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The QWERTY keyboard - used by virtually all typewriters, word processors and computers was invented by the American James Densmore as a means of slowing down the speed of typing so that the rollers on early typewriters would not jam.
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First freely programmable computer made by Konrad Zuse
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IBM chief Thomas Watson said there were would only ever be enough demand for five computers in the world.
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Called ENIAC "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator" it was the first private electronic computer, makes 5000 additions in a second and it weighed 30 tons.
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Douglas Engelbart created the first mouse for Windows O.S
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The most famous computer in the world, HAL 9000 never existed, but was in a movie.
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Microsoft begins the friendly war with Apple.
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The first ever computer virus ended up on a 5.25" floppy disk. The virus was called Brain and it was created by Basit and Amjad in Lahore, Pakistan.
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The defining moment for open source software was when a young student at the University of Helsinki, first released his propotype Linux software.
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In the USA, sales of computers to homes exceeded sales of computers to businesses.
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The world computer industry shipped its one billionth PC.
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In late 2002, a 10-strong team of computer specialists ran a computer program which took five years to design for a a total of 400 hours at the top speed of two trillion calculations a second to work out the value of pi - the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. They calculated the value to 1.2411 trillion places, a figure that would stretch around the world 500 times.
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In 2010, the world's fastest supercomputer was a Chinese machine called Tianhe-1A which was capable of 2,507 trillion calculations each second.
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More than 80% of the world's personal computers contain Microsoft's MS-DOS or Windows operating systems.
