We have collected some of the best quotes from three of the most influential people in the history of operating systems: Steve Jobs (Apple), Linus Torvalds (Linux) and Bill Gates (Microsoft).

Some of these quotes may surprise you, especially the older ones. For your convenience, we have put the quotes in chronological order.

(We have to wonder if we will have left the same trail of quotes a couple of decades from now when Pingdom rules the world (cough)…)

Steve Jobs

Let’s start with the man who co-founded Apple in 1976, left the company in 1985, then came back and saved the day in 1997.

1991:

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

1994, while he was obviously not working at Apple:

If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.

1996, on Bill Gates:

I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.

1997, on Apple products:

The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!

2003, a modest comment on the iPod and iTunes:

It will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry. This is landmark stuff. I can’t overestimate it!

2006, on Microsoft:

Our friends up north spend over five billion dollars on research and development and all they seem to do is copy Google and Apple.

2007, on his $1 annual salary:

I make fifty cents for showing up … and the other 50 cents is based on my performance.

Bill Gates

Now on to the man who co-founded Microsoft in 1975 and later became the richest man in the world.

1980:

There’s nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.

1983:

We will never make a 32-bit operating system.

1984:

The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.

1987:

I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.

1991:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.

1993:

The Internet? We are not interested in it.

1995:

There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.

1996, on the oft-quoted “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time… I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough.

1998:

Microsoft looks at new ideas, they don’t evaluate whether the idea will move the industry forward, they ask, ‘how will it help us sell more copies of Windows?’

1998, memo to the Office product group:

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people’s browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

2001:

Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that.

2004:

Spam will be a thing of the past in two years’ time.

Linus Torvalds

Finally, the man who in 1991 started to work on what would become Linux.

1991:

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

1996:

Some people have told me they don’t think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They’d be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.

1998:

My name is Linus Torvalds and I am your god.

2001:

Do you pine for the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?

2003:

Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.

2006:

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

2006:

Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy. (Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens. I’m flexible, and not black-and-white.)

2007:

I have an ego the size of a small planet.

2008:

Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can’t stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

Sources:

Images from Wikimedia Commons: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds.

Quotes found on Wikiquote.org.

Tagged with:apple, Bill-Gates, history, Linus-Torvalds, linux, microsoft, operating systems, quotes, Steve-Jobs

The people over at the popular micro-blogging service Twitter are using Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service to watch over their availability.

There is even a permanent link to a public Pingdom report page on the Twitter status blog, so anyone can get an updated view of their Web availability at any time.

Above: Screenshot from the Twitter status blog.

This is an additional way for Twitter operations to provide transparency, totally in line with their traditional openness about any issues they have had. We think it’s pretty cool that they are using Pingdom to help them out with this.

Tagged with:monitoring, pingdom, twitter, uptime

Most people who have worked with IT have at one time or another in their work life come across some amazingly strange practices or major oversights that in retrospect seem more or less insane.

Here is a collection of crazy stories specifically about data centers and server rooms that we have filtered out from the gazillion of anecdotes at The Daily WTF:

Server room entrance via the women’s bathroom

When a company switched office floors but had to leave their on server room on their old floor, the solution was “simple”. Since they couldn’t walk through the offices of the new tenants in their old office, the building’s management agreed to let them seal off the server room from the old office, and build a new entrance. However, the only possible entrance then became a bit less than ideal: Through the handicapped stall in the women’s bathroom. But they did it.

Don’t use the code lock – use your trusty Bic pen

A server room at a school had been deemed too important to be locked by a mere key. Instead they had installed a push-button code lock. There was just one flaw. On installing the push-button lock, the old key lock cylinder had simply been removed, leaving a hole in the door where you used to put the key. Someone discovered that if you put a Bic pen in the hole, you could open the lock mechanism. Presto: instant access!

A secure and well-ventilated location… the men’s bathroom?!?

When helping a construction site set up their computer network, a consultant instructed the project manager at the construction site to “install the server in a secure and well-ventilated location.” Apparently the definition should have been slightly more fool-proof. When the consultant arrived on site, the equipment was set up inside the men’s bathroom in a construction site trailer.

The admin robot – reboot via CD-ROM eject

When an important server used for credit card transactions started crashing on a regular basis, and there was no budget in place to replace it, one tech jokingly suggested that they build a robot that could reboot the machine day and night. They ended up doing exactly that. A perfectly aligned piece of machinery ejected a CD-ROM sled exactly on the reset button of the problematic server as soon as it stopped responding to ping. (You have to wonder if MacGyver was involved…)

The eco-friendly guy vs. the A/C units

When a server room filled with important server equipment was overheated during a three-day weekend, the damage was significant, with equipment replacements alone costing nearly $200,000. Once the dust settled and people started researching why the still-functioning A/C units had stopped working specifically over the weekend, an email from one of the employees turned up:

From: ----- -----------
To: IT Department
Re: A/C constantly running.

To whom it may concern,

I came in today (Monday) to finish up a project I was working
on before our big meeting with the State ----- Commission tomorrow,
and I noticed that there were three or four large air conditioners
running the entire time I was here. Since it's a three day weekend,
no one is around, why do we need to have the A/C running 24/7?

With all the power that all those big computers in that room use, I
doubt it is really eco-friendly to run those big units at the same
time. And all computers have cooling fans anyway, so why put the A/C
for the building in that room? 

I got a keycard from [the facility manager’s] desk and shut off the
A/C units. I’m sure you guys can deal with it being warm for an hour
or two when you come in tomorrow morning. 

In the future, let’s try to be a little more conscientious of our
energy usage!

Thanks,
—–

And there is more…

There are plenty of other amusing anecdotes that we couldn’t fit in since it would have made this post huge, so here are a few more, compressed:

• Weird wiring – kitchen light shutting down server
• Downtime due to melted servers
• A/C + overflowing fish bowl – Not ideal for a server room
• Water-cooled servers…
• Super-secure data center location vs. super-insecure server setup
• CEO-induced upgrade frenzy – upgrade the CEO instead
• Server as saw horse = bad idea
• Backup overkill deluxe

All the above stories were found on the often very funny The Daily WTF, a website dedicated to collecting weird IT-related stories. (We can’t guarantee they’re all 100% true, though.)

We hope you found these stories as amusing as we did, and please feel free to share your own favorite anecdotes in the comments.

Tagged with:data-center, humor, it, servers, sysadmin

When it comes to security, there is often a focus on the software side, thwarting hackers and other virtual threats such as viruses and worms. When it comes to uptime and availability, focus often rests on redundant power, clustering, and other similar strategies. We often forget about something that can put a stop to any operation: good, old-fashioned, real-life robbery.

Don’t make the assumption that it will never happen to you.

Are data centers as secure as they want you to think?

Though security is often a selling-point for many data centers, they aren’t necessarily safe from theft. There have been plenty of incidents involving hardware theft from data centers.

A few examples:

• Multiple robberies at a Chicago data center
  The Chicago-based colocation company CI Host had its data center broken into on October 2, 2007. The intruders passed through a reinforced wall with the help of a power saw, attacked the night manager with a tazer, and stole at least 20 servers. This particular data center had at that time been burglarized at least four times since 2005.
• Fake police officers rob Verizon data center
  A Verizon Business data center in northern London got $4 million worth of computer equipment stolen on December 6, 2007. The “heist” was done by between three to five men dressed as police officers. They managed to gain entry to the data center and tied up the five staff members before stealing the equipment.
• Level 3 data center robbery disrupts telecom service
  One of Level 3’s London data centers had a number of router cards stolen on November 1, 2006, which disrupted voice and data traffic to many of its customers in London.
• Peter Gabriel’s website down due to stolen servers
  Musician Peter Gabriel had the servers running his official website stolen in May 2008, effectively taking his website offline. The servers were said to be hosted with the company Rednet Ltd. Not much information seems to be available other than a temporary message that was posted on his website explaining that all services were offline since their servers had been stolen from the ISP.
• Thieves rob Cable & Wireless data center, taking out Financial Times website
  A Cable & Wireless data center outside London had routers and switches stolen on July 10, 2008. Among the affected customers was the Financial Times, whose website was left offline until they could redirect it to a backup facility.

If you keep it in the office, have proper security

It may be tempting to keep your servers nearby in your office, both for convenience and perhaps also for cost reasons. But if you do, make sure they are properly locked away in a secure place.
Otherwise something like this could potentially happen:

• Dept-collection bureau server with personal data for 700,000 people stolen
  On March 21, 2008, thieves broke into the Central Collection Bureau in Indiana and stole eight computers and one database server. The stolen database server contained personal information about approximately 700,000 Indiana residents, including their social security numbers.
• Insurance company robbed of server with information about 930,000 customers
  International Insurance Group, AIG, had their offices burglarized on March 31, 2006. The thieves got away with a server filled with data containing the names, addresses and social security numbers of over 930,000 customers.
• University file server with cancer research data stolen
  A file server containing cancer research data was stolen from the University of California on March 20, 2007. The research data included names, contact information and social security numbers of study subjects and in some cases also personal health information.

Black market for hardware

This article from The Register is a bit on the old side, but it’s an interesting read. According to it, criminals are even targeting specific brands of hardware and are well aware of what they are looking for. There is obviously a lucrative black market for computer equipment if organized, criminal elements are involved.

Stealing data, not hardware?

Loss of hardware is one thing, but hardware can be replaced. One scary thought is theft specifically aimed at stealing servers with valuable data on them.

For example, in the cases where customer databases and credit card information are stolen, not only is it a liability to the company and its customers, but this information can most likely be sold for a hefty profit by unscrupulous individuals.

In the examples above, several cases have involved what must be considered as very valuable data. It is quite possible that this was just a coincidence and that the thieves were only after the hardware, but who knows?

Worry about protecting your data from hackers and take precautions, but remember that if someone just walks away with your server, that firewall you set up won’t do you much good.

What can I do?

Aside from planting yourself in front of your server rack with a shotgun on your lap, what can you do to keep your servers and data safe?

• It’s not always easy to know exactly where your servers are hosted and how well the security is handled. If your servers are critical to your business, make it a point to inquire about the data center where they are kept. What security measures are in place? If you are at a colocation facility you can of course check this out first hand.
• Encrypt sensitive data. The most valuable thing that gets stolen might actually not be your hardware, but the data on them. Maybe the thieves won’t realize this, but don’t count on it.
• Make sure you have backups of important data, and do your backups frequently. In case your servers do get stolen, at least you will be able to restore the lost data once your replacement hardware is up and running.

It might be worth to keep in mind that even with great security measures in place, an office or data center might still end up getting robbed. If criminals can rob banks, they can surely gain access to a data center, as the examples above have shown.

Conclusion

Though this is definitely not our expertise, the fact that computer hardware is being stolen on a wide and regular basis indicates that it has good value on the black market. You therefore need to take strong precautions to protect both your servers and your data.

Also, if you are buying second-hand server equipment, you might want to try to make sure that it’s from a legitimate source. You don’t want to end up with stolen goods.

Tagged with:criminality, data-center, security, sysadmin, webmaster

Traditional news media have embraced the Web, and these days we have a lot of great news sources online. We here at Pingdom have surveyed 13 of the top news websites in the world, monitoring the likes of CNN, Reuters, the New York Times and Times Online. The survey ran for the first half of 2008, i.e. January 1 – June 30, and focused on measuring the availability of these websites (their uptime).

Millions of people visit these websites every day to read up on current events. If one of them is down, basically any time, day or night, a lot of people are bound to notice.

As this survey shows, the majority of these websites take availability very seriously, but some have occasionally stumbled a bit more than the others. Read on to find out which ones.

The websites monitored in this survey were Forbes, CNN, New York Times, Voice of America, Washington Post, Bloomberg, BBC News, Guardian Unlimited, Reuters, ABC News, Christian Science Monitor, International Herald Tribune, and Times Online. As you can see there are both US- and UK-based websites, although the majority of them are US-based.

(The links in the paragraph above are the pages we monitored for each website.)

Overview

To give you a chance to compare all the websites in the survey side by side, we have added this diagram for an easy overview of the downtime for each website, but we will take a closer look at the data further down.

The best-performing websites

Five of the websites in the survey had less than an hour of downtime during these six months. Notably, the Forbes website didn’t have any downtime at all, which is very impressive. Both the New York Times and CNN websites were also close to having no downtime, being unavailable a mere 20 and 25 minutes respectively.

Eight of the websites in the test had a 99.9% uptime or better. Uptime is usually shown in percent, where 99.9% is considered a highly respectable score. This is often called “three nines”. It should be mentioned that for a website to have a 99.9% uptime during a six-month period, it can only be unavailable for a total of just over four hours.

Forbes, since it had zero downtime, was the only website with a 100% uptime.

Here is the list of websites with a 99.9% uptime or better:

• Forbes: 100.00%
• New York Times: 99.99%
• CNN: 99.99%
• Voice of America: 99.98%
• Washington Post: 99.98%
• Bloomberg: 99.96%
• BBC News: 99.94%
• Guardian Unlimited: 99.93%

The websites with the most downtime

These websites were the five websites in this survey with the largest amount of downtime.

• Times Online: 23h 31m (99.46% uptime)
• International Herald Tribune: 15h 0m (99.66% uptime)
• Christian Science Monitor: 14h 46m (99.66% uptime)
• ABC News: 13h 36m (99.69% uptime)
• Reuters: 5h 40m (99.87% uptime)

There are many different things that can cause downtime, and sometimes the reason can be planned site maintenance, though this does of course not change the fact that the website was unavailable to its readers.

The longest continuous outages

These were the longest continuous outages (periods of unavailability) that were recorded for the websites in the survey.

(For our US readers, CET is GMT+1. Subtract 6 hours to get the time in EST.)

• International Herald Tribune: 10h 53m (starting 07:03 CET on April 6)
• Times Online: 8h 45m (starting 00:29 CET on June 10)
• ABC News: 8h 25m (starting 08:46 CET on Jan 24)

The longest outage after that was BBC News with 1h 23m, starting 15:30 CET on May 17.

It should be noted that the downtime here was mostly at night time in the areas where you can expect most of these websites’ readers to be (ABC News and International Herald Tribune in North America and Times Online in Europe). This could either indicate that they were performing some form of planned maintenance, or possibly that they had issues and for some reason were unable to get the website back up and running until the morning.

Conclusion

This survey tested a mix of different popular news websites, and clearly shows that a majority of them have excellent availability. This is perhaps not so surprising, considering how “visible” these websites are, but it’s not easy to really know this for a fact until you have done some real monitoring, which is what we did.

What was surprising, however, was to see that the highly respected Times Online ended up being unavailable for a total of close to 24 hours.

About the survey

Tests were performed once a minute around the clock. If a website did not respond, or loaded too slowly (if the HTML page could not be loaded within 30 seconds), or responded with an error, it was considered down. Downtime was always double-checked from two different locations. All testing was performed using Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service.

Tagged with:downtime, news, news media, survey, uptime, website

What if you could have a type of monitoring that would store a value of your choosing, and a status of your choosing, based on a script on your servers? A kind of “universal” check type that you can customize as you wish on your end. Well, now you can.

We have added a new, customizable check type to the Pingdom uptime monitoring service, called simply “HTTP custom”. It expects a formatted XML response with a status (OK/not OK) and a value (a number). This value replaces the “response time” value in the Pingdom graphs, and the status (OK or not) replaces the UP or DOWN status.

Since you are returning a value and a status every time your XML page is accessed (for example once a minute), you will be able to see this data in the graphs in the Pingdom control panel, and of course be sent alerts just as with any other Pingdom check.

This may all sound a bit abstract, so let’s look at some examples of how this new check type can be used.

• Monitor the amount of free RAM or HD space on your server.
• Monitor the CPU load on your server.
• Monitor the number of active connections to your web server.
• And any other monitoring type you can imagine…

All you need is a script that performs some form of task on your end and sends back the status and value of the operation in the specified XML format. Your script decides what is considered UP (i.e. OK), so you have full control over thresholds and what is tested on your end.

Of course, nothing stops you from performing more advanced tasks than the ones we mentioned above. The imagination is the limit here. What we do on our end is simple, we just get this XML file from you. How you generate it is completely up to you.

We hope you will find good use for this new functionality. As always, we welcome any feedback you may have!

Note: This check will time out if it cannot read the XML file within 30 seconds, which counts as a “down” on Pingdom’s end. So if you decide to create a really elaborate, time-consuming script on your end, you may be best off letting it run separately and just have it continuously update a status page (the XML file) that is accessed by Pingdom.

Also, if the server your script runs on (or rather the XML file) is unreachable for some reason, this will also count as a “down” on Pingdom’s end, so make sure your script runs on a reliable server with a good Internet connection.

Tagged with:features, pingdom, script, sysadmin, uptime-monitoring, webmaster, xml

Every OS out there can be updated over the Internet. In fact, this functionality is a critical and important part of the OS, and updates are often done in an automated fashion. Windows has its Windows Update, Mac OS X has its Apple Software Update and Ubuntu has its main repositories.

We have measured the software update “access point” availability for these three operating systems during Q2 2008 (April, May, June). If that access point is unavailable or inaccessible, the operating system cannot connect and download updates.

So, how reliable are they?

It turns out that Microsoft wins this one hands down. Their Windows software update was available 100% of the time.

Apple had a respectable 99.9% uptime for its software update. It was only unavailable a total of 2 hours and 34 minutes.

Ubuntu on the other hand came off worse, with only a 98.64% availability for its main repository. That is a total of 1 day, 5 hours and 45 minutes in the three months of this survey. It should be noted, though, that Ubuntu’s repositories have mirrors around the world, so users can download packages from those as well.

About the survey:

The monitoring was done using Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service, performing a test once every five minutes. Downtime was always confirmed from two different locations.

For Apple’s software update we monitored the URL “swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index-1.sucatalog” which contains the index information necessary to receive new updates.

For Windows we monitored the URL “www.update.microsoft.com” which is used by Microsoft to distribute updates.

For Ubuntu we monitored the URL “archive.ubuntu.com” which is the main repository that contains all the packages that can be downloaded through Ubuntu. Again, it should be pointed out that there are other mirrors that can be used.

Tagged with:apple, linux, mac-os-x, microsoft, operating system, software, survey, ubuntu, uptime, windows

According to a recent survey by the Swedish computer magazine PC för Alla, women seem to be consistently more frustrated than men when it comes to computers and the Web. (For those of you who don’t speak Swedish, “PC för Alla” translates to “PC for Everyone”.)

The highest frustration levels are understandably brought on by computer crashes, which cause frustration in 77% of the men and 85% of the women.

This is followed by slow load times for web pages, which frustrate 56% of the men and 66% of the women, and Internet advertising, which frustrates 47% of the men and 52% of the women.

Here is a selection of the survey results:

Frustrated by slow load times for web pages
Men: 56%
Women: 66%

Frustrated by ads on the Internet
Men: 47%
Women: 52%

Frustrated by keeping track of multiple passwords
Men: 32%
Women: 34%

Frustrated when their computer crashes
Men: 77%
Women: 85%

Frustrated if their broadband connection doesn’t reach the promised speed
Men: 48%
Women: 56%

Frustrated by (interacting with) computer support
Men: 38%
Women: 42%

Average of the above
Men: 49.7%
Women: 55.8%

We found this highly interesting. What accounts for the difference between men and women here? It seems too large to simply be explained away by a statistical anomaly since the sample base was almost 4,000 people.

And we here at Pingdom can’t help but wonder why not 100% of the people in the survey are frustrated if their computer crashes… Who would find that even remotely ok?

About the survey:

The survey got 3,812 responses. 717 from women, 3,060 from men, and 35 who did not to divulge their gender. You can read the resulting article (in Swedish) on the IDG.se website.

It should be noted that most PC för Alla readers are probably close to what can be considered “the average Swedish Web user”. It’s not a magazine directed at advanced users or experts.

Tagged with:anger, computers, gender, idg, internet, statistics, survey, usability, web, web user, women

On June 23-24, O’Reilly held the 2008 edition of Velocity, a conference focused on web performance and operations. Unfortunately no one from Pingdom was able to attend (much to our great dismay considering the subject matter), but luckily for us the slides for a lot of the presentations have been made public.

We have scoured the Velocity 08 website for interesting material from the conference and have put together this collection of what we consider the best presentation slides on the subject of website performance. If you’re mainly looking for things concerning website performance, this post spares you the work of doing the same.

The best presentation slides on website performance

Click on the titles in the list below to download the slides for that presentation. Note that most of these slides are Powerpoint files, and can be quite big (several MB).

• Hotmail’s Performance Tuning Best Practices - Aladdin Nassar from Microsoft covers what Microsoft has learnt about website performance from Hotmail.
• High-performance Ajax Applications - Julien Lecomte from Yahoo! looks at different techniques and best practices for developing high-performance Ajax applications.
• Lessons Learned in Live Search Moving to and then Away from Ajax - Eric Schurman from Microsoft presents the lessons learned from tuning the site performance of Live Search.
• Even Faster Web Sites - Steve Souders from Google (author of the book High Performance Web Sites and also the creator of Yslow) take a look at even more ways to speed up websites.
• Image Optimization: How Many of These 7 Mistakes Are You Making - Stoyan Stefanov from Yahoo! goes through image optimization tricks and tools that will help you speed up your website.
• Improving Netflix Performance - Bill Scott from Netflix gives plenty of insight into how Netflix improved their site performance in this interesting case study.

We took care to pick presentation slides that can be followed and make sense on their own.

Though looking at slides without the actual presentation can be occasionally confusing, the slides still contain heaps of interesting information and we thank the contributors for making their material public like this.

On a small side note, our favorite quote from these slides has to be from the Hotmail performance presentation:

“Newer technologies ~ bigger guns to shoot ourselves with.”

More, more, more

If you weren’t able to attend this conference, or if you did and want to refresh your memory, the presentation files are freely available on O’Reilly’s site, though only for the speakers who chose to share their material.

For those interested, some material from the conference is also available as video.

There really is a lot of interesting material here, so hopefully next year we’ll be able to join the crowd at the actual conference.

Tagged with:conference, optimization, performance, velocity, web-development, webmaster, website

Not long ago we all used an ordinary encyclopedia when we needed to find information about something. Today the Internet can give us the answer to (almost) anything.

When it comes to getting the facts on basically anything between heaven and earth, one particular site really stands out. Yes, Wikipedia, we are talking about you.

There is actually more information on that site than you ever thought you needed.

Here are some examples of what you can find on Wikipedia that you will never find in the likes of Encyclopedia Britannica.

IP over Avian Carriers

A joke about using homing pigeons to carry Internet traffic. It was initially described in RFC 1149 on April 1, 1990. It has been tested in Norway with a packet loss of 55%.

Bill Gates’ flower fly

A flower fly named after Bill Gates, found only in Costa Rican highland forests. Latin name, Eristalis gatesi. There is also a Paul Allen’s flower fly found in the same area.

ISO 3103

ISO 3103 is a specified standard method for brewing tea that was added in 1980.

AOL disk collecting

Read about America Online’s infamous marketing strategy to spread excessive amounts of CD-ROMs with the software for accessing the America Online service. It’s been estimated that they produced over a billion disks with over a thousand disk designs.

Atari video game burial

An event that took place in 1983. When the North American video game industry had crashed, Atari ended up dumping thousands of video game cartridges (many with the ill-fated E.T. video game) into a New Mexican landfill.

How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?

Apparently a geeky Russian Internet joke. The question tends to pop up frequently in unexpected circumstances. It was for example given to the Russian president Vladimir Putin when people were able to propose questions for an online conference.

Dogcow

Clarus the Dogcow is a bitmapped image originally part of Apple’s Cairo font that was created in 1983. Since then it has reached cult status, and has appeared in several different applications and other places.

John Titor

Someone calling himself John Titor posted on several Internet bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001, claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036. He made lots of predictions that never came true, but there are still believers.

Lenna

Lenna or Lena is the most widely used test image for image processing algorithms. The image was originally cropped from a centerfold picture of Lena Söderberg, a Swedish model posing in the November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine.

The Lenna image is so established in the image processing community that Söderberg was a guest at the 50th annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997.

Last but not least: List of problems solved by MacGyver

The 80s TV series MacGyver made all kids want a Swiss Army knife. The extremely resourceful character created inventions from basically anything to get out of trouble (he didn’t carry a gun).

If you want to ensure your survival against all odds, armed only with a Swiss Army knife and sometimes not even that, you need to read this.

Tagged with:aol, atari, Bill-Gates, dogcow, encyclopedia, freebsd, funny, kde2, macgyver, wikipedia