Three questions, three answers

Who invented the remote control?

It’s probably one of the objects that soon we won’t need anymore (see Report) because – guess why? – also for “controlling” our TVs, we’ll be able to use our smartphones. In the meanwhile, however, here is its brief history.

The TV remote control is an invention of the American company Zenith Radio Corporation. It was born at the end of the 40s and the first model was a big box connected to the TV with a cable. In 1956 the new Zenith Space Command arrived. The cable disappeared and the remote worked using ultrasound. The first TV remote had only three or four buttons for very simple actions - turning on or off the TV, switching channels and adjusting the volume. Today, “modern” remote controls use infrared technology that are able to transmit more complex commands to the TV (like adjusting the brightness* or surfing the internet), or radio waves, that are able to pass obstacles (walls and furniture).

Why do we celebrate International Internet Day on 29th October?

51 years ago the biggest revolution of the 20th century started - the great network that today is known as the Internet was born. By now we almost can’t live without it because the Web has changed, for better and for worse, our way of making friends, getting information, thinking, buying. At the beginning, it was an experiment carried out by the US Defence department who decided to create a system of communication to exchange information between computers scattered* around America. This “network” was called Arpanet. And exactly on 29th October 1969 the very first message by Arpanet was sent - a simple word, «LOGIN», but the system only managed to send the first two letters. It was the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee who perfected* this idea and invented in 1990 the World Wide Web as we know it today.

DO YOU KNOW…?

Do you know which is one of the most used passwords in the world?

Arpanet Internet Qwerty

What does the “QWERTY keyboard” mean?

Have you ever wondered why the letters on a computer keyboard are arranged in a certain way? Simply because they are based on the QWERTY layout (that are the first 6 letters that appear on the top line of the keyboard), created in 1873 by Christopher Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter. The system was created in order to prevent people from typing too quickly and therefore risk blocking the machine. After almost a century and a half our computers and also our telephones have maintained the same keyboard, even if in some countries variants* exist (for example, AZERTY in France and Belgium, and QWERTZ in Germany and Austria).

The first real e-mail in history (using ‘@’) only contained the sequence of letters «qwertyuiop» (the whole first line of the QWERTY keyboard). The American programmer Ray Tomlinson, sender of the message, was carrying out technical tests with Arpanet. It was 1971.

Glossary

brightness: producing a lot of light perfected: making something perfect scattered: be in different locations variants: different versions of something