Technology — Page 7
Innovations and technology
188 facts
The world's first computer mouse was made of wood.
It was invented by Douglas Engelbart in nineteen sixty-four. The wooden box contained two metal wheels that…
About ninety percent of the world's currency exists only as digital data on servers.
Physical cash in circulation is only a tiny fraction of global wealth. The vast majority of transactions and savings…
The first recorded computer bug was an actual moth stuck in a relay.
In nineteen forty-seven, Grace Hopper and her team found the insect in the Harvard Mark II. They taped it into the…
The world's first webcam was invented to monitor a coffee pot.
Scientists at Cambridge University were tired of walking to the breakroom only to find the coffee pot empty. They set…
The original Apple logo featured Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree.
Designed by Ronald Wayne, the complex nineteen seventy-six logo showed Newton reading, with a poem on the border. It…
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 first one-gigabyte hard drive weighed over two hundred and fifty kilograms.
Launched by IBM in nineteen eighty, the model thirty-three eighty was the size of a refrigerator and required complex…
The first recorded computer bug was an actual insect.
In 1947, Harvard engineers found a moth trapped in a relay of the Mark II computer, coining the term debugging.
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 first webcam was invented to watch a coffee pot.
Scientists at Cambridge University created the system in 1991 so they could see if the breakroom coffee pot was full…
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…
The first electronic computer weighed thirty tons.
The ENIAC, built in 1945, occupied an entire room and used eighteen thousand vacuum tubes to perform calculations.
GPS depends on atomic clocks in satellites.
The precision of the global positioning system requires nanosecond synchronization, impossible without extremely…
The World Wide Web was invented at CERN.
Tim Berners-Lee created the web in 1989 to facilitate information sharing among scientists at the European…
The first computer password was created in 1961.
MIT's CTSS system was the first to implement passwords to protect user accounts on the same computer.
The first one-gigabyte hard drive weighed over two hundred kilos.
Released by IBM in 1980, the 3380 model was the size of a refrigerator and required special equipment just to be…
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…
The first recorded computer bug was caused by an actual bug.
In nineteen forty-seven, a moth got stuck in a relay of the Harvard Mark II computer, causing a malfunction.
The first domain name registered on the internet was symbolics.com.
It was registered in nineteen eighty-five by a computer company in Massachusetts, marking the beginning of the domain…
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…
The first digital camera weighed almost five kilograms.
Created by Steven Sasson in nineteen seventy-five, it used cassettes to store images and took over twenty seconds to…
Bluetooth was named after an ancient Viking king.
Harald Bluetooth united disjointed Scandinavian tribes in the tenth century, just as the technology was created to…
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…