GAMES

• Tetris has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, since it began in 1982. That comes to $800 million in revenues!

• The first all-computer championship was held in New York in 1970, and was won by CHESS 3.0-a program written by Slate, Atkin and Gorlen at Northwestern University, Illinois.

• In Spring 1967, MacHACK VI became the first chess program to beat a human, at the Massachussets State Chess Championship.

• The Sega Dreamcast, released in 1999, was the first console game machine to sport a 128-bit architecture.

• On 22nd November, 1966, a USSR chess programme began a corre-spondence match with the Kotok-McCarthy MIT chess program. The match lasted 9 months and was won by the Soviet computer, with 3 wins and 1 loss.

• In 1968, International Master David Levy made a $3,000 bet with John McCarthy, researcher in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University, that no chess computer would beat him in 10 years. He won his bet!

• In 1978, Atari Football became the first arcade game to use a track ball.

• Sony released a matte black version of its PlayStation in 1997, which enabled programmers to create their own video games in the C programming language. It was called Net Yaroze.

• Mario, one of the best known video game characters, was named after Nintendo's landlord.

• Playstation 2 hit the shelves in Japan on March 4, 2000, and sold 98,000 units in four hours.

• In 1988, Deep Thought and Grandmaster Tony Miles shared first place in the US Open chess championship.

• Did you know that an estimated 1 lakh copies of the PlayStation game Tiger Woods 99 were recalled after The Spirit of Christmas, a clip in which Jesus Christ and Santa Claus get into fistfight over the true meaning of Christmas, was discovered in a hidden file on the CD-ROM? The recall was necessitated due to the fact that the clip was unauthorised and was full of expletives

• The most expensive game ever developed was ShenMue for Sega Dreamcast. It cost $20 million.

• PacMan got its name from the Japanese word "pacu", meaning "to munch". Since "pacu" is pronounced the same as "f— you", only with a 'p' sound, its name was changed to "PacMan".

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CELL PHONES

• Bell Labs conceived the idea of the cellular phone in 1947.

• Citizens of Norway can submit their tax forms by SMS.

• Catholics in the Philippines are not allowed to confess their sins via text messaging because the Bishops feel that e-mail and fax confessions are not secure enough.

• The Nokia 5160 series included an edition with Disney characters Mickey, Minnie, Goofy and Donald.

• Cell phones went public in 1977, when Chicago began public cell phone trials with 2000 customers. Japan began testing cellular phone services in 1979.

• Dr. Mahlon Loomis of Virginia, a dentist, may have been the first person to communicate through wireless via the atmosphere.

• Nearly 45 countries, including India, have banned the use of cell phones while driving. In Ireland, you can be fined $380 and/or face imprisonment for three months.

• Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology was originally developed for miltary use in the late 1960s.

• Japanese telecom carrier NTT DoCoMo launched the world's first 3G mobile phone services in Japan in October 2001.

• The WHO says there is still no evidence to prove that cellular phones pose any health risks, but further research is needed.

• Mobile phone ringtones was the most searched-for technology term in Yahool's annual survey, followed by digital cameras and mobile phones.

• Cellphones are more popular in European and Asian coun-tries than they are in the United States-more than 90 percent of Europeans own a cell phone, compared to about 50 percent of Americans.

• On December 3,1992, an engineer named Neil Papworth sent the first SMS-"MERRY CHRISTM-AS"-to his colleagues at Vodafone in Britain.

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