Technology — Page 8
Innovations and technology
188 facts
The first message sent over the internet was just the word "LO".
The original message was supposed to be "LOGIN", but the ARPANET system crashed after the transmission of the first…
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 first website in history is still online and can be visited.
Created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in nineteen ninety-one, the page explained what the World Wide Web was and is…
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 YouTube video was recorded at a zoo.
Titled "Me at the zoo", it was uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim in two thousand and five, showing him standing in…
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 GPS system would not work without Einstein's theory of relativity.
Because GPS satellites move fast and are in weaker gravity, their atomic clocks gain about thirty-eight microseconds…
The "Save" icon on computers is a floppy disk that held one point four megabytes.
Younger generations use this icon without knowing what it is, but the three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk, which was…
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 computer mouse was made of wood and had two metal wheels.
It was invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1964. The wooden box contained the electronic components and the button, but…
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…
The first webcam in history was created to monitor a coffee pot at the University of Cambridge.
In 1991, researchers at the Cambridge computing laboratory installed a camera that took three pictures per minute of…
The flight code for the Apollo 11 mission was written by a team led by a woman, Margaret Hamilton.
Margaret Hamilton led the MIT software engineering team responsible for developing the onboard computer programs. Her…
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…
The first computer mouse prototype was made of wood.
Invented by Douglas Engelbart in nineteen sixty-four, the device consisted of a wooden shell with two metal wheels…
The first one gigabyte hard drive weighed over two hundred and fifty kilograms.
Released by IBM in nineteen eighty, the three thirty model was the size of a refrigerator and had to be installed in…
The GPS system requires Einstein's theory of relativity to work.
Because satellites move very fast and are further from the Earth's centre of gravity, their atomic clocks tick at a…