8th February 2016
The root of the word ‘engineer’ lies in the Latin word ingenium, meaning ‘innate quality of mental power’ or cleverness. In olden days, the engineers were required to be extremely skilful and inventive as they devised various levers, pulleys and other machines that helped in the civil and military development of any society. Engineer, as a verb, means to skillfully plan or manage a project or an enterprise.
8th February 2016
8th February 2016
Olympus-1 was a communications satellite which was launched by the European Space Agency in 1989. In 1993, Olympus-1 was hit by a meteoroid that damaged its solar array pointing system. Satellites use panels of solar cells to derive electricity from the sun. For this, the solar panels have to point at the direction of the sun. A solar array pointing system is used to suitably point to solar arrays towards the sun. This pointing system was damaged.
8th February 2016
The e-mail predates the Internet or the World Wide Web by more than a decade. The e-mail originated in the research labs of the United States Defence Labs in the late 1960s, in the ARPANET project. It was used as a note or a file that was transferred from one user’s folder to another user’s folder in a mainframe computer. Several users could log in at a time to the mainframe computer from their respective ‘dumb terminals’ (computers that could not store data but could access the mainframe computer). Once any user logged in to a computer, he was able to see the message. However, it was not clear who sent the message and to whom. In 1971, Roy Tomlinson designated an e-mail address format, i.e. the name of the user @ name of the computer, and used the ‘at the rate of’ @ symbol to separate the user from the host (computer). The Internet arrived on the scene some time in the early 1980s, almost ten years after the e-mail.
