Ramses

Ramses 2 also known as Ramses the great was an Egyptian pharaoh of the nineteenth Egyptian dynasty. He bacame pharaoh in his early 20s, and reigned for a total of 66 years and 2 months. He was once said to have lived to be 99 years old, but it is more likely that he died in his ninetieth year.

GNU

In 1983, Richard Stallman founded the GNU project, which today forms an essential part of most Linux systems. The goal of GNU was to develop a complete Unix-like operating system composed entirely free of software.

Mars

Mars has fascinated astronomers since the time immemorial. It was known by the ancient Egyptians as "Her Deschel" or "the Red One". The Babylonians referred to it as "Nergal" or "the Star of Death" while the Hebrews named it "Ma'adim" which means "the one who blushes". The modern name of the planet, however, comes from the Romans who named it after their god of war.

Bertillonage

In the 1980s, French law enforcement officer and biometrics researcher, Alphonse Bertillion created anthropometry, the first scientific identification system based on physical measurements that would help the police in identifying criminals. The method, which was called Bertillonage, was eventually replaced by fingerprinting in later years.

LucasArts

LucasArts started out in May 1982 as the Games Group of Lucasfilm Ltd, the film production company of George Lucas. Lucas wanted his company to branch out into the areas of entertainment, so he cooperated with Atari to produce video games. LucasArts didn't use the Star Wars franchise until early 1990s. The first Star Wars created in-house by them was a space combat simulator called X-wing. The game went on to spawn a successful series.

Gary Thuerk

Back in 1978, when the Internet was called Arpanet, Gary Thuerk, who worked as a Marketing Manager at Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), sent out the first spam e-mail inviting techies to a demonstration of DEC's new computer, the Decsystem-20. The CC list of that e-mail took up so much room that it spilled into the message's body. The Guiness Book of Records refers to Gary Thuerk as the 'Father Of Spam'.

IUMA

The Intenet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) is generally recognised as the pioneer of online music. It was started in 1933 by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from the University of California to provide a forum for unsigned artists to share their music. IUMA provides artists who register with a free URL and Web page.

Sony

Sony was founded on May 7, 1946 as the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation by Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita. It was renamed to Sony in 1958. Their first consumer product: a rice boiler! Sony developed the magnetic recording tape, and in 1950 sold the first tape, and in 1950 sold the first tape recorder in Japan. In 1960, they produced the world's first trasistor television.

SETI

SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. SETI efforts began with a paper written by physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison and published in the Science press in 1959. Cocconi and Morrison suggested that the microwave frequencies between 1 and 10 gigahertz would be best suited for interstellar communications.

Pentax

Pentax is one of Japan's leading manufacturers of optical components and products. The company was formed in 1919 as the Asahi Optical Joint Stock Co of Tokyo as a producer of spectacle lenses and in 1931 produced its first still camera lenses. The 'Pentax' name was created in 1957, derived from a combination of the words PENTAprism and refleX in recognition of Asahi Optical being the first manufacturer to incorporate a pentaprism viewfinder and reflex mirror system into a camera.

Hard Drive

The first hard drive, IBM 350 was made in a cabinet that was exactly 60 inches long and 29 inches deep. This was done because IBM had a strict rule that all its products must pass through their doorway which was 29.5 inches wide.

SIM

SIM, short for subsciber identity module, is a sort of smart card that holds information about the subscriber of a GSM mobile service on a chip. The card was first introduced in the early 1990s in Europe and since then has been adopted the world over to power mobile phones. Current SIM cards measure around 64KB but newer developments indicate card capabilities of around half a GB.

Texas

Texas Instruments is responsible for inventing several of the essential gadgets we use today. It invented the transistor radio, integrated circuit and solid circuit in the 1950's. They also invented the hand-held calculator in 1967, the single-chip microcomputer in 1971 and single-chip microprocessor in 1973, at almost the same time as Intel.

Electromagnetic spectrum

Within the range of radiation frequencies, called the electromagnetic spectrum, cell phones fall between TVs and Microwave ovens (with the ovens, obviously, being on the higher side). At that level, many scientists believe that radiations from cell phones couldn't conceivably impair human health. Just by the way, a tanning booth at a spa and even X-ray machines at a clinic radiate at a higher frequency.

Ethanol

Ethanol's use as a transportation fuel can be traced as far back as Henry Ford and other transportation pioneers. In the 1880's, Henry Ford built his first ethanol-fuelled automobile called the Quadricycle. Ford's Model T, produced in 1908, had a carburettor adjustment that would allow the vehicle to run on ethanol fuel produced by farmers.

David Hanson

David Hanson is a sculptor, robotics researcher and the CEO of Hanson Robotics. Hanson developed social robots that stimulate naturalistic conversations with face tracking AI, speech recognition, and realistic expressions that use a polymer material created by him. These materials require 1/20th the energy and weight of previous materials when affecting facial expressions. He is also well known for creating a robotic humanoid sculpture named Vera in the image of his girl friend.

JVC

JVC, or Japan Victor Company, is a Japanese consumer electronics corporation based in Yokohama, Japan which was founded in 1927. The company is best known for debuting Japan's first televisions, and inventing the VHS system. They invented the VHS format and debuted the first VHS players for the consumer market in 1976 for $885- a year after Sony introduced the Betamax home videocassette tape in 1975. Of course, VHS won hands down.

Nokia tune

The "Nokia Tune"- probably the world's most well-known ringtone-is based on a 19th century guitar work named"Gran Vals" by Spanish musician Francisco Tarrega. In fact, the tune was originally named "Gran Vals" on Nokia phones but was changed to "Nokia Tune" around 1998 when it became so well known that people referred to it as such.

Mark W Tilden

Mark W Tilden is a robotics physicist whose work in the field is credited with producing complex robotic movements from simple logic circuits, often all on the single chip and without a microprocessor. Tilden, who presently works at WowWee making biomorphic robot-based toys such as the 'RoboSapien', was also technical consultant for the robot scenes of the 2001 movie 'Lara Croft: Tomb Raider'.

Motorola

Before becoming famous for its cellular phones, Motorola was also a strong contender in semiconductor industry with expertise in integrated circuits used in computers. In fact, the US-based company even supplied microprocessors that were used in Commodore Amiga, Apple Macintosh and Power Macintosh personal computers.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg was started by Michael Hart in 1971. Hart believed that computers would one day be accessible to the general public and decided to make works of literature available in electronic form for free. He happened to have a copy of the US Declaration of Independence and this became the first Project Gutenberg e-text. He named the project after Johannes Gutenberg, the 15th century German printer who propelled the printing press revolution.

IC

The IC was first conceived by scientist Geoffrey Dummer of the British Ministry of Defence in 1952. He was, however, unsuccessful in building such a circuit. The IC was then individually developed by two scientists: Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments created an IC made of germanium in 1959, while Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor developed the more complex "unitary circuit" made of silicon in 1961.

Mouse

The mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute in 1963 after extensive usability testing. It was also called the bug but, eventually, this was dropped in favour of mouse. It was one of several experimental pointing devices developed for Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS), which was both a hardware and software system.

Photography

The word photography comes from combining the Greek words 'phos', which means light, and 'graphis' that means stylus or paintbrush. Photography therefore means "drawing with light".

Ozone

Ozone is a strong smelling, pale blue, naturally occuring, reactive toxic gas consisting of three oxygen atoms. The gas provides a protective layer shielding the Earth from harmful ultravoilet radiation. Ozone is one of the most powerful natural sanitisers and deodorises known to science. Ozone doesn't merely mask odours and harmful substances; it seeks out and eliminates them at their molecular source.

Camcorder

The first camcorder was introduced in 1983 by Sony. This was followed by a Kodak release in 1984. These camcorders combined a video-camera with an existing full-size VHS/Betamax recorder and were large devices that required a sturdy tripod or strong shoulders to stably support the camera's bulk. They were mostly designed for right-handed use.

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi was invented in 1991 by NCR corporation/AT&T in the Netherlands. Initially meant for cashier systems, the first wireless products were brought onto the market under the name WaveLAN with speeds of 1Mbps/2Mbps. But the actual father of Wi-Fi has been named as Vic Hayes, who designed the standards such as IEEE 802.11b, 802.11a and 802.11g. The design now forms the basis of network access through Wi-Fi.

Roland Corporation

Roland Corporation, a Japanese manufacturer of electronic musical instruments and equipment, was founded by Ikutaro Kakehashi in Osaka on April 18, 1972. Though it may seem strange for a Japanese company to have a western name, the company was actually founded with exports in mind. Ikutaro Kakehashi wanted a name that wouldn't be mangled in pronunciations so he picked the name Roland from a telephone directory.