According to The Hitchhiker's Guide, millions of years ago there was a race of hyperintelligent pandimensional beings who wanted to know about the meaning of life. To settle the issue they built a "stupendous super computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks had been connected up it had started from 'I think therefore I am' and got as far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off...
Deep Thought, the size of a small city, was a computer programmed to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of life, the Universe, and everything. After seven and a half million years, it came up with the result of 42; but the problem was that it didn't know the question itself (no one actually did), so it commissioned yet another super computer to calculate it.
It was this same computer that created the
Point of View gun, that exposes the target to the Point-of-View of whoever fired the gun.
No other information was given and doesn't really seem all that interesting, anyway