Wandex

Matthew Gray's Wandex (1993) the first search engine was designed to track the growth of the internet. Initially, it only counted Web servers but later also started capturing URLs. Wandex exploited the linked nature of the Web, following one link to the next- a procedure that is still followed by modern search engines.

The Pentax Corporation

The Pentax Corporation is a Japanese company founded in 1919 as Asahi Kogagu Kogyo Goshi Gaisha, a spectacle lens manufacturing outfit. In 1938 they changed their name to Asahi Optical Corporation, by which time they were also manufacturing camera/cine lenses. In 1952, Asahi Optical introduced their first camera, the Asahiflex (the first Japanese SLR). Asahi Optical adopted its current name, 'Pentax Corporation', in 2002.

Cordless phone

The first cordless phone was invented by Teri Pall in 1965. Although she sold her rights to the cordless phone, Teri Pall is still recognized as having revolutionised cordless communication.

Microsoft

Microsoft's first ever operating system, Xenix, which was released in 1980, did not make a huge impact. The OS that made Microsoft famous was DOS (Disk Operating System). IBM originally hired Microsoft to provide an OS for their upcoming IBM PC. Microsoft however, failed to make an OS, so they bought one called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $50,000, which they renamed to PC-DOS.

Jonathan Ive

London-born Jonathan Ive, apple's Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, is credited with designing the iMAC, the product that gave the Cupertino-based company a second lease of life in 1998. Since then, his team has also designed other Apple products such as the iBooks, the Power Macs, the Titanium PowerBook G4, the Mac mini and the iPod family

Methanol

Methanol, also known as methyl alcohol or wood alcohol, it is a light, volatile, colourless, tasteless, flammable, poisonous liquid with a very faint odour. The use of methanol can be traced back to the ancient Egyptians, who used it in their emblaming process. The word methylene, is obtained by combining the Greek word methy='wine' + hyle = wood. The name was shortened to 'methanol' from methylene in 1892 by the International Conference on Chemical Nomenclature.

JobServe

JobServe is the world's first Internet Recruitment Service. The company was formed late in 1993 by Robbie Cowling. Online operations started out on 4 may, 1994 when they launched the world's first 'Jobs by Email' service delivering a handful of jobs to just over a dozen email addresses. This was followed later in the year by the world's first recruitment web site.

Gadget

The word gadget was invented as a PR gimmick in 1884 in New York. The company behind the gimmick was Gaget, Gauthier & CIE who were responsible for casting of the Statue of Liberty at the time. Incidentally, even the first atomic bomb to be tested in 1945 was nicknamed 'the gadget'.

USB

USB 1.0 came about in november 1995 but it didn't catch on till USB 1.1 was introduced in 1998. USB 1.1 had two data rates: 12 Mbps for high-speed devices like disk drives and 1.5 Mbps for lower bandwidth devices like joysticks. USB 2.0, introduced in 2002, increased the peripheral-to-PC speed to 48 MBps. Most USB ports now are USB 2.0

Motorola

Dr Martin Cooper from Motorola, the inventor of the first modern cell phone, made the first call on such a phone in April 1973 to his rival, Joel Engel, Bell Lab's head of research. Bell Labs introduced the idea of cellular communications in 1947 with technology that was meant for police cars. However, Motorola was the first to incorporate the technology into mobile device that was designed for outside of an automobile use.

Hard disk drive

The first hard disk drive was the IBM 350 Disk File, invented by Reynold Johnson and introduced in 1955 with the IBM 305 computer. This drive had fifty 24 inch platters, with a total capacity of five million characters. A single head was used for access to all the platters, making the average access time very slow. The IBM 350 Disk File was about the size of two refrigerators and was marketed as an accounting system.

Warcraft

Orcs and Humans is a real-time strategy game that was developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment in 1994. It is rumoured that Warcraft's interface was at first designed to put Warhammer (an RPG boardgame) into a computer seeting but was canned because the deal failed. This rumour was rampant because the characters in Warcraft are very similar to those of Warhammer.

Prince of Persia

Prince of Persia is a platform game that was released by Broderbund for the Apple 2 1989. It was widely seen as a great leap forward in the quality of animation seen in video games. The creator of the Jordan Mechner studied many hours of films of his brother running and jumping in white clothes to ensure that all the movements looked just right in a process called rotoscoping.

Siemens

Siemens, the world's largest electronics company, has its international headquarters in Berlin and Munich, Germany. The company was founded by Werner von Siemens on October 1, 1847 to manufacture and sell the telegraph he had invented that used a needle to point to the sequence of letters, instead of using the Morse code.

Camera phone

The world's first camera phone was the J-SH04 made by Sharp Corporation and put on market from J-phone (Vodafone) in Japan in November 2000. This phone would be considered fairly elementary when compared to the camera phones of today; just five and a half years since. The highest resolution camera cell phone available today is Samsung Electronics' 8 megapixel WCDMA "SPH-V8200".

SanDisk

SanDisk is a US-based company that designs and markets flash memory card products. The company was founded in 1988 by Eli Harari, a well-known non-volatile memory technology expert. Sandisk is usually known for having some of the cheapest and some of the best flash memory cards in the world.

ISRO

India's national space agency, ISRO, was founded in 1969 under the department of Atomic Energy and continued under the Space Commission and Department of Space, created in June 1972. The agency was responsible for the launch of India's first satellite Aryabhatta in 1975. Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, who founded ISRO, is therefore considered the father of the Indian space programme.

Spacecraft by NASA

The 380 Kg Stardust was launched by NASA on February 7, 1999 to collect dust samples and photograph the icy nucleus of the comet Wild 2. When the spacecraft flew past the comet, the impact velocity of the particles that were captured was 6,100 metres per second, up to nine times the speed of a bullet fired from a rifle. Although the captured particles were smaller than a grain of sand, high-speed capture could after their shape and chemical composition-or vaporise then entirely.

Laptop

The first true laptop was the GRiD Compass 1011, designed by Bill Moggridge in 1979, and released in 1982. It was enclosed in a magnesium case and introduced the now familiar clamshell design, in which the display folded shut against the keyboard. The device could also run on batteries, and was equipped with a 320x200-pixel plasma display and 384 KB memory. It was not IBM-compatible, and it was priced at a steep $10,000.

Intel

Intel founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce was initially named Moore Noyce. But the name did not sound good in reference to electronics because Noyce sounded like 'noise', which is associated with electronic interference. The company then changed its name to NM electronics for a year before settling on INTegrated ELectronics or Intel for short. But he Intel trademark had to be bought out from a hotel chain that had he name from the beginning.

Fuel Cell

The principle of the Fuel cell was discovered by Swiss scientist Christian Friedrich Schonbein in the 1838. Based on this work, the first fuel cell was developed by Welsh scientist Sir William Grove in 1843, but it wasn't until 1959 that British engineer Francis Thomas Bacon successfully developed a 5 KW stationary fuel cell.

LEGO BRICKS

Lego bricks, manufactured over 40 years ago, still interlock neatly with those that are manufactured today. And get this: Six eight-stud Lego bricks of the same colour can be put together in 915,103,765 ways, while just three bricks of the same colour offer 1,560 combinations.

VAIO

VAIO, the name that's used for Sony's computer products, stands for 'Video Audio Integrated Operation' and was created for those devices that are both, multimedia as well as conventional computing products. The VAIO logo uses the letters 'V' and 'A' to represent a cosine wave and the letters 'I' and 'O' to represent one and zero. The logo is said to symbolise the analogue and digital multimedia capabilities of the product.

Modems

Modems were first introduced as a part of the SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment, an automated control ststem for collecting, tracking and intercepting bomber aircraft) in the 1950s. The modems connected terminals located at various airbases, radar sites and command-and-control centres to the SAGE director centres scattered around the US and Canada and ran on dedicated communications lines.