SOLIHULL, United Kingdom, Sept. 28, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Land Rover has revealed the New Discovery seven-seat SUV by breaking a Guinness World Record for the largest LEGO structure ever built. /NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/4d374d62-1f31-4659-ae79-cd92580eb74c Long-term Land Rover Discovery owners Bear Grylls, Sir Ben Ainslie and Zara Phillips took part in the dynamic live reveal of Land Rover’s most versatile model around a 13-metre high LEGO version of London’s Tower Bridge. The New Discovery embodies Land Rover’s drive to go Above and Beyond, combining British desirability with an unstoppable spirit of adventure. It is highly desirable with unrivalled capability and technology like no other. Gerry McGovern, Land Rover’s Chief Design Officer, said: “New Discovery redefines the large SUV. Land Rover’s design and engineering teams have revolutionised the Discovery DNA to create a highly desirable, extremely versatile and hugely capable premium SUV.” Everyday ingenuity has been at the heart of the Discovery for the last 27 years, with more than 1.2 million customers to date.
The new Discovery is for the digital age. Ingenious technology keeps your family safe, connected and confident on all surfaces, all terrains and in all weathers to ensure your destination is reached. The fifth-generation model benefits from Land Rover’s strong, safe and light full-size SUV architecture, delivering comfort and adaptability like no other. The reveal set was made from 5,805,846 individual LEGO bricks, breaking the previous Guinness World Record by 470,646 pieces. Laid end to end, the bricks would stretch for almost 200 miles, or from Tower Bridge in London to Paris. Led by the UK’s only LEGO Certified Professional, Duncan Titmarsh, it took five months for expert LEGO Master Builders in the UK to construct the incredible Tower Bridge structure. It was erected in the grounds of Packington Hall, Warwickshire, UK – close to Land Rover’s Solihull plant, where New Discovery will be produced. As part of the dramatic reveal sequence, British adventurer Bear Grylls appeared in typically exciting fashion by abseiling from the top of the huge Tower Bridge installation, through the open drawbridge and onto the stage beside the New Discovery.
The finale was Land Rover BAR Team Principal Sir Ben Ainslie driving his sailing team through 900mm-deep water under the bridge – demonstrating the unrivalled capability and versatility of Land Rover’s new SUV. Sir Ben towed a LEGO replica of the Land Rover BAR boat, a 186,500-brick meticulous model of the boat that will challenge for next year’s America’s Cup. The model of Tower Bridge was flanked by two LEGO ‘Discovery Zones’ celebrating 27 years of Land Rover Discovery heritage. An Equestrian Zone, hosted by accomplished rider Zara Phillips, featured a typically British picnic scene made entirely from LEGO bricks. The Bear Grylls Adventure Zone included a LEGO fire and boulders to represent a scene from a typical mountain exploration. New Discovery represents the next step in Land Rover’s journey of transformation from cogs to code and is designed, engineered and manufactured with the help of some of the 1,300 talented young engineers currently on the company’s leading training programmes.
Jaguar Land Rover is one of UK's leading recruiter of graduates and apprentices: 3,000 have joined in the past six years and 400 new recruits have just started on the 2016 intake. Bear Grylls said: “I have developed a powerful bond with Land Rover vehicles over the years and to me they embody that spirit of adventure coupled with a rugged reliability that also serves the needs of a young family. The Land Rover Discovery is invaluable on expeditions, whether filming in deserts, jungles or mountains, yet it’s still the perfect vehicle for the family's everyday use. It's a proud moment to be here with Land Rover revealing the New Discovery to the world.” Emma Owen, LEGO UK and Ireland Spokeswoman, said: “We are thrilled that Jaguar Land Rover has used LEGO bricks to add some Guinness World Record-breaking creativity to the launch of the latest Discovery. This is an epic, outstanding build that absolutely captures the imagination in a way we haven't seen before.
With LEGO bricks and some imagination you really can build anything!” The photo is also available via AP PhotoExpress.Microsoft was founded on April 4th, 1975. Today the company, reputedly the third most valuable in the world, turns 40. Celebrations were in order at Redmond to mark the occasion of the company's 40th anniversary with all three of Microsoft chiefs, co-founder Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer who succeeded him as CEO 2000 and Satya Nadella who took over the reins in February 2014, being present. To signal the event to Microsoft's other employees - there are now quarter of a million of them - Bill Gates sent an email. This wasn't intended for global publication but was leaked via Twitter. Tomorrow is a special day: Microsoft's 40th anniversary. Early on, Paul Allen and I set the goal of a computer on every desk and in every home. It was a bold idea and a lot of people thought we were out of our minds to imagine it was possible. It is amazing to think about how far computing has come since then, and we can all be proud of the role Microsoft played in that revolution.
The email then turns to contemplate the future but the opportunity to review the history is too good to miss. Microsoft was founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico on April 4, 1975 by Bill Gates, then 19, and Paul Allen, who was 22. It was Allen who came up with the company name from the combination of the words microprocessor and software. In fact Microsoft was the second company founded by Gates and Allen. The pair of them had met in the computer room of the school they both attended, Lakeside School in Seattle and they soon started to make money from their hobby. They were paid to debug the operating system of the local PDP-10 timeshare, to computerize the school timetabling and they built a microprocessor based machine to work out traffic census data and offered a data-processing service to their local authorities and this led to their first company, Traf-o-data. Their entrepreneurial experience meant that Gates and Allen were quick to seize the opportunity that presented itself - the announcement of the Altair on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Computing.
Not only did they realize that this was the future they acted on the instinct. Bill phoned Ed Roberts whose Albuquerque-based company Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) produced the Altair kits and claimed to already have a version of BASIC, the language written by for the 8080 microprocessor and that he was ready to do business. The only part of the claim that was true was the part about being ready to do business. To produce the Basic, Paul Allen first had to write an 8080 simulator for the college PDP-10 - using a book bought from the corner bookshop, written by Adam Osborne, that gave the full 8080 instruction set! Bill Gates coded the interpreter and as he had already written a Basic interpreter for the PDP-10 he didn't have to look up the theory and was free to concentrate on the difficult task of squeezing the language into 4KBytes with enough space left over to run a program. The Altair was followed by a rash of other home microcomputers but MITS wasn't keen to license BASIC to its competitors and Gates became very angry at the way his beloved Basic was being pirated by all and sundry.
In the end most of Microsoft's early revenues came not from selling individual copies of Basic to enthusiasts but from making custom ROMs for the huge number of home computers that were being produced. ROMs are much more difficult to pirate and so a steady flow of cash became available and Microsoft just grew and grew. It moved to a new home in Bellvue Washington in 1979. Microsoft's success was largely due to choosing the right projects and not trying to do everything itself. It entered the operating system business with Xenix, its own version of Unix but rather than do the conversion in-house it subcontracted to SCO, a small west coast firm. When the Apple II became a success and there was little code for its 6502 processor Microsoft designed a plug-in Z80 card for it and licensed CP/M. Microsoft's contract to write MS-DOS was probably the single most important event in turning the small company of the late 70s into the massive behemoth it has now become. IBM, then still thought of as International Business machines, was the old, biggest and most profitable of all the computer companies, but it was incapable of moving at the fast pace required to join in the microcomputer revolution.
Instead it set up a separate business unit which decided in turn to outsource the software as well as the hardware for the emerging IBM PC, codenamed Project Chess When asked to write the PCDOS operating system, Microsoft did even more outsourcing. It bought outright an operating system from Seattle Computer Products that would save a year in development time. Although IBM was under the impression that it had sole rights to PCDOS, in fact Microsoft retained the right to sell a version called MS-DOS At the very start there was a perception that MS-DOS was some how not quite PCDOS - but this soon faded as cheap PC clones became available all running MS-DOS. And so it was that MS-DOS came to dominate in the clone marketing wars of the early 80's. It was, however, Windows that would become Microsoft's flagship operating system and again the story could have turned out differently. IBM attempted to gain a stranglehold on the market by reinventing the PC but this time with proprietary hardware it also wanted some proprietary software, OS/2, but strangely it still asked Microsoft to develop it in partnership.
IBM had a bigger share and its OS/2 was going to be different from Microsoft’s OS/2. As things turned out both the PS/2 and OS/2 failed and Microsoft’s Windows became the number one operating system. Gates claims to have tried to interest IBM in Windows but his attempts fell on deaf ears. “In May 1990, the last weeks before the release of Windows 3.0, we tried to reach an agreement with IBM for it to license Windows to use on its own personal computers. We told IBM that we thought that although OS/2 would work over time, for the moment Windows was going to be a success and OS/2 would find its niche slowly.” Although the split with IBM caused them to produce their own version of OS/2 to compete with Windows, Microsoft made money on every copy of OS/2 IBM sold! When OS/2 had to be Windows compatible to stand a chance of survival Microsoft moved the goal posts by releasing Windows 3.1 and removing real mode support. MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 are ingrained in the memory of anyone who used a desktop PC in the 20th century.