Pointers as a basic concept are used in "indirect addressing" a function on most CPUs going back at least as the 6502. 

Commodore used the "kernal" on its VIC 20, C64, and C128 computers. a fixed set of address software could call that would then be redirected to the current code. They could then modify the OS without breaking existing software.

I think the 8080 and Z80 had indirect address too, but I am not certain and I don't remember it in the 8008. 

Who invented pointers?
in all my Apache servers I use hotlink protection because I hate the idea someone could stick my images/flash in their sites using my server bandwidth.

In order to make hotlink protection work, in my Apache .htaccess I simply use this:

#Hotlink protection (only for www.domain.it cause http://domain.it is being redirected)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.domain.it/.*$      [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.domain.it$      [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(wav|swf|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp|js)$ - [F,NC]


This works well, but I recently dicovered that when I ask for http://www.domain.com/somepage.htm/ (with final slash) the hotlink protection seems to be triggered and server stops page to download .(wav|swf|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp|js) files

Do you know how could I fix this in .htaccess???

Before today I even thought that the server should return an error if I enter as URL http://www.domain.com/somepage.htm/ (with final slash). But I saw it's normal because if you look for http://www.php.net/docs.php it returns the same page of http://www.php.net/docs.php/ (final slash).
Why is that, could you explain me a bit?!

Thanks
