Technology — Page 4
Innovations and technology
118 facts
The IBM Simon was the first smartphone in history.
The IBM Simon, launched in 1994, is considered the first smartphone in history because it combined phone, diary, fax…
The transistor was invented in 1947.
The transistor was invented in 1947 at Bell Labs by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley. They received…
Facebook was called TheFacebook at the beginning.
When it was launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and Harvard colleagues, the site was called TheFacebook. In 2005, the…
The world's smallest autonomous robots are smaller than a grain of salt.
Researchers at Penn and Michigan universities created programmable autonomous robots only 200 by 300 by 50…
Current artificial intelligence already possesses independent intellectual curiosity, similar to that of a child.
Experts, including Turing Award winner Robert Tarjan, state that current AI still lacks independent intellectual…
The first telephone installed in the White House was in 1879, during the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes.
The device was installed in the telegraph room and its number was simply one, as there were very few telephone…
The QR code was invented in 1994 by a Japanese company called Denso Wave to track automobile parts.
The need to encode more information than traditional barcodes allowed led to the development of this two-dimensional…
In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue computer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in an official six-game match.
This was the first time a computer defeated a human world champion under standard tournament conditions, marking a…
The first computer mouse, invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1964, was carved out of wood.
This primitive device, called an 'X-Y position indicator for a display system', had a single button and two metal…
The very first domain name ever registered on the internet was symbolics.com, created in March 1985.
This historic milestone on the World Wide Web was registered by Symbolics Computer Corporation, marking the beginning…
The first 1 GB hard drive weighed over 200 kilograms and was made by IBM.
The IBM 3380 model, released in 1980, was the size of two refrigerators and cost tens of thousands of dollars. It was…
GPS relies on Einstein's theory of relativity to stay accurate.
Since satellites move very fast and are in an area of weaker gravity, time passes differently for them compared to…
The total weight of all the gold ever mined in human history would fit into roughly three Olympic-sized swimming pools.
It is estimated that all mined gold would form a cube about twenty-two meters on each side, which corresponds to the…
The QWERTY keyboard was originally designed to prevent key jamming.
In early typewriters, adjacent keys used together would jam frequently. The QWERTY layout separated the most common…
The first mobile phone weighed almost a kilogram and cost the equivalent of several thousand euros.
The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, launched in 1983, weighed about 790 grams and measured 25 centimetres without the…
The first webcam in the world was created to monitor a coffee pot at the University of Cambridge.
In 1991, scientists at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory connected a camera to the local network so they would not…
The first computer bug was an actual real-life moth found trapped in a computer relay in 1947.
Admiral Grace Hopper and her team found a moth trapped in a relay of the Harvard Mark II computer. They taped the…
The first message sent over the internet was the word LOGIN, but the system crashed after the first two letters.
On October 29, 1969, a student attempted to send the word LOGIN from a computer at UCLA to another at the Stanford…
Nintendo was founded when the Ottoman Empire still existed.
Nintendo was founded in eighteen eighty-nine as a playing card company. The Ottoman Empire was only officially…
The password for US nuclear silos was eight zeros for twenty years.
To ensure rapid launch, the code for all bases was set to 00000000 from 1962 until the mid-eighties, against the…
The internet was originally created for military purposes.
ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, was developed by the US Department of Defense in the sixties to create a…
GPS depends on atomic clocks in satellites.
The precision of the global positioning system requires nanosecond synchronization, impossible without extremely…
The Apollo 11 computer was less powerful than a modern calculator.
The AGC had only a few kilobytes of memory and a tiny processing speed, but it was enough to take humans to the Moon…
About ninety percent of the world's currency exists only in digital format.
The vast majority of bank transactions and reserves are made electronically, with physical cash being a tiny fraction…
