I found this out “accidentally” today (November 4th) while searching something on the Web, from Google.com landing page. This is what it looked like:
As I looked at the binary numbers in their cartoony animation, I see they are:
01001011
01000001
01001111
which then translated to text, decimal, and hex are as follows:
| ASCII | Decimal | Hex | |
| 01001011 | K | 75 | 4B |
| 01000001 | A | 65 | 41 |
| 01001111 | O | 79 | 4F |
Out of those, the letters “KAO” stand out and the only ones that made sense.
Charles K. Kao is considered the father of fiber optics. Kao and his partner George Hockham published a paper in 1966 that proposed fibers fabricated with purified glass could carry a gigahertz of information over long distances using lasers. He earned a joint Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009 for his groundbreaking research in the 1960s.
He would have turned 88 in 2021.
