Technology — Page 5
Innovations and technology
118 facts
A large part of the Apollo missions code was written by women.
Teams of female programmers at MIT, led by Margaret Hamilton, developed the flight software that allowed the…
The first Apple logo featured Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree.
Designed by one of the founders, the complex illustration showed the scientist reading, with a poetic quote around…
The word CAPTCHA is actually a complex acronym.
It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, used to prevent bots from…
The barcode was inspired by Morse code drawn in the sand.
The inventors scribbled thin and thick lines on the beach to adapt the dots and dashes of Morse code into a format…
The first mobile phone call was made to the company's biggest rival.
In nineteen seventy-three, Martin Cooper of Motorola used the first mobile phone prototype to call Joel Engel, the…
The game Pong was not the first video game in history.
Although it popularised the industry in nineteen seventy-two, games like "Tennis for Two" from nineteen fifty-eight…
The Bluetooth logo is a combination of two Viking runes.
The symbol is actually the superposition of the initials of King Harald Bluetooth, written in the ancient Nordic…
Domain names on the internet were originally free.
In the early days of the web, DARPA and the NSF funded domain registration, and anyone could request an address…
The at symbol was chosen for email because it meant at the price of.
Ray Tomlinson chose the symbol in nineteen seventy-one because it was used in accounting to indicate prices and was…
The first digital camera was built by Kodak in 1975 and weighed over three kilos.
Engineer Steven Sasson created the prototype using parts from tape recorders and Fairchild's new digital sensor. The…
All the electrons circulating on the Internet together weigh approximately the same as a strawberry.
Physicist Russell Seitz calculated that the combined mass of the electrons moving in the global network is around 50…
By solving reCAPTCHA tests, millions of people unknowingly helped to digitise old books and newspapers.
Created in 2007 at Carnegie Mellon University, reCAPTCHA showed one known word and another that computers had failed…
The Java programming language was originally called Oak, after an oak tree.
In 1991 James Gosling of Sun Microsystems named the language after the oak tree outside his office window. Since…
The Ctrl+Alt+Delete shortcut was created in 1981 by an IBM engineer to restart the computer without switching it off.
David Bradley designed it for the programmers of the first IBM PC, picking three keys far apart so that nobody would…
Nokia started out in 1865 as a paper pulp mill in Finland.
The engineer Fredrik Idestam opened the mill by a river, and the name came from the town of Nokia, where it later…
Samsung was founded in 1938 as a small company selling dried fish, vegetables and noodles.
Lee Byung-chul opened the business in Daegu, Korea, with about 40 employees, exporting goods to China. The name means…
The first hashtag was proposed in 2007 by a Twitter user, not by the company itself.
Chris Messina suggested using the # symbol to group conversations, with the example #barcamp. Twitter thought the…
Junk email is called 'spam' because of a Monty Python sketch.
Spam is an American brand of canned meat from 1937. In a 1970 sketch set in a café where every dish contains Spam, a…
The first iPhone, from 2007, could not copy and paste text.
The feature only arrived in June 2009 with version 3.0 of the system. The first iPhone also had no app store, no…
Velcro was inspired by burdock burrs stuck to a dog's fur.
In 1941, after a walk with his dog, the Swiss engineer George de Mestral saw under a microscope that the burrs had…
Tetris was created in 1984 at a research centre in Moscow, in the Soviet Union.
Alexey Pajitnov worked at the Academy of Sciences and programmed the game on a computer with no graphics, using…
Super glue was discovered by accident in 1942, during a search for a clear plastic for gun sights.
Harry Coover, at Kodak, tested cyanoacrylates, but they stuck to everything and were set aside. In 1951 he came…
