Table of Contents

The Internet

First e-books

The first e-books (1971) were written in plain text format and published as text files; other formats were made available later. Michael Hart wrote most of the early e-books himself; later other volunteers joined in and expanded the project. In 2000, Stephen King made his book Riding the Bullet available online. More than 400,000 copies of the file were downloaded in the first 24 hours. 1)

Mail Exchange

Mail Exchange (MX) records are DNS records that are necessary to deliver email to your address. The MX record is used to tell the world which mail servers accept incoming mail on your domain and where to direct email sent to your domain. If MX records are not pointed to the correct location, you will not receive an email. 2)

@ sign

The @ sign comes from a Latin ligature replacing the word “ad” in medieval and Renaissance trade manuscripts (to, at) and denoting, among other things, the recipient of a shipment. It first appeared in 1448 in a document recording wheat shipments from the Kingdom of Castile to the Kingdom of Aragon. 3)

Acer

Acer is a Taiwanese brand of computer hardware distributor manufacturer. The company name is derived from the Latin word “acer”, meaning “willingly”. Acer began operations as a brand in 1976 and has since been spun off in 2000 to focus on producing technologically advanced, easy-to-use computer products. 4)

WhatsApp

Jan Koum is a Ukrainian Jew. In 1992, at the age of 16, he immigrated to the USA with his mother and grandmother and settled in Mountain View, California. Initially, he was a member of a hacker group called w00w00, then worked at Yahoo for nine years. He was the CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp (along with Brian Acton) In 2014, Forbes magazine added his name to the list of the 400 richest Americans. 5)