History of Subway

Subway is a franchise fast food restaurant that sells primarily sandwiches and salads. It was founded in 1965 by Fred De Luca and Peter Buck and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Doctor's Associates, Inc. (DAI). The company has over 28,700 franchised units in 86 countries as of January 2008 and is the fastest growing franchise in the world. Currently, Subway is the third largest fast food chain globally after Yum! Brands (34,000 locations) and McDonald's (31,000 locations).

Subway's main operations office is in Milford, Connecticut, and five regional centers support Subway's growing international operations. The regional office for Europe's 1,000 stores is in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Australia and New Zealand, with over 2,100 outlets, is supported from Brisbane, Australia. The 300 Middle Eastern locations are supported from Beirut, Lebanon. Singapore supports the 300+ Asian locations. The Latin American Support Center in Miami assists over 1,100 restaurants. In the UK and Ireland the company hopes to have 2,010 restaurants by the year 2010.

Many restaurant analysts attribute Subway's fast growth to the growing concern on health by restaurant customers, a trend that Subway has taken advantage of in its marketing. In 1999, an Indiana University student named Jared Fogle lost 245 pounds (110 kg) with a diet made up mostly of Subway sandwiches combined with exercise. The story is used by Subway as a large part of their marketing campaign to this day. Jared has emerged as a spokesman for Subway, furthering their image as a health-conscious restaurant chain.

Fred DeLuca borrowed $1,000 from family friend Dr. Peter Buck to start his first sandwich shop in 1965, when he was only 20 years old. He was trying to raise money to pay for college. He chose a mediocre location for his shop, but by noon on the first day of the opening, customers were pouring in. On the radio advertisement they had promoted the name as "Pete's Submarines", which sounded like Pizza Marines, so they changed the name to "Pete's Subway"; eventually it was shortened to "Subway", as it is known to this day. As of 2007, the company has over 28,400 franchised locations in 87 countries and produces US$ 9.05 billion sales every year. In 2007, Forbes magazine named DeLuca number 242 of the 400 richest Americans with a net worth of 1.5 billion dollars.

When the company was founded, Dr. Peter Buck, co-founder, was a scientist with a doctoral degree, and Fred DeLuca had aspirations of becoming a medical doctor. Hence the name Doctor’s Associates, Inc.



Subway uses the advertising slogan "Eat Fresh" to explain how every sandwich is made on freshly baked bread, using fresh ingredients, in front of the customer to their exact specification, by employees who Subway terms "Subway Sandwich Artists®".

In 2000, Subway added seasoned breads and a line of specialty items to its menu. In 2003 Doctor's Associates Inc. (DAI) signed an exclusive contract to offer Coca-Cola products. Coca-Cola helped pay for the initial rollout of toaster ovens to existing restaurants. Subway gave customers the option to have their sandwiches toasted in response to increased competition from rival sandwich chain Quiznos Sub, which popularized toasted sandwiches. In Australia, the introduction of Fresh Toasting enabled the Subway Franchise to prevent Quiznos from gaining market share. The Turbo Chef toaster is a microwave and convection oven hybrid.


In addition to traditional restaurants, Subway operates in many non-traditional locations. For instance, there are over 900 Subway locations inside of Wal-Mart stores and 200 on military bases, including several in Iraq, in addition to three located inside The Pentagon - as well as an increasing number on college and university campuses.

There is at least one adults-only Subway, located at Foxwoods Resort & Casino. It is accessible only after entering a gaming area which is restricted to guests 21 and over, but it also has a drive thru.

Exterior of a typical Subway restaurant in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

In 2006, the first kosher Subway restaurant opened in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Jared Fogle, who is Jewish, was in attendance at the opening. "With slight modifications, such as no pork-based products such as bacon or ham, and the use of soy-based cheese, the menu is virtually identical to that of any other Subway restaurant." . Around 15 further locations are planned for 2007, in places including Baltimore, Brooklyn, Kansas City and Los Angeles.

All Subway restaurants in Muslim countries serve Halal menu, There are also at least two Subway restaurants in the United States that do the same, and 31 in the United Kingdom. Local franchisees have plans to open seven more Halal operating Subway restaurants in the United Kingdom later in the year.

History of Apple

Before Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple, he was an electronics hacker. By 1975, he was working at Hewlett-Packard and helping his friend Steve Jobs design video games for Atari. Wozniak had been buying computer time on a variety of minicomputers hosted by Call Computer, a time-sharing firm run by Alex Kamradt. The computer terminals available at that time were primarily paper-based; thermal printers like the Texas Instruments Silent 700 were state of the art. Wozniak had seen a 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine on how to build your own computer terminal. Using off-the-shelf parts, Wozniak designed the Computer Conversor, a 24-line by 40-column, uppercase-only video teletype that he could use to log on to the minicomputers at Call Computer. Alex Kamradt commissioned the design and sold a small number of them through his firm.

Aside from their interest in up-to-date technology, the impetus for "the two Steves" seems to have had another source. In his essay From Satori to Silicon Valley (published 1986), cultural historian Theodore Roszak made the point that the Apple Computer emerged from within the West Coast counterculture and the need to produce print-outs, letter labels, and databases. Roszak offers a bit of background on the development of the two Steves’ prototype models.

On June 12, 2005 at Stanford University's 2005 Commencement Address Jobs said, "When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions."

In 1975, Wozniak started attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club. New microcomputers such as the Altair 8800 and the IMSAI inspired him to build a microprocessor into his video teletype and have a complete computer.

At the time the only microcomputer CPUs generally available were the $179 Intel 8080, and the $170 Motorola 6800. Wozniak preferred the 6800, but both were out of his price range. So he watched, and learned, and designed computers on paper, waiting for the day he could afford a CPU.

When MOS Technology released its $20 6502 chip in 1976, Wozniak wrote a version of BASIC for it, then began to design a computer for it to run on. The 6502 was designed by the same people who designed the 6800, as many in Silicon Valley left employers to form their own companies. Wozniak's earlier 6800 paper-computer needed only minor changes to run on the new chip.

Wozniak completed the machine and took it to Homebrew Computer Club meetings to show it off. At the meeting, Wozniak met his old friend Jobs, who was interested in the commercial potential of the small hobby machines.


Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak ("The Two Steves") had been friends for some time, having met in 1971, when their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, introduced 21-year-old Wozniak to 16-year-old Jobs. Jobs managed to interest Wozniak in assembling a machine and selling it.

Jobs approached a local computer store, The Byte Shop, who said they would be interested in the machine, but only if it came fully assembled. The owner, Paul Terrell, went further, saying he would order 50 of the machines and pay $666.66 each on delivery. Jobs then took the purchase order that he had been given from the Byte Shop to Cramer Electronics, a national electronic parts distributor, and ordered the components he needed to assemble the Apple I Computer. The local credit manager asked Jobs how he was going to pay for the parts and he replied, "I have this purchase order from the Byte Shop chain of computer stores for 50 of my computers and the payment terms are COD. If you give me the parts on a net 30 day terms I can build and deliver the computers in that time frame, collect my money from Terrell at the Byte Shop and pay you."


With that, the credit manager called Paul Terrell who was attending an IEEE computer conference at Asilomar in Pacific Grove and verified the validity of the purchase order. Amazed at the tenacity of Jobs, Terrell assured the credit manager if the computers showed up in his stores Jobs would be paid and would have more than enough money to pay for the parts order. The two Steves and their small crew spent day and night building and testing the computers and delivered to Terrell on time to pay his suppliers and have a tidy profit left over for their celebration and next order. Steve Jobs had found a way to finance his soon-to-be multimillion-dollar company without giving away one share of stock or ownership.

The machine had only a few notable features. One was the use of a TV as the display system, whereas many machines had no display at all. This was not like the displays of later machines, however; text was displayed at a terribly slow 60 characters per second. However, this was still faster than the teletypes used on contemporary machines of that era. The Apple I also included bootstrap code on ROM, which made it easier to start up. Finally, at the insistence of Paul Terrell, Wozniak also designed a cassette interface for loading and saving programs, at the then-rapid pace of 1200 bit/s. Although the machine was fairly simple, it was nevertheless a masterpiece of design, using far fewer parts than anything in its class, and quickly earning Wozniak a reputation as a master designer.

Joined by another friend, Ronald Wayne, the three started to build the machines. Using a variety of methods, including borrowing space from friends and family, selling various prized items (like calculators and a VW bus) and scrounging, Jobs managed to secure the parts needed while Wozniak and Wayne assembled them. They were delivered in June, and as promised, they were paid on delivery. Eventually 200 of the Apple I's were built.


But Wozniak had already moved on from the Apple I. Many of the design features of the I were due to the limited amount of money they had to construct the prototype, but with the income from the sales he was able to start construction of a greatly improved machine, the Apple II; it was presented to the public at the first West Coast Computer Faire on April 16 and April 17, 1977. On the first day of exhibition, Jobs introduced Apple II to a Japanese textile technician named Mizushima Satoshi who became the first authorized Apple dealer in Japan.

The main difference internally was a completely redesigned TV interface, which held the display in memory. Now not only useful for simple text display, the Apple II included graphics, and, eventually, colour. Jobs meanwhile pressed for a much improved case and keyboard, with the idea that the machine should be complete and ready to run out of the box. This was almost the case for the Apple I machines sold to The Byte Shop, but one still needed to plug various parts together and type in the code to run BASIC.

Building such a machine was going to cost a lot more money. Jobs started looking for cash, but Wayne was somewhat gun shy due to a failed venture four years earlier, and eventually dropped out of the company. Banks were reluctant to lend Jobs money; the idea of a computer for ordinary people seemed absurd at the time. Jobs eventually met "Mike" Markkula who co-signed a bank loan for $250,000, and the three formed Apple Computer on April 1, 1976. Why Apple? At the time, the company to beat was Atari, and Apple Computer came before Atari alphabetically and thus also in the phone book.
With both cash and a new case design in hand thanks to designer Jerry Manock, the Apple II was released in 1977 and became the computer generally credited with creating the home computer market. Millions were sold well into the 1980s. A number of different models of the Apple II series were built, including the Apple IIe and Apple IIGS, which could still be found in many schools as late as 2005.

By the early 1980s, Apple Computer faced increasing competition from other companies. The main competitor of Apple Computer was Commodore, an established PC maker whose computers were outselling the Apple's of the time. However, this was soon to change as the long established maker of business level mainframes, IBM, was to enter the market.

Apple III

Lisa

While the Apple II was already established as a successful business-ready platform because of Visicalc, Apple was not contented. The Apple III (Apple 3) was designed to take on the IBM PC in the business environment.

The Apple III was a relatively conservative design for computers of the era. However, Steve Jobs did not want the computer to have a fan; rather, he wanted the heat generated by the electronics to be dissipated through the chassis of the machine, forgoing the cooling fan.

Unfortunately, the physical design of the case was not sufficient to cool the components inside it. By removing the fan from the design, the Apple III was prone to overheating. This caused the Integrated Circuits to disconnect from the motherboard. Customers who contacted Apple customer service were told to "drop the computer on the desk", which would cause the ICs to fall back in to place.

Thousands of Apple III computers were recalled and, although a new model was introduced in 1983 to rectify the problems, the damage was done.

Beginning of Windows

In anticipation of the Macintosh launch, Bill Gates, co-founder, chairman of Microsoft was given several Macintosh prototypes in 1983 for software development for the new computer. In 1985, Microsoft launched Microsoft Windows, its own GUI for IBM PCs using many of the elements of the Macintosh OS. This led to a long legal battle between Apple Computer and Microsoft, ending with an out of court settlement. In this settlement it was stated that Microsoft would be granted access to and allowed unlimited use of the Macintosh GUI. By that point the IBM PC system had been reverse engineered and many companies were also making IBM PC Compatibles, cheaper copies of the PC. Although the first version of Windows was technologically inferior

to the Mac, a Windows-equipped PC clone could be purchased for much less.

History of yahoo

In January 1994, Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a website named "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web." Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages.

In April 1994, "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo". Filo and Yang said they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." The name can also be a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.

By the end of 1994, Yahoo had already received one million hits. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on 1 March 1995, Yahoo was incorporated. On April 5, 1995, Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo with two rounds of venture capital. On 12 April 1996, Yahoo had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million dollars, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.

"Yahoo" had already been trademarked for barbecue sauce (and knives (by EBSCO Industries)). Therefore, in order to get the trademark, Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark to the name.

Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo diversified into a Web portal. In the late 1990s, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Excite and other Web portals were growing rapidly. Web portal providers rushed to acquire companies to expand their range of services, in the hope of increasing the time a user stays at the portal.

On 8 March 1997, Yahoo acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo Mail. Yahoo also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo Games. Yahoo then acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on 12 October On December 12th, Google had been introduced and three years later yahoo struggled and so Google carried on and are bigger than Yahoo. 1998. On 28 January 1999, Yahoo acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo acquired was eGroups, which became Yahoo Groups after the acquisition on 28 June 2000. Yahoo also launched Yahoo Messenger on 21 July 1999.

When acquiring companies, Yahoo often changed the relevant terms of service. For example, they claimed intellectual property rights for content on their servers, unlike the companies they acquired. As a result, many of the acquisitions were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services.


On 3 January 2000, at the height of the Dot-com boom, Yahoo stocks closed at an all-time high of $475.00 a share. 16 days later, shares in Yahoo Japan became the first stocks in Japanese history to trade at over ¥100,000,000, reaching a price of ¥101.4 million ($962,140 at that time).

On 7 February 2000, yahoo.com was brought to a halt for a few hours as it was the victim of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). On the next day, its shares rose about $16, or 4.5 percent as the failure was blamed on hackers rather than on an internal glitch, unlike a fault with eBay earlier that year.

During the dot-com boom, the cable news station CNBC also reported that Yahoo and eBay were discussing a 50/50 merger. Although the merger never materialized the two companies decided to form a marketing/advertising alliance six years later in 2006.

On 26 June 2000, Yahoo and Google signed an agreement which retained Google as the default world-wide-web search engine for yahoo.com following a beta trial in 1999.


Yahoo formed partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers to create content-rich broadband services to compete with AOL. On 3 June 2002, SBC and Yahoo launched a national co-branded dial service. In July 2003, BT Openworld announced an alliance with Yahoo On 23 August 2005, Yahoo and Verizon launched an integrated DSL service.

In late 2002, Yahoo began to bolster its search services by acquiring other search engines. In December 2002, Yahoo acquired Inktomi. In February 2005, Yahoo acquired Konfabulator and rebranded it Yahoo Widgets, a desktop application and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc. and its subsidiaries AltaVista and AlltheWeb. On February 18, 2004, Yahoo dropped Google-powered results and returned to using its own technology to provide search results.

In 2004, in response to Google's release of Gmail, Yahoo upgraded the storage of all free Yahoo Mail accounts from 4 MB to 1 GB, and all Yahoo Mail Plus accounts to 2 GB. In 2007, Yahoo took out the storage meters and made the storage limit unlimited. On 9 July 2004, Yahoo acquired e-mail provider Oddpost to add an Ajax interface to Yahoo Mail. On 13 October 2005, Yahoo and Microsoft announced that Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger would become interoperable.

Yahoo continued acquiring companies to expand its range of services, particularly Web 2.0 services. Yahoo Launchcast became Yahoo Music on 9 February 2005. On 20 March 2005, Yahoo purchased photo sharing service Flickr. On 29 March 2005, the company launched its blogging and social networking service Yahoo 360°. In June 2005, Yahoo acquired blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation. Yahoo then bought online social event calendar Upcoming.org on 4 October 2005. Yahoo acquired social bookmark site del.icio.us on 9 December 2005 and then playlist sharing community webjay on 9 January 2006.

On 27 August 2007, Yahoo released a new version of Yahoo Mail that makes it possible for users to send instant messages to the largest combined instant messaging (IM) community including users of Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger, to send free text messages to mobile phones in the U.S., Canada, India and the Philippines.

On 22 January 2008, it was reported that Yahoo was planning to lay off hundreds of employees out of its work force of about 14,000. The company has suffered severely in its inability to effectively compete with industry search leader Google.

On 29 January 2008, Yahoo announced that the company was laying off 1,000 employees. The cuts represent 7 percent of the company's workforce of 14,300. Employees are being invited to apply for an unknown number of new positions that are expected to open as the company expands areas that promise faster growth.

Apple Inc. history

The company introduced the Apple II microcomputer in March 1977. A few years later, in 1983, it introduced the Lisa, the first commercial personal computer to employ a graphical user interface (GUI), which was influenced in part by the Xerox Alto. Lisa was also the first personal computer to have the mouse. In 1984, the Macintosh was introduced, which arguably advanced the concept of a new user-friendly graphical user interface. Apple's success with the Macintosh became a major influence in the development of graphical interfaces elsewhere, with major computer operating systems, such as the Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST, appearing on the market within two years of the introduction of the Macintosh.

In 1991, Apple introduced the PowerBook line of portable computers. The 1990s also saw Apple's market share fall as competition from Microsoft Windows and the comparatively inexpensive IBM PC compatible computers that would eventually dominate the market. In the 2000s, Apple expanded its focus on software to include professional and prosumer video, music, and photo production solutions, with a view to promoting their products as a "digital hub". It also introduced the iPod, the most popular digital music player in the world.

1976 to 1980: The early years

The Apple I, Apple's first product. Sold as an assembled circuit board, it lacked basic features such as a keyboard, monitor, and case. The owner of this unit added a keyboard and a wooden case.

Apple was founded on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne (and later incorporated January 3, 1977 without Wayne, who sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak) to sell the Apple I personal computer kit. They were hand-built by Steve Wozniak in the living room of Jobs' parents' home, and the Apple I was first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club. Eventually 200 computers were built. The Apple I was sold as a motherboard (with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips) — not what is today considered a complete personal computer. The user was required to provide two different AC input voltages (the manual recommended specific transformers), wire an ASCII keyboard (not provided with the computer) to a DIP connector (providing logic inverter and alpha lock chips in some cases), and to wire the video output pins to a monitor or to an RF modulator if a TV set was used. The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 and was market-priced at $666.66.

Jobs approached a local computer store, The Byte Shop, which ordered fifty units and paid US$500 for each unit after much persuasion. He then ordered components from Cramer Electronics, a national electronic parts distributor. Using a variety of methods, including borrowing space from friends and family and selling various items including a Volkswagen Type 2 bus, Jobs managed to secure the parts needed while Wozniak and Ronald Wayne assembled the Apple I.

The Apple II was introduced on April 16, 1977 at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It differed from its major rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because it came with color graphics and an open architecture. While early models used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, this was quickly superseded by the introduction of a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive and interface, the Disk II.


Another key to business for Apple was software. The Apple II was chosen by programmers Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston to be the desktop platform for the first "killer app" of the business world—the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. VisiCalc created a business market for the Apple II, and the corporate market attracted many more software and hardware developers to the machine, as well as giving home users an additional reason to buy one—compatibility with the office. (See the timeline for dates of Apple II family model releases—the 1977 Apple II and its younger siblings the II+, IIe, IIc, and IIGS.)

According to Brian Bagnall's book, "On the Edge" (pp. 109-112), Apple exaggerated its sales figures, and Apple was a distant third place until VisiCalc came along. VisiCalc was first released on Apple II because Commodore and Tandy computers were tied up in VisiCalc's software development office due to their popularity. VisiCalc's association with Apple was thus pure happenstance, not a technical decision. Even after VisiCalc, Apple II did not surpass the Tandy TRS-80, whose sales were helped by the large number of Radio Shack stores. However, VisiCalc did put Apple ahead of Commodore's PET, at least in the US. (Commodore later regained the lead for a while with the Commodore 64 in the mid 80s, the best selling specific model of computer to date.)

By the end of the 1970s, Jobs and his partners had a staff of computer designers and a production line. The Apple II was succeeded by the Apple III in May 1980 as the company struggled to compete against IBM and Microsoft in the lucrative business and corporate computing market. The designers of the Apple III were forced to comply with Jobs' request to omit the cooling fan, and this ultimately resulted in thousands of recalled units due to overheating.An updated version, the Apple III+, was introduced in 1983, but it was also a failure due to bad press and wary buyers.

Apple's sustained growth during the early 1980s was partly due to its leadership in the education sector, attributed to their adaptation of the programming language LOGO, used in many schools with the Apple II. The drive into education was accentuated in California with the donation of one Apple II and one Apple LOGO software package to each public school in the state. The deal concluded between Steve Jobs and Jim Baroux of LCSI, and having required the support of Sacramento, established a strong and pervasive presence for Apple in all schools throughout California. The initial conquest of education environments was critical to Apple's acceptance in the home where the earliest purchases of computers by parents was in support of children's continued learning experience.

1981 to 1989: Lisa and Macintosh

The rebel from Apple's 1984 ad, set in a dystopian future modeled after the Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, set the tone for the introduction of the Macintosh

Jobs and several other Apple employees including Jef Raskin visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Alto computer. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for selling them US$1 million in pre-IPO Apple stock (approximately US$18 million net).

It is said that Jobs was immediately convinced that all future computers would use a GUI, and decided to turn over design of Apple's next project, the Apple Lisa, to produce such a device. The Lisa was named after Jobs' daughter (however, a bacronym, Local Integrated Software Architecture, was coined). He was eventually pushed from the group due to infighting, and instead took over Jef Raskin's low-cost computer project, the Macintosh. Branding the new effort as the product that would "save Apple", an intense turf war broke out between the Lisa's "corporate shirts" and Jobs' Macintosh "pirates", both teams claiming they would ship first and be more successful. In 1983 the Lisa team won the race and Apple introduced the first personal computer to be sold to the public with a GUI. However, the Lisa was a commercial failure as a result of its high price tag (US$9,995) and limited software titles.

The Macintosh 128K, the first Macintosh computer

In 1984, drawing upon its experience with the Lisa, Apple next launched the Macintosh. Its debut was announced by a single national broadcast of the now famous US$1.5 million television commercial, "1984", based on George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The commercial was directed by Ridley Scott and aired during Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984. Jobs' intention with the ad was to represent the IBM PC as Big Brother, and the Macintosh as a nameless female action hero portrayed by Anya Major. While the Macintosh initially sold well, follow-up sales were not particularly strong. The machine's fortunes changed with the introduction of the LaserWriter, the first laser printer to be offered at a reasonable price point, and PageMaker, an early desktop publishing (DTP) package. The Mac was particularly powerful in this market due to its advanced graphics capabilities, which were already necessarily built-in to create the intuitive Macintosh GUI. It has been suggested that the combination of these three products was responsible for the creation of the DTP market. As DTP became widespread, Apple's sales reached a series of new highs, and the company had its initial public offering on September 7, 1984.

An internal power struggle developed between Jobs and new CEO John Sculley in 1985. Apple's board of directors sided with Sculley and Jobs was removed from his managerial duties. Jobs later resigned from Apple and founded NeXT Inc., a computer company that built machines with futuristic designs and ran the UNIX-derived NeXTStep operating system. Although powerful, NeXT computers never caught on with buyers, due in part to their high purchase price.

1989 to 1991: The Golden Age

The Macintosh Portable was Apple's first "portable" Macintosh computer, released in 1989.

Having learned several painful lessons after introducing the bulky Macintosh Portable in 1989, Apple introduced the PowerBook in 1991, which established the modern form and ergonomic layout of the laptop computer. The same year, Apple introduced System 7, a major upgrade to the operating system which added color to the interface, and introduced a number of new networking capabilities. It would remain the architectural basis for Mac OS until 2001.

The success of the PowerBook and several other Apple products during this period led to increasing revenue. For some time, it appeared that Apple could do no wrong, introducing fresh new products and generating increasing profits in the process. The magazine MacAddict named the period between 1989 to 1991 the "first golden age" of the Macintosh. However, the continuing development of Microsoft Windows had given birth to an interface that was competitive with Apple's. Combined with a huge base of low-cost computers and peripherals and an improving software suite, an increasing number of potential customers turned to the "Wintel" standard.

Apple, relying on high profit margins to maintain their massive R&D budget, never developed a clear response. Instead they sued Microsoft for theft of intellectual property, in Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation. The lawsuit dragged on for years before finally being thrown out of court. A series of major product flops and missed deadlines destroyed Apple's reputation of invincibility, and consequently their market share dropped, particularly after the release of Windows 95

During this time, Apple branched out into consumer electronics. One example of this product diversification was the Apple QuickTake digital camera, one of the first digital cameras brought to the consumer market. A more famous example was the Newton, termed a "Personal digital assistant" or "PDA" by Sculley, that was introduced in 1993. Though it failed commercially, it defined and launched a new category of computing and was a forerunner of devices such as Palm Pilot, PocketPC, and eventually the iPhone.

1994 to 1997: Attempts at reinvention

The Apple Newton was Apple's first foray into the PDA markets, as well as one of the first in the industry. A financial flop, it helped pave the way for the Palm Pilot and Apple's own iPhone in the future.

By the mid-90s, Apple realized that it had to reinvent the Macintosh in order to stay competitive in the market. The needs of both computer users and computer programs were becoming, for a variety of technical reasons, harder for the existing hardware and operating system to address.

In 1994 Apple allied with long-time competitor IBM and CPU maker Motorola in the so-called AIM alliance. This was a bid to create a new computing platform (the PowerPC Reference Platform or PReP), which would use IBM and Motorola hardware coupled with Apple's software. The AIM alliance hoped that PReP's performance and Apple's software would leave the PC far behind, thus countering Microsoft, which had become Apple's chief competitor. That year, Apple introduced the Power Macintosh using IBM's PowerPC processor. This processor utilized a RISC architecture, which differed substantially from the Motorola 68k series that had been used by all previous Macs.

Throughout the mid to late 1990s, Apple tried to improve its operating system's multitasking and memory management. After multiple failed attempts to improve the existing Mac OS, first with the Taligent project, then later with Copland and Gershwin, the company chose to purchase NeXT and its NeXTSTEP operating system, bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple in the process. On July 9, 1997, Gil Amelio was ousted as CEO of Apple by the board of directors after overseeing a 3-year record-low stock price and crippling financial losses. Jobs stepped in as the interim CEO and began a restructuring of the company's product line.

At the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into a partnership with Microsoft to release new versions of Microsoft Office for the Macintosh as well as a US$150 million investment in non-voting Apple stock.

On November 10, 1997, Apple introduced the Apple Store, an online retail store based upon the WebObjects application server the company had acquired in its purchase of NeXT. The new direct sales outlet was also tied to a new build-to-order manufacturing strategy and announced at the same time as new machines using the PowerPC processor.

1998 to 2005: New beginnings

Company headquarters on Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California.

On August 15, 1998, Apple introduced a new all-in-one Mac computer reminiscent of the original Macintosh 128K: the iMac. The iMac design team was led by Jonathan Ive, who would later design the iPod and the iPhone. While not groundbreaking from a technological standpoint, the iMac featured an innovative new translucent plastic exterior, originally in Bondi Blue, but later many other colors. The iMac sold close to 800,000 units in its first five months and helped return the company to sustained profitability for the first time since 1993.

Through this time period, Apple purchased several companies in a move to create a portfolio of professional and consumer-oriented digital production software. In 1998, Apple announced the purchase of Macromedia's Final Cut software, signalling its expansion into the digital video editing market. The following year, Apple released two video editing products: iMovie for consumers, and Final Cut Pro for professionals, the latter of which has gone on to be a significant video-editing program, with 800,000 registered users in early 2007. In 2002 Apple purchased Nothing Real for their advanced digital compositing application Shake, as well as Emagic for their music productivity application Logic. which led to the development of their consumer-level GarageBand application. With iPhoto's release in 2002, this completed Apple's collection of consumer and professional level creativity software, with the consumer-level applications being collected together into the iLife suite.

Mac OS X, the operating system based on NeXT's OPENSTEP and BSD Unix was released on March 24, 2001 after several years of development. Aimed at consumers and professionals alike, Mac OS X aimed to marry the stability, reliability and security of the Unix operating system with the ease of use afforded by a completely overhauled user interface. To aid users in moving their applications from Mac OS 9, the new operating system allowed the use of OS 9 applications through Mac OS X's Classic environment.

The entrance of the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York City is a glass cube, housing a cylindrical elevator and a spiral staircase that leads into the subterranean store.

On May 19, 2001, Apple opened its first official Apple Retail Stores in Virginia and California, and has since continued to open more stores in the United States and other countries.

Later the same year, Apple introduced its first iPod portable digital audio player. The product has proven phenomenally successful; over 100 million units have been sold in the six years since its introduction. In 2003, Apple's iTunes Store was introduced, offering online music downloads for US 99¢ a song and integration with the iPod. The service quickly became the market leader in online music services, with over 3 billion downloads by August 2007. Steve Jobs announced that iTunes had reached 4 billion downloads during his keynote address at the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo.

As for the Macintosh, Apple's design team progressively abandoned the flashy colors of the iMac G3 era in favor of white polycarbonate for consumer lines such as the iMac and iBook, as well as the educational eMac, and metal enclosures for the professional lines. This began with the 2001 release of the titanium PowerBook and was followed by the 2001 white iBook, the 2002 flat-panel iMac, the 2003 Power Mac G5, and the 2004 Apple Cinema Displays.

Is Computer Science Dying

The statistics do not lie, especially when they are repeated year after year. Computer Science faces a rocky future in Ireland. When other countries like India are pushing computer science in a big way, Ireland has seen numbers applying for computer science third-level courses in a freefall.

Yesterdays leaving certificate results show that, once again, the failure rates for mathematics and science are alarmingly high. They are so bad that we now have Minister for Education Mary Hanafin calling for third-level colleges to accept Foundation Level mathematics as a minimum requirement. There was a time when you needed an honour in higher level mathematics to get into many third-level courses.

Is it any wonder that numbers are falling in applications for computer science when more and more young people are lowering their aspirations in terms of mathematics achievement? If foundation level maths is accepted for the majority of third-level courses, where is the incentive for a student to study at pass level, let alone higher level? I can see students hedging their bets - dropping to foundation level maths because they have at least 6 other subjects to get their points from. Mathematics is fundamental to computer science and at a very minimum an honour at pass level should be accepted. If more and more people drop into foundation level maths - people that are capable of achieving more but are only using maths to calculate their final leaving cert points tally - then I do not see much of a future for computer science.

It may not be all doom and gloom though for the software industry in Ireland. Other courses that bridge the gap between business and computer science are proving to be popular. Courses in Business Information Systems (BIS) and Management Information Systems (MIS) do offer, over the course of a full undergraduate degree, a reasonable proportion of practical computer science subjects, such as programming, database management systems, operating systems and netwworking. That is welcome from an employers point of view, but can these graduates fill the research gap at a time when the government is pushing the notion of more PhD graduates?

Will we reach the point where we have lots of PhD computer science research programme places that cannot be filled by Irish graduates?

Kosovo war

Kosovo in Tito's Yugoslavia (1945–1986)

Tensions between the two communities had been simmering throughout the 20th century and had occasionally erupted into major violence, particularly during the First Balkan War, World War I and World War II. The Communist government of Josip Broz Tito systematically repressed nationalist manifestations throughout Yugoslavia, seeking to ensure that no Yugoslav republic or nationality gained dominance over the others. In particular, the power of Serbia—the largest and most populous republic—was diluted by the establishment of autonomous governments in the province of Vojvodina in the north of Serbia and Kosovo in the south. Kosovo's borders did not precisely match the areas of ethnic Albanian settlement in Yugoslavia (significant numbers of Albanians were left in the Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia, while the far north of Kosovo remained largely ethnic Serbian). Nonetheless, the majority of its inhabitants since at least the 1921 census were Albanian.

Kosovo's formal autonomy, established under the 1945 Yugoslav constitution, initially meant relatively little in practice. Tito's secret police cracked down hard on nationalists. In 1956, a number of Albanians were put on trial in Kosovo on charges of espionage and subversion. The threat of separatism was in fact minimal, as the few underground groups aiming for union with Albania were politically insignificant. Their long-term impact was substantial, though, as some—particularly the Revolutionary Movement for Albanian Unity, founded by Adem Demaci—were much later to form the political core of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Demaci himself was imprisoned in 1964 along with many of his followers.

Yugoslavia underwent a period of economic and political crisis in 1968, as a massive government program of economic reform widened the gap between the rich north and poor south of the country. Student demonstrations and riots in Belgrade in June 1968 spread to Kosovo in November the same year, but were put down by the Yugoslav security forces. However, some of the students' demands—particularly for real representative powers for Albanians on both Serbian and Yugoslav state bodies, and better recognition of the Albanian language—were conceded by Tito. University of Priština was established as an independent institution in 1970, ending a long period when the institution had been run as an outpost of Belgrade University. The Albanianisation of education in Kosovo was hampered by the lack of Albanian-language educational materials in Yugoslavia, so an agreement was struck with Albania itself to supply textbooks.

In 1974, Kosovo's political status was improved still further when a new Yugoslav constitution granted an expanded set of political rights. Along with Vojvodina, it was declared a province and gained many of the powers of a fully-fledged republic: a seat on the federal presidency and its own assembly, police force and national bank. Power was still exercised by the Communist Party, but it was now devolved mainly to ethnic Albanian communists.

Tito's death on May 4, 1980 ushered in a long period of political instability, worsened by growing economic crisis and nationalist unrest. The first major outbreak occurred in Kosovo's main city, Pristina, in March 1981 when Albanian students rioted over long queues in their university canteen. This seemingly trivial dispute rapidly spread throughout Kosovo and took on the character of a national revolt, with massive popular demonstrations in many Kosovo towns. The protesters demanded that Kosovo should become the seventh republic of Yugoslavia. However, this was politically unacceptable to Serbia and the Republic of Macedonia. Some Serbs (and possibly some Albanian nationalists as well) saw the demands as being a prelude to a "Greater Albania" which could encompass parts of Montenegro, the Republic of Macedonia and Kosovo itself. The Communist Yugoslav presidency quelled the disturbances by sending in riot police and the army and proclaiming a state of emergency, although it did not repeal the province's autonomy as some Serbian Communists demanded. The Yugoslav press reported that about 11 people had been killed (although others claimed a death toll as high as 1,000) and another 4,200 were imprisoned.

Kosovo's Communist Party also suffered purges, with several key figures (including its president) expelled. Hardliners instituted a fierce crackdown on nationalism of all kinds, Albanian and Serbian alike. Kosovo endured a heavy secret police presence throughout most of the 1980s that ruthlessly suppressed any unauthorised nationalist manifestations, both Albanian and Serbian. According to a report quoted by Mark Thompson, as many as 580,000 inhabitants of Kosovo were arrested, interrogated, interned or reprimanded. Thousands of these lost their jobs or were expelled from their educational establishments.

During this time, tension between the Albanian and Serbian communities continued to escalate. In 1969, the Serbian Orthodox Church had ordered its clergy to compile data on the ongoing problems of Serbs in Kosovo, seeking to pressure the government in Belgrade to do more to protect the Serbian faithful. In February 1982, a group of priests from Serbia proper petitioned their bishops to ask "why the Serbian Church is silent" and why it did not campaign against "the destruction, arson and sacrilege of the holy shrines of Kosovo". Such concerns did attract interest in Belgrade. Stories appeared from time to time in the Belgrade media claiming that Serbs and Montenegrins were being persecuted. There was a genuine perception among Serbian nationalists in particular that Serbs were being driven out of Kosovo. A significant fact contributing to fear and instability was large-scale drug traffiking by mafias of Kosovar Albanians.

An additional factor was the worsening state of Kosovo's economy, which made the province a poor choice for Serbs seeking work. Albanians, as well as Serbs tended to favour their compatriots when employing new recruits, but the number of jobs was in any case too few for the population. To that end, it is believed that a large number of those declaring Albanian ethnicity are in fact from the Roma community who happen to be of Islamic faith. Kosovo was the poorest part of Yugoslavia: in 1979 the average per capita income was $795, compared with the national average of $2,635 (and $5,315 in Slovenia).


Kosovo and the rise of Slobodan Milošević (1986–1990)

In Kosovo growing Albanian nationalism and separatism in response to persecution led to growing ethnic tensions between Serbs and Albanians. An increasingly poisonous atmosphere led to wild rumours being traded and otherwise trivial incidents being blown out of proportion.

It was against this tense background that the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU, from its Serbian initials, САНУ) conducted a survey under Serbs who had left Kosovo in 1985/1986 . The report concluded that a considerable part of those who had left had been under pressure by Albanians to do so.

Sixteen prominent members of the SANU began work in June 1985 on a draft document that was leaked to the public in September 1986. The SANU Memorandum, as it has become known, was hugely controversial. It focused on the political difficulties facing Serbs in Yugoslavia, pointing to Tito's deliberate hobbling of Serbia's power and the difficulties faced by Serbs outside Serbia proper.

The Memorandum paid special attention to Kosovo, arguing that the province's Serbs were being subjected to "physical, political, legal and cultural genocide" in an "open and total war" that had been ongoing since the spring of 1981. It claimed that Kosovo's status in 1986 was a worse historical defeat for the Serbs than any event since liberation from the Ottomans in 1804, thus ranking it above such catastrophes as the Nazi occupation or the First World War occupation of Serbia by the Austro-Hungarians. The Memorandum's authors claimed that 200,000 Serbs had moved out of the province over the previous twenty years and warned that there would soon be none left "unless things change radically." The remedy, according to the Memorandum, was for "genuine security and unambiguous equality for all peoples living in Kosovo and Metohija [to be] established" and "objective and permanent conditions for the return of the expelled [Serbian] nation [to be] created." It concluded that "Serbia must not be passive and wait and see what the others will say, as it has done so often in the past."

The SANU Memorandum met with many different reactions. The Albanians saw it as a call for Serbian supremacism at a local level. They claimed that all Serb emigrants had left Kosovo for economic reasons. Other Yugoslav nationalities—notably the Slovenes and Croats—saw a threat in the call for a more assertive Serbia. Serbs themselves were divided: many welcomed it, while the Communist old guard strongly attacked its message. One of those who denounced it was a Serbian Communist Party official named Slobodan Milošević.

In November 1988, Kosovo's head of the provincial committee was arrested. In March 1989, Milošević announced an "anti-bureaucratic revolution" in Kosovo and Vojvodina, curtailing their autonomy and imposing a curfew and a state of emergency in Kosovo due to violent demonstrations, resulting in 24 deaths (including two policemen). Milošević and his government claimed that the constitutional changes were necessary to protect Kosovo's remaining Serbs against harassment from the Albanian majority.

Amir Timur

Timur was born in 1336, at a small town called Kesh, 50 miles south of Samarkand. A Chengezi Turk, he was the son of a minor chief who due to hard work and focused aims was able to become the ruler of a vast empire consisting of Transoxiana, a part of Turkistan, Afghanistan, Persia, Syria, Kurdistan and a major part of Asia Minor. The areas he conquered in his lifetime were only second to the conquests of Alexander.

As a young man he received a serious leg wound while stealing sheep, that resulted in a permanent limp. He was nicknamed Timur Leng (the lame), which ultimately became "Tamerlane". This handicap never hampered his ambitions. His aim was to become a conqueror of the caliber of Chengez Khan.

Timur's career was a combination of destruction and construction. On one hand he organized his army on the line of Mongols but on the other hand he left his administration in the hands of trained Muslim administrators. He would punish rebellions like Chengez Khan but would show a lot of respect for Muslim men of learning. Before destroying a beautiful peace of architecture, he would order sketches drawn, so that he could build its replica in his capital city of Samarkand.

After destroying the powers of Persia and Russia, Timur decided to invade India. His army initially entered India under the leadership of his grandson, Pir Muhammad Jehangir, in November 1397. This army managed to conquer Uch and Multan. In September of the following year, Timur himself came with a huge army 92,000 cavalrymen. He stormed though the areas that came in his way; Bhatnir, Sarsuti, Kaithal, Samana, Tughluqpur and Panipat. He finally reached Delhi. A weak Tughluq ruler, Nasir-ud-din Mahmud, ruled Delhi at that time. Mahmud ran away after being defeated by Timur.

After conquering Delhi, Timur announced general amnesty. It was only after the murder of a few of the Timur's soldiers at the hands of the local people, that he ordered a general massacre of locals and the plundering of Delhi. After looting Delhi for several days, Timur decided to go back. On his way back, he captured Jammu and Punjab. He made Khizar Khan his governor of Multan, Lahore and Dipalpur and left the area before the arrival of summer in March 1399. The booty acquired by Timur's soldiers included rubies, diamonds, garnets, pearls, vessels of gold and silver, silk, brocade and ornaments.

Against advise, he embarked on a grand conquest of China in January 1405. His age caught up with him and he became seriously ill. He was carried back to Samarkand, where he died in February, the same year.

Razia Sultana

Daughter of Iltutmush, Razia Sultana was the first female Muslim ruler of South Asia. She was a talented, wise, just and generous woman. She was a great administrator and was well versed in governmental affairs. She was not only a good leader in the battlefield but herself was also an excellent fighter. As the most capable son of Iltutmush died during his own life, and the rest were incompetent to govern, Iltutmush nominated his daughter, Razia Sultana, as his successor on the throne of Delhi. Whenever Iltutmush had to leave his capital, he used to leave Razia Sultana in charge of the affairs in Delhi. But when Iltutmush died, Rukn-ud-din Firuz, one of his sons, occupied the throne and ruled for about seven months. Razia Sultana, with the support of the people of Delhi, secured the throne after defeating her brother in 1236.

Razia Sultana established complete law and order in her country. To rule the country, she abandoned her femininity and adopted a masculine getup. She used to dress as a man when appearing in public, be it in court or on the battlefield. She made an Ethiopian slave named Jalal-ud-din Yaqut her personal attendant and started trusting him the most. This challenged the monopoly of power claimed by the Turkish nobles.

The Turkish nobles resented having a woman as their ruler, especially when she started challenging their power. They began conspiring against her. In 1239, the Turkish governor of Lahore rebelled against Razia Sultana. However, when she marched against him, he first fled and then apologized. Then the governor of Bhatinda revolted. When Razia Sultana was trying to suppress the rebellion in Bhatinda, her own Turkish officers deposed her from the throne of Delhi and made her brother Bahram the Sultan. Razia Sultana married the governor of Bhatinda, Malik Altunia, and with his help tried to reoccupy the throne. She was defeated by the Turkish nobles and was compelled to flee away. A peasant who had offered her food and shelter while fleeing from an encounter killed her in her sleep. She died in 1240.

Tughluq Dynasty [1320-1412]

During his rule, Khusraw replaced Muslim officers by Hindu officers in all key positions of the country. These Hindu officers openly insulted Islam, dishonored mosques and used copies of the Quran as pedestals for idols. This situation was very difficult for the Muslim of South Asia to digest. They gathered around a Tughluq noble popularly known as Ghazi Malik, who defeated and killed Khusraw. He wanted to give power back to the Khalji Dynasty, but could not find any survivor amongst the decedents of Alauddin. In this situation, the nobles asked him to become Sultan. He ascended the throne on September 8, 1320, and assumed the title of Ghiyas-ud-din Tughluq Shah, thus becoming the founder of the Tughluq dynasty. The Tughluqs belonged to the Qarauna Turk tribe. After becoming Sultan, Ghiyas-ud-din concentrated on crushing the Hindu rajas, who had gained power during the short rule of Khusraw. He conquered Bengal, which was no longer part of the central empire since the death of Balban. When he came back after the successful Bengal expedition, his son Jauna Khan gave him a very warm welcome. When Ghiyas-ud-din was taking the guard-of-honor, the special stage that had been constructed for the occasion fell down, killing Ghiyas-ud-din and six other people. His son Muhammad bin Tughluq succeeded him. Muhammad Tughluq was a man of ideas. He tried to implement a number of his own schemes. Unfortunately for him, almost all his schemes failed and he became unpopular amongst the masses. When he died, his cousin, Firuz Shah was raised to the status of Sultan. Firuz Shah's long rule of 37 years is known for his marvelous administrative reforms. Due to old age, Firuz Shah handed over power to his son Muhammad Shah during his lifetime. The new Sultan proved incompetent and was not liked by the nobles. A civil war like situation was created. Firuz Shah helped in cooling down the tension and replaced Muhammad Shah with Ghiyas-ud-din, his grandson, as Sultan. However, after the death of Firuz Shah in 1388, a tussle once again began between the power-hungry princes of the house of Tughluqs. The nobles, who in order to gain more power, started supporting one prince or the other, further worsened the situation. This period of fighting amongst the Tughluq princes continued for about quarter of a century. Amir Timur's invasion on Delhi in 1398 further destroyed the political and economic standing of the Tughluqs. The dynasty eventually came to an end in 1414 when Khizar Khan founded the Saiyid Dynasty in Delhi.

Qutb-ud-din Aibak

Born to a Central Asia Turk family, Qutb-ud-din Aibak was captured and sold as a slave when he was a child. He was lucky to be purchased by the chief Qazi of Nishapur, who treated him like one of his own sons. Aibak received good education and was trained in the field of archery and horsemanship. However, when the master died, his sons, who were jealous of Aibak, sold him to a slave merchant. Fortune once again favored him and Muhammad Ghuri bought him.

Out of Ghuri's thousands of slaves, Aibak, because of his character and qualities, became one of his master's favorite. Aibak steadily rose through the ranks and eventually became a General. Like his owner Ghuri, Aibak performed his greatest deeds while still a subordinate. He was responsible for most of the conquests of Northern India and was appointed as Ghuri's Viceroy to Delhi. When Ghuri died in 1206, the Turkish Amirs and Generals elected Aibak as the new Sultan. It was he who shifted the capital first from Ghazni to Lahore, and then from Lahore to Delhi, and thus is considered as the first Muslim ruler of South Asia.

Aibak could not rule for long and died in 1210 after falling from a horse while playing polo. He is buried near the Anarkali Bazaar in Lahore, where a new tomb was constructed over his grave around 1970. Though his tenure as a ruler was only four years, and most of them were spend in dealing with the revolts of nobles like Taj-ud-din Ildiz, Nasir-ud-din Qubachah and a few Hindu chiefs, yet he established a firm administrative system. He restored peace and prosperity in the area under him and roads were free from thieves and robbers. He started the construction of Quwaat-al-Islam Mosque at Delhi. He also laid the foundation of the Qutb Minar, which was completed by his successor Iltutmush. Aibak was known as Lakh Baksh because of his generosity. He was also a pious Muslim. Historians have praised his evenhanded justice. He patronized Nizami and Fakh-i-Mudabbir, both of whom dedicated their works to Aibak.

His successors, who ruled India till 1290, were also slaves like him and the dynasty is known as the Slave Dynasty.

Slave Dynasty

The concept of equality in Islam and Muslim traditions reached its climax in the history of South Asia when slaves were raised to the status of Sultan. The Slave Dynasty ruled the Sub-continent for about 84 years. Qutb-ud-din Aibak, Shams-ud-din Iltutmush and Ghiyas-ud-din Balban, the three great Sultans of the era, were themselves sold and purchased during their early lives. The Slave Dynasty was the first Muslim dynasty that ruled India.

Muhammad Ghuri had no son so he raised thousands of slaves like his sons. Ghuri had the habit to buy every talented slave he came across. He would then train them in the way royal children were trained. During Ghuri's regime, slaves occupied all key positions in the government machinery. Three favorite slaves of the Sultan were Qutb-ud-din Aibak, Taj-ud-din Ildiz and Nasir-ud-din Qubachah. He appointed them governors of Delhi, Ghazni and Lahore, respectively. Ghuri never nominated his successor but it was obvious that the successor was to be one of his slaves.

When Ghuri died in 1206, the amirs elected Aibak as the new Sultan. Aibak first shifted his capital from Ghazni to Lahore and then from Lahore to Delhi. Thus he was the first Muslim ruler who ruled South Asia and had his headquarters in the region as well. Aibak could only rule for four years and died in 1210. He was succeeded by his son Aram Shah, who proved to be too incompetent to hold such an important position. The Turk nobles invited Iltutmush, one of the slaves and son-in-law of Aibak, to assume charge of the state affairs. Iltutmush ruled for around 26 years from 1211 to 1236 and was responsible for setting the Sultanate of Delhi on strong footings.

After the death of Iltutmush, a war of succession started between his children. First Rukn-ud-din Firuz sat on the throne for seven months. He was replaced by Razia Sultana. Another son of Iltutmush, Bahram, took over from Razia Sultana in 1239. Next, Masud, son of Rukn-ud-din Firuz, became Sultan from 1242 to 1245. Finally the youngest son of Iltutmush, Nasir-ud-din Mahmud became Sultan in 1245. Though Mahmud ruled India for around 20 years, but throughout his tenure the main power remained in the hands of Balban. On death of Mahmud, Balban directly took over the throne and ruled Delhi. During his rule from 1266 to 1287, Balban consolidated the administrative set up of the empire and completed the work started by Iltutmush.

Grigori Rasputin

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (or Grigori Yefimovich Novy) (Russian: Григо́рий Ефи́мович Распу́тин / Григорий Ефимович Новый) (January 22 [O.S. January 10] 1869 – December 29 [O.S. December 16] 1916) was a Russian mystic who is perceived as having influenced the later days of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, his wife the Tsaritsa Alexandra, and their only son the Tsarevich Alexei. Rasputin had often been called the "Mad Monk", while others considered him a "strannik" (or religious pilgrim) and even a starets (ста́рец, "elder", a title usually reserved for monk-confessors), believing him to be a psychic and faith healer.

It has been argued that Rasputin helped to discredit the tsarist government, leading to the fall in 1917 of the Romanov dynasty. Contemporary opinions saw Rasputin variously as a saintly mystic, visionary, healer, and prophet, and, on the other side of the coin, as a debauched religious charlatan. Historians may find both to be true, but there is much uncertainty, for accounts of his life have often been based on dubious memoirs, hearsay, and legend.


The myths surrounding Rasputin portray him as showing indications of supernatural powers throughout his childhood. Efimy Rasputin, Gregory's father, raised horses, and one ostensible example of these powers was when he mysteriously identified the man who had stolen one of the horses. Rasputin had a knack for identifying thieves and seems to have assumed that everyone possessed this supernatural power.

When he was around the age of eighteen, he spent three months in the Verkhoturye Monastery, possibly a penance for theft. His experience there, combined with a reported vision of the Mother of God on his return, turned him towards the life of a religious mystic and wanderer. It also looks like he came into contact with the banned Christian sect known as the khlysty (flagellants), whose impassioned services, ending in physical exhaustion, led to rumors that religious and sexual ecstasy were combined in these rituals. Suspicions (which have not generally been accepted by historians) that Rasputin was one of the Khlysts threatened his reputation right to the end of his life. Indeed, Alexander Guchkov charged him with being a member of this illegal and orgiastic sect. The Tsar perceived the very real threat of a scandal and ordered his own investigations, but he did not, in the end, remove Rasputin from his position of influence; quite the contrary, he fired his minister of interior for a "lack of control over the press" (censorship being a top priority for Nicholas then). He pronounced the affair to be a private one closed to debate.

Shortly after leaving the monastery, Rasputin visited a holy man named Makariy, whose hut was nearby. Makariy had an enormous influence on Rasputin, who would model himself after him. Rasputin married Praskovia Fyodorovna Dubrovina in 1889, and they had three children, named Dmitri, Varvara, and Maria. Rasputin also had another child with another woman. In 1901, he left his home in Pokrovskoye as a strannik (or pilgrim) and, during the time of his journeying, travelled to Greece and Jerusalem. In 1903, Rasputin arrived in Saint Petersburg, where he gradually gained a reputation as a starets (or holy man) with healing and prophetical powers.
For some time, the date of Rasputin's birth remained questionable. "It is still not known with any certainty when Rasputin was born, and all the books which deal with him and his career give differing dates; not even his biographers — and there have been many — have been able to agree. The closest one can come with certainty is sometime between the years 1863 and 1873." It was not until recently that new documents surfaced revealing Rasputin's birth date as January 10, 1869 O.S. (equivalent to January 22, 1869 N.S.)

The legends recounting the death of Rasputin are perhaps even more bizarre than his strange life. According to Greg King's 1996 book The Man Who Killed Rasputin, a previous attempt on Rasputin's life had been made and had failed: Rasputin was visiting his wife and children in his hometown, Pokrovskoye, along the Tura River, in Siberia. On June 29, 1914, he had either just received a telegram or was just exiting church, when he was attacked suddenly by Khionia Guseva, a former prostitute who had become a disciple of the monk Iliodor, once a friend of Rasputin's but now absolutely disgusted with his behaviour and disrespectful talk about the royal family. Iliodor had appealed to women who had been harmed by Rasputin, and together they formed a survivors' support group.

Guseva thrust a knife into Rasputin's abdomen, and his entrails hung out of what seemed like a mortal wound. Convinced of her success, Guseva supposedly screamed, "I have killed the antichrist!"

After intensive surgery, however, Rasputin recovered. It was said of his survival that "the soul of this cursed muzhik was sewn on his body." His daughter, Maria, pointed out in her memoirs that he was never the same man after that: he seemed to tire more easily and frequently took opium for pain.

The murder of Rasputin has become legend, some of it invented by the very men who killed him, which is why it becomes difficult to discern exactly what happened. It is, however, generally agreed that, on December 16, 1916, having decided that Rasputin's influence over the Tsaritsa had made him a far-too-dangerous threat to the empire, a group of nobles, led by Prince Felix Yusupov and the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich (one of the few Romanov family members to escape the annihilation of the family during the Red Terror), apparently lured Rasputin to the Yusupovs' Moika Palace, where they served him cakes and red wine laced with a massive amount of cyanide. According to legend, Rasputin was unaffected, although Vasily Maklakov had supplied enough poison to kill five men. Conversely, Maria's account asserts that, if her father did eat or drink poison, it was not in the cakes or wine, because, after the attack by Guseva, he had hyperacidity, and avoided anything with sugar. In fact, she expressed doubt that he was poisoned at all.

Determined to finish the job, Yusupov became anxious about the possibility that Rasputin might live until the morning, which would leave the conspirators with no time to conceal his body. Yusupov ran upstairs to consult the others and then came back down to shoot Rasputin through the back with a revolver. Rasputin fell, and the company left the palace for a while. Yusupov, who had left without a coat, decided to return to grab one, and, while at the palace, he went to check up on the body. Suddenly, Rasputin opened his eyes, grabbed Yusupov by the throat and strangled him. As he made his bid for freedom, however, the other conspirators arrived and fired at him. After being hit three times in the back, Rasputin fell once more. As they neared his body, the party found that, remarkably, he was still alive, struggling to get up. They clubbed him into submission and, after wrapping his body in a sheet, threw him into an icy river, and he finally met his end there—as had both his siblings before him.

World War III is revealed

"When the prophecies-within-prophecies are deciphered, the hidden timeline of World War III is revealed."


In May 2005, the Italian National Library in Rome made an amazing discovery. Buried in their archives was an unknown manuscript written by the famed prophet Michel de Nostradame, or Nostradamus (1503-1566). This manuscript was handed down to his son and later donated to Pope Urban VIII. It did not surface again until now, almost four hundred years later.

Using cutting-edge data mining techniques, Dr. Rathford sifted this complex word puzzle searching for significant patterns and relationships. Almost immediately, he came up with the predictive model known as The Nostradamus Code.

The Facts About Nostradamus

Nostradamus is the Latinized form of Michel de Nostredame, the French astrologer, who lived from 1503 to 1566. His great popularity is apparent when one ponders that he is one of the few authors whose work has never been out of print for over four hundred years!

His family converted from Judaism to Catholicism when he was 9 years old. Regarding Roman Catholicism:
He approved the Ceremonies of the Roman Church and remained faithful to the Catholic faith and religion, holding that outside it there was no salvation. He gravely reproved those who, having withdrawn from its embrace, were prepared to let themselves be fed and watered by the easy-going freedoms of damnable foreign doctrines. Their end, he asserted, would be evil and nasty (NE, p. 43).
Furthermore:
It is important to remember the Jewish element of Nostradamus’ childhood when trying to decipher the Prophecies, as he was greatly influenced by occult Jewish literature (PON, p. 5).
Nostradamus had accurate predictive abilities in knowing a future Pope:
Legends about Nostradamus’ prophetic powers also start to appear at this time. Apparently when in Italy he saw a young monk who had been a swineherd pass by him in the street, and immediately knelt down and called him ‘Your Holiness’. Felice Peretti became Sextus V in 1585, long after Nostradamus’ death (PON, p. 8).
Nostradamus Was An Occultist
His interest in the occult was strong and presumably he was still experiencing odd flashes of prophetic insight (PON, p. 9).

Nostradamus converted the top room of his house at Salon into a study and as he tells us in the Prophecies, worked there at night with his occult books (PON, p. 9).
Nostradamus’ Method of Divination
In the following quatrain, he wrote how he came up with his prophecies:
Sitting alone at night in secret study; it is placed on the brass tripod. A slight flame comes out of the emptiness and makes successful that which should not be believed in vain (PON, p. 20).
Erika Cheetham comments on his divination:
Both this and the following quatrain describe Nostradamus’ method of divination, they are not predictions. Nostradamus used the methods of the 4th Century neo-Platonist Iamblichus, a reprint of whose book De Mysteriis Egyptorum was published at Lyons in 1547 and almost certainly read by Nostradamus. It may well have been the source of his experiments with prophecy, for soon afterwards his almanacs started to appear. All the ingredients for magical practices are in this quatrain. It is night. Nostradamus is alone in his study reading the secret forbidden books which inspire his prophecies; the brass tripod is a method used by Iamblichus—on it was placed a bowl of water into which the seer gazed until the water became cloudy and pictures of the future were revealed. Flambe exiquë is the light of inspiration which seizes Nostradamus as he begins to prophesy (PON, p. 20).
Scrying, which is commonly practiced by witches, was his method of predicting:
The term scrying, deriving from the English descry--"to make out dimly" or "to reveal"--denotes an ancient art of clairvoyance: concentrating on an object until visions appear. Scrying has been practiced by magicians and Witches through the ages. Among the purposes of scrying are predictions of the future, answers to questions, solutions to problems, help in finding lost objects, and help in tracking down criminals.

The object on which to concentrate is usually a shiny, smooth surface that makes a good speculum, such as the crystal ball used by Gypsy fortune-tellers or the still water of a lake or pond into which many early scryers gazed. Some of the most frequently used objects are mirrors, polished stones or metals, and bowls of liquid. Ink, blood, and other dark liquids were used by the Egyptians for centuries. Bowls of water were used by Nostradamus (Witchcraft Today, by James R. Lewis, copyrighted 1999, p. 264).
Nostradamus Knew He Was Headed For Hell
Unlike the truly inspired Biblical prophets, who would see visions, have dreams or hear God’s audible voice without the aid of material objects, the above method of predicting the future used by Nostradamus is of the occult and, therefore, clearly forbidden by God:
Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the LORD, and because of these detestable practices the LORD your God will drive out those nations before you. (Deut. 18:10-12)
According to the aforementioned Scripture, the well-known Nostradamus was detestable to the LORD because of his occult involvement. In fact, Nostradamus seems to have known his soul was headed for hell (perdition) over this and burnt to ashes the books in which he discovered these techniques:
... he indicates how it is possible for the diviner to open the mind to divine inspiration not merely through the use of judicial astrology, but with the ritual aid of lymbe and exigue flamme ... Almost in the same breath, however, he beseeches his infant son never to dabble in such practices for, he says, they desiccate the body, disturb the mind, and send the soul to perdition. For that reason he has reduced to ashes the ancient books in which he first discovered the techniques involved. They burned, he says, with an unnatural brilliance (NE, p. 64).
But there is more you need to know about him and his prophecies which might surprise you. Let’s note the following quatrain:
Nostradamus Was Demon Possessed
The wand in the hand is placed in the middle of the tripod’s legs. With water he sprinkles both the hem of his garment and his foot. A voice, fear; he trembles in his robes. Divine splendour [sic]; the god sits nearby.
Cheetham gives her interpretation:
Nostradamus continues to explain his method. He touches the middle of the tripod with his wand, and then moistens his robe and his feet with the water placed on it. This is the same method as was used to obtain inspiration by the Apollonian prophetess at the oracles of Branchus in Classical times. Nostradamus is afraid of the power he evokes when it comes to him; he hears it, as well as sees it; it appears to speak to him and he writes down the prophecies. He is unafraid once the gift has possessed him. This dual aspect of his vision is most important when interpreting the centuries (PON, pp. 20, 21).
A spirit being would approach Nostradamus when he began doing divination, as was done by an Apollonian false prophetess. At such a time he became possessed by it. In a different quatrain we read:
The divine word will give to the substance (that which) contains heaven and earth, occult gold in the mystic deed. Body, soul and spirit are all powerful. Everything is beneath his feet, as at the seat of heaven (PON, p. 120).
The interpretation is given as such:
Although many commentators dismiss this verse I think it is a rare and important description of Nostradamus’ beliefs and experiences. The divine word which takes on substance is either Nostradamus literally calling forth the spirit who inspires him to prophecy, or an incantation which gives him divine powers, ‘the occult gold and the mystic deed’. He feels his body to be possessed of great powers and possibly the last line indicates that during his prophetic sessions he felt disembodied, that his soul was outside his body looking down on himself, at the foot of the heavenly seat. This is a common trance-like experience. Alternatively Nostradamus could mean that the spirit of inspiration came down to him and is as much present beneath his feet, and therefore under his control, as it is at its heavenly source (PON, p. 120).
When Nostradamus would become possessed he would also enter into a trance. A different quatrain goes on to say:
The heavenly bodies endlessly visible to the eye come to cloud (the intellect) for their own reasons. The body, together with the forehead, senses and head all invisible, as the sacred prayers diminish (PON, p. 177).
That is understood to mean the following:
But I think that Nostradamus is here describing the sensation of ‘bodilessness’ which he experiences when in a predictive trance, when his mind and intellect are used by the heavenly beings for their own purposes. The prayers of the last line are the invocations to the spirits made by Nostradamus. As they finish, he is possessed (PON, p. 177).
The Kennedy Assassinations
Many have heard that Nostradamus accurately predicted the assassinations of JFK and RFK 400 years in advance, but did he really make such a prediction or are his fans trying to make his prophecies fit history and thereby unduly exalt his predictive powers? Dear reader, carefully ponder the following for yourself. This is supposed to be the Kennedy assassination predictions:
The great man will be struck down in the day by a thunderbolt. An evil deed, foretold by the bearer of a petition. According to the prediction another falls at night time. Conflict at Reims, London, and pestilence in Tuscany (PON, p. 33).
Please note that the facts reveal that there was no specific mention of the name Kennedy as you might have thought, or of his time frame or century, neither was it stated that it would be the brother or even a relative who would “fall at night time.” Furthermore, as we look back into history, how did the Kennedy assassinations trigger pestilence in Tuscany? In spite of all of this, however, one of his devotees wishes to understand this quatrain as meaning:
The first three lines here may apply to the assassinations of the two Kennedy brothers. John F. Kennedy was shot down (thunderbolt) in broad daylight at Dallas, Texas on 22nd November 1963 by the psychopath, Lee Harvey Oswald. The other man linked with him who is killed at night, was his brother Robert F. Kennedy who was shot down on 5th June 1968 in the early morning while celebrating his victory in the presidential primary elections at a hotel. Line 2, the fact that the assassination had been told by the bearer of a petition may refer to the many death threats John F. Kennedy and his brother received during their terms of office. The troubles in France, England and Italy would refer to the world repercussions of these assassinations (PON, p. 33).
Dear reader, isn’t it clear from the evidence that the predictions that Nostradamus allegedly made about the Kennedy assassinations are contrived! If you stopped someone at random on the sidewalk who never heard of Nostradamus and gave him this actual quatrain, do you sincerely think he would say it predicted the Kennedy assassinations? Never! Furthermore, if RFK was to be the other man who falls at night time, why does the record instead show he was shot in the early morning?
Did Nostradamus Predict Hitler?
In the actual quatrain written by Nostradamus we do not read of “Hitler” but instead of a different person or thing called Hister. This fact is concealed in this English translation of this famous quatrain:
Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers, the greater part of the battlefield will be against Hitler. He will drag the leader in a cage of iron, when the child of Germany observes no law (PON, p. 82).
This is what that supposedly means:
One of Nostradamus’ most remarkable series of quatrains, with the name Hitler given in anagram as Hister. There can be little doubt that Hitler is implied; who else could be so well described by the last line, the German who observed no law? In 16th-Century handwriting the resemblance is even closer with the use of the long s, Hifter. Commentators before 1930 understood the Hister to be the river Danube, from its latin name Ister. But Hitler recognized himself in these quatrains by the mid 1930s and Goebbells made great propaganda out of them in the pre-war party years. Evidence of this is found in many sources, chiefly Ellic Howe’s book ‘Nostradamus and the Nazis’. During the first year of the Second World War the development of the war was to a great extent dependent upon the rivers crossed by the Germans who came into Europe in a never-ending stream looting and pillaging (farouches de faim) (PON, p. 82).
Notice: it is admitted that before 1930 it was understood that Hister (not Hitler) was the subject of the quatrain!
Nostradamus’ Failed Prophecies
Without a doubt, at least some of the times Nostradamus failed in his prophecies. This is candidly admitted by a devotee:
He believed himself to possess certain powers, although there is reason to believe he could not draw on these to order. They certainly sometimes let him down in the Prophecies (PON, p. 14).
That last sentence is very important for it factually declares that Nostradamus made false prophecies! But the author admits to more:
I can dismiss ninety-five per cent of Nostradamus’ predictions as historical coincidence (PON, p. 14).
The July 1999 End of the World False Prophecy
Though many of Nostradamus’ prophecies were vague and obscure, at least the following one was exact as to the timing of a major event which was supposed to occur in July 1999:
In the year 1999, and seven months, from the sky will come the great King of Terror. He will bring back to life the great king of the Mongols. Before and after War reigns happily (PON, p. 417).
That was understood in 1973 and earlier to mean the following:
In his gloomy prediction Nostradamus seems to foresee the end of the world at the Millennium, the year 2000. He was greatly influenced in this by medieval thinking which held all millenniums in great dread. From the verse it appears that first we must suffer the Asian antichrist ‘the King of Mongols’ before the advent of this new and terrifying figure. Note that Nostradamus expects war both before and after his coming (PON, p. 417).
Time is the enemy of false prophets. This is no exception with Nostradamus and his failed prophecy of July 1999. Clearly, Nostradamus was a proven false prophet, and not "the prophet" as Peter Lemesurier calls him (NE, p. 43), because he made at least one false prophecy. But even Lemesurier unwittingly admits to one of Nostradamus' false prophecies:
Indeed, the seer predicts that the Pope's flight from Rome in the year 2000 ... will be accompanied by the appearance of just such a comet as this verse seems to describe (NE, p. 152).
But this prophecy is also false. Nostradamus is further indicted by the facts that he was an occultist who used divination for his prophecies and was himself demon possessed. Regarding the latter and the gift of fortune-telling, please ponder the following Scripture:
One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave-girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour. But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone ... (Acts 16:16-19, NRSV).
From the above Scripture, it should be clear that demon spirits can predict the future to some degree of accuracy or that demon possessed slave girl couldn’t have made a great deal of money for her owners. We should remember this as we evaluate Nostradamus and his predictive powers, which came from spirit beings. Moreover, remember this: a false prophet can make true prophecies (Dt. 13:1-10), but when a false prophecy is made, that person is always a false prophet (Dt. 18:21,22):

You may say to yourselves, "How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD?" If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him (Dt. 18:21,22)
Also, remember that the "prophet" Nostradamus claimed his own revelations were of Divine origin:
His revelations, he [Nostradamus] constantly claimed, were of Divine, not human, origin let alone the product of mere magic. Indeed, only such Divine revelations, he repeatedly pointed out in his dedicatory letters ... could possibly hope to foretell the future (NE, p. 114).
But Nostradamus was correct about one thing--he himself was hell-bound, as is anyone involved in the occult. Besides Dt. 18:10-12 other Scriptures apply:
All the counsel you have received has only worn you out! Let your astrologers come forward, those stargazers who make predictions month by month, let them save you from what is coming upon you. Surely they are like stubble; the fire will burn them up. They cannot even save themselves from the power of the flame. Here are no coals to warm anyone; here is no fire to sit by. (Isa 47:13,14)

But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars--their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death. (Rev 21:8)
Dear reader, if you or someone you know is involved in the occult, repent from this evil and turn to Jesus Christ. Prove your repentance by your deeds, including the destroying of your sorcery materials (Acts 19:19).

Also, if the reader wants to read the future before it happens, he/she should go to the Bible (God’s word), the only reliable source from God that mankind has, and carefully ponder its pages as to the coming of the antichrist, the Lord’s return, Judgment Day and other events. There they will find 100% accurate information about anything the Scriptures speak out upon, unlike the prophecies of Nostradamus! Of utmost importance, the reader should examine what the Bible declares about how to find forgiveness of sins and salvation. For more information on this please view our other related articles. GOD BLESS YOU.

Nostradamus

Michel de Nostredame (14 December 1503 or 21 December 1503 – 2 July 1566), usually Latinized to Nostradamus, was a French apothecary and reputed seer who published collections of prophecies that have since become famous world-wide. He is best known for his book Les Propheties, the first edition of which appeared in 1555.

Since the publication of this book, which has rarely been out of print since his death, Nostradamus has attracted an enthusiastic following who, along with the popular press, credit him with predicting many major world events.

In contrast, most academic sources maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus's quatrains are largely the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations (sometimes deliberate) or else are so tenuous as to render them useless as evidence of any genuine predictive power. Moreover, none of the sources listed offers any evidence that anyone has ever interpreted any of Nostradamus's quatrains specifically enough to allow a clear identification of any event in advance.

Nevertheless, interest in the work of this prominent figure of the French Renaissance is still considerable, especially in the media and in popular culture, and the prophecies have in some cases been assimilated to the results of applying the alleged Bible Code, as well as to other purported prophetic works.

Mysterious assassinations no new thing: the example of Zia-ul-Haq

An event and issue that continues to generate considerable amount of debate is the assassination of General Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator before Musharraf. (There was a interregnum, if you will, of politicians between Zia-ul-Haq and Musharraf.)

One day, all of a sudden, Zia’s plane blew up. To this day, there has been no conclusive finding as to who was responsible. Of course, the various people who would have wanted him dead makes pinpointing the culprit extremely difficult. Was it the Americans (and, if so, which entity therein)? The Soviets? The Indians? The Israelis? Other Communists? Afghans? How did they do it?

Although Zia-ul-Haq was instrumental in allowing the Americans to fund and supply the mujahidin in Afghanistan, who were fighting the Soviets, Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization of Pakistan posed a considerable risk to the greater stability of the region, not to mention how unwieldy he (and his Islamized nation) was getting. It would have made sense to off Zia-ul-Haq before he became more of a liability than an asset. (The example of Saddam Hussein demonstrates how this can become so, although the Americans then had no idea of such a scenario: if they did it and this was why, it was simple foresight.)

Zia-ul-Haq’s vital support for the mujahidin was crucial in letting the mujahidin drive out the Soviets, thus inflicting on the previously invincible Soviets and crushing blow, one which may be credited to contributing greatly to the unraveling of the Soviet Union and fall of the Soviet Communist empire. They would have had good reasons to want Zia-ul-Haq dead; taking out America’s ambassador to Pakistan at the same time would have also served their purposes. (But then was it military intelligence or the KGB that orchestrated the explosion?)

Zia-ul-Haq was a threat to India not only because he was an Islamist and Islamizing general (both of which contribute to a very unfriendly attitude to the secular or Hindu state) but also because of his efforts behind the scenes to secure the technology to built a nuke. (Although the groundwork was laid by Zia-ul-Haq’s civilian predecessor, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, whom Zia executed, Zia was very instrumental in the nuke plan’s success and development. He saw it as “the Islamic bomb”, which many other Islamist and/or Muslim allies identified with and which led to their secret assistance to Pakistan’s nuke plan.) Perhaps they thought taking him out might stall the nuke plan, if not derail it, or would put a stop to the Islamization which was souring relations between Pakistan and India even more. Similar reasons and issues could determine why the Israelis would want to take Zia out.

Perhaps Afghan nationalists were upset with the constant encroachment of Pakistani or Pakistan-funded entities upon the sovereignty of Afghanistan, and they wanted no more of it and so sought to take out Zia. Perhaps Afghan Communists, smarting from the Soviets’ defeat and unable to do anything, sought to exact revenge by assassinating Zia.

No one knows.

Obviously, there is a whole plethora of theories (more often than not conspiracy theories) regarding who did it and why. And so such a state of affairs, which now exists to some extent with Benazir’s assassination, is nothing new to Pakistanis. (Indeed, such a state of affairs is not new regarding assassinations: consider the many theories and opinions regarding the culprits the motives thereof for the assassination attempts on Kennedy, John Paul II, Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan, and King Birendra of Nepal.) Whereas some assassination attempts, such as those on Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Reagan, Yitzhak Rabin are clear-cut with regard to culprits and motives (Hindu nationalists, Sikhs, Tamil nationalists, star-struck idiot, and Israeli far-right nationalist, respectively), others are not.