Intricate Ramblings

A snapshot of a pretty famous place from nearly a century ago, and a more recent one. Where?

This one’s a sitter perhaps to the initiated in business quizzing.

X was a company that began as a supplier of lamps after WWI. It later diversified to sell other appliances such as electric irons and motors.

Y was another company that was started by X’s founder’s brother-in-law in an abandoned factory of X. Y’s founder was quite ambitious and the company grew to rival X in a few segments. Ultimately though, X and Y merged to form a single entity and the rivalry stopped. Y is a brand name 20-somethings today will remember from their childhood days. X, Y = ?

The company (X) began its operations in areas that are pretty far from what its known for today. Amongst its past achievements include services rendered to Great Britain during WWII, with the development of radar equipment and guided missiles, at one of their famous laboratories in London.
Years later, one of it’s employees would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing a rather revolutionary technology at the time. However, X soon pulled out of these fields and gave more focus to the area for which it is most well known today.
X = ?

X is today an obscenely large conglomerate which is one of the biggest defence contractors in the world.

X had its beginnings in the late 1890s as the Holland Torpedo Boat Company, which built the first submarines for the US Navy. The company had quite a windfall during the WWII, and went nearly bankrupt after the end of the war. Through various acquisitions, it took on its current name and made a re-entry back into aviation (amongst other sectors). X = ?

Spin story.

Might get lynched for this one. Here goes :

Why can’t these men handle the truth?

Inexhaustive list of something, which gave rise a rather common phrase in use today.

• 14 people in the ______ ________ at Edmond, Oklahoma (1986) by a __________ .
• 2 people in the _______ ________ at Ridgewood, New Jersey (1991) by a __________ .
• 5 people in the _______ ________ at Royal Oak, Michigan (1991) by a ___________ .
• 7 people in the _______ ________ at Goleta, California (2006) by a ___________ .

The first and second set of blanks is common across the list.

What phrase?

Hopefully, a tech question that will make you go “Really?”.

Data centers are an in-thing today, with the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Google and HP building gargantuan networks of these things. In fact, Amazon’s internal data center traffic is said to account for 1% of the world’s total internet traffic.

Most of these companies (with the alleged recent exception of Google) build their data center gear by contracting out to what’s known as an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer). X is a firm that has been in this particular business for the last 25 or so years. X, in fact, counts as the largest manufacturer of laptops (ODM for Alienware, Dell, HP, Compaq, etc.). X was also initially chosen for the OLPC project but was later on dropped in favour of Compal Electronics (which is the second largest laptop manufacturer behind X).

< Yawn > X = ?

The story of the genesis of X is in a chance meeting between the president of American Airlines and an IBM manager on a flight. They struck up a conversation (owing to them sharing their last name), during which time the IBM manager was made aware of certain problems that the airline was facing at the time.

Since IBM already had infrastructure already set up to deal with this problem, they agreed to work out a solution for American Airlines. Today, this is a system that we take for granted. Over time, various other systems, such as Galileo from United Airlines, serve the same purpose as X.

What is X and what purpose does it serve? X was featured on IBM’s famous centenary video last year.

A long long time ago, before the world of TCP/IP , or even the Ethernet, there existed Videotex. Wikipedia classifies it as an “end-user information system”. Although, in reality, it seems like an ugly child between the internet and the television.

Videotex involved text being sent over copper for display on television sets (and in some cases, telephones). Simple operations, such as a telephone directory lookup, were to be done using the service. The first envisioned Videotex service, was that of BBC, where they wished to generalize the idea of sending closed captioning information.

Videotex never really took off, except in France. This was implemented in a system known as Y. In fact, before the arrival of the Internet, nearly one million citizens of France were already on Y. Y offered services such as directory lookups, restaurant reservations, and even make online purchases. Y was retired only last month (due to plummeting sales, of course). Y = ?

Edit : In case you wonder why it died, screenshot shown below :