and print media across the UK ran a campaign to prevent Gary McKinnon's extradition to the U.S.

Random Access Memory. Random-access memory (RAM) is a form of computer data storage that stores data and machine code currently being used. A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data in the memory.

Operating memory. A peripheral is "an ancillary device used to put information into and get information out of the computer". There are three different types of peripherals: input devices, which interact with or send data from the user to the computer (mice, keyboards, etc.) output devices, which provide output to the user from the computer (monitors, printers, etc.) input/output devices that perform both functions.

Monitor. In computing, an input device is a piece of computer hardware equipment used to provide data and control signals to an information processing system such as a computer or information appliance. Examples of input devices include keyboards, mouse, scanners, digital cameras and joysticks.

Million bits per second. Common data rate units are multiples of bits per second (bit/s) and bytes per second (B/s). For example, the data rates of modern residential high-speed Internet connections are commonly expressed in megabits per second (Mbit/s).