Who really created "Windows"

Contrary to popular belief, the omnipresent Windows operating system does not owe its existence to Bill Gates, Paul Allen or the development team at Microsoft.

The man responsible for giving us Windows was actually a marketing expert called Rowland Hanson. Work on the operating system had started after Gates had seen a demo of VisiCorp’s software called VisiOn, which featured a graphical user interface (GUI), at Comdex, in 1982, and had decided that Microsoft would also come out with a GUIbased operating system. Gates and
the development team referred to it as ‘Interface Manager’ and the name stuck, at least until Hanson was hired to develop a marketing campaign for the product. He was unimpressed by the rather geekish ‘Interface Manager’ and proposed that the product be named ‘Windows’, as the user saw a number of ‘windows’ on the screen that contained the tools and files they needed to work with.

And the rest, as they love to say, is history. Had it not been for Hanson, ‘IM’ would have been an abbreviation for an operating system rather than for instant messaging.

btw this a documented and acknowledged fact...

Also see History of Microsoft Windows at Answers.com

adapted from: anandk

Einstein's letter to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt

This is an amazing find. I was reading The Andromeda Strain, a strong techno-thriller, written by Michael Crichton in 1969, and I came across a fact in it about a letter to President Roosevelt written by Albert Einstein on August 2nd 1939, just a month before World War II began. I felt a sudden urge to investigate and was amazed at what Google and Wikipedia said, which also confirmed it to be correct. The content of the two page letter is amazing, you can view high-res scans of the letter from

Quote from dannen.com -

In the summer of 1939, six months after the discovery of uranium fission, American newspapers and magazines openly discussed the prospect of atomic energy. However, most American physicists doubted that atomic energy or atomic bombs were realistic possibilities. No official U.S. atomic energy project existed. Leo Szilard was profoundly disturbed by the lack of American action. If atomic bombs were possible, as he believed they were, Nazi Germany might gain an unbeatable lead in developing them. It was especially troubling that Germany had stopped the sale of uranium ore from occupied Czechoslovakia. Unable to find official support, and unable to convince Enrico Fermi of the need to continue experiments, Szilard turned to his old friend Albert Einstein...[Continue the Story]

After going thru some links and lots of text I conclude that, Albert Einstein did not directly participate in the invention of the atomic bomb or World War II, but he was inadvertently instrumental in facilitating, respectively, the development and disintegration of both. This letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt led to the Manhattan Engineering District, also known as "The Manhattan Project". This is where early US nuclear development happened, and the nuclear bombs code-named "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" were constructed and dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on August 6 and August 9, respectively. The Manhattan Project, a national crash program racing to develop atomic weapons before Nazi Germany, was the seed that grew into the modern national laboratory system, which today includes many non-weapons-research laboratories, such as Argonne (a U.S. D.O.E RnD Lab).

Worth a look -

Aerial photo of the Argonne National Laboratory

Concept design of "Little Boy"

Concept design of "Fat Man"

Albert Einstein at the U.S. Library of Congress

Franklin D. Roosevelt American Heritage Center Museum

The Andromeda Strain at Amazon

The Andromeda Strain movie adaptation (1971) at IMDB