Kon-Tiki expedition

The Kon-Tiki expedition was a 1947 journey by raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands, led by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl. The raft was named Kon-Tiki after the Inca sun god, Viracocha, for whom "Kon-Tiki" was said to be an old name. Kon-Tiki is also the name of Heyerdahl's book; the Academy Award-winning documentary film chronicling his adventures; and the 2012 dramatised feature film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. Although the expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey.

Kontiki (company)

Kontiki is a peer-assisted content delivery company headquartered in the United States. Kontiki is characterized as peer-assisted because it uses a combination of central servers and peer-to-peer communications.

History

Kontiki was founded in November 2000. From then to its acquisition, Kontiki raised $46.5 million in investment. In March, 2006, the company was acquired by VeriSign (now Symantec) for $62 million in a cash deal. Kontiki has always been focused on the enterprise business, but during the VeriSign years, they also had a consumer-focused division, which was responsible for technology integration with products such as the BBC iPlayer.

In May 2008, VeriSign, as part of a divestiture, sold Kontiki to MK Capital for $1 million and 3.98 million shares (an undetermined fraction of the spun-out company). According to that report, the rumored price was $40 million. Since breaking away from VeriSign, the company focused on their enterprise business.

Kontiki raised another $10.7 million in funding in 2010. The round was led by MK Capital and joined by New World Ventures and Cross Creek Capital, an affiliate of Wasatch Advisors.

Tiki 100

Tiki-100 was a desktop home/personal computer manufactured by Tiki Data of Oslo, Norway. The computer was launched in the spring of 1984 under the original name Kontiki-100, and was first and foremost intended for the emerging educational sector, especially for primary schools. Due to a dispute with Thor Heyerdahl, famous for his Kon-Tiki raft used in his expedition in 1947, the name was later changed to Tiki-100. Early prototypes had 4 KB ROM, and the '100' in the machine's name was based on the total KB amount of memory.

Development

It was decided by the Norwegian government that Norwegian schools should all use the same computer in education. The Tiki-100 was developed as a direct response to this decision, and was as such greatly influenced by the standards defined by it. One of the most influential of these standards was compatibility with CP/M and the Z80 CPU.

Being designed as a computer intended for education, interactivity was prioritized. The machine was given good graphics capabilities for its time, along with decent sound. While other educational computers at the time had a main focus on BASIC and simple computer-science, the Tiki-100 had more focus on being a tool to aid in education and everyday-life situations. This put forth the need and memory requirements to run more complex applications.