Greetings — here are exciting and surprising facts about technology, from early machines to modern and future tech. Read on for historical milestones, company trivia, internet stats, and oddities.
1. Charles Babbage is known as the “father of the computer” for designing the Analytical Engine.
2. Babbage’s Analytical Engine in the 19th century inspired modern computing concepts.
3. The first electronic computer ENIAC weighed about 27 tons and occupied roughly 1,800 square feet.
4. Doug Engelbart developed the first computer mouse around 1964; the early model was made of wood.
5. The trackball was invented in 1952 by Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff.
6. Gary Starkweather invented the laser printer at Xerox in 1969.
7. Konrad Zuse created the first programmable computer, the Z1, in 1936.
8. Personal computers in their modern form have been produced since the 1980s.
9. The first one-gigabyte disk drive (circa 1980) weighed about 550 pounds (≈250 kg).
10. Computers use microchips that enable extremely fast calculations.
11. Many computers include fans to cool components; overheating can damage hardware.
12. Over 6,000 new computer viruses are created each month.
13. The average annual salary for a San Francisco Apple employee has been reported around $125,000.
14. In 2012 Apple sold roughly 340,000 iPhones per day — about four per second.
15. Apple’s iPad Retina displays have been manufactured by Samsung.
16. Apple’s revenue has been reported to reach hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute during peak periods.
17. An early Apple co-founder sold 10% of his shares for $800; those shares later became worth billions.
18. iPhone sales have at times generated more revenue than all Microsoft products combined.
19. The iPod idea was initially pitched to Philips and RealNetworks, who declined.
20. Using iTunes requires agreeing to Apple’s terms and licensing conditions.
21. About one in three of Apple’s executives or senior engineers has been reported as Indian in some periods.
22. An iPhone contains small amounts of precious metals: traces of gold, silver, and platinum.
23. More people own a mobile phone than a toothbrush in some global comparisons; mobile penetration is very high.
24. Ninety percent of text messages are read within three minutes of delivery.
25. HTC released the first Android smartphone on October 22, 2008.
26. As CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella became one of the most prominent Indian-born technology executives.
27. Microsoft hosts thousands of patents and employs many patent-holding researchers.
28. Microsoft did not have a public website until after acquiring or commissioning web services and resources in the early 1990s.
29. The first floppy disk (1970s) had a storage capacity of about 80 KB.
30. The earliest USB flash drive prototypes appeared in 1999 and early market products in 2000 with about 8 MB capacity.
31. Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple in 1997, helping Apple avoid bankruptcy.
32. Microsoft developed an early smartwatch concept in 1994 with Timex.
33. Large populations in some countries still have little or no internet access; millions have never used the web.
34. A large portion of web traffic is generated by bots and automated systems rather than humans.
35. the world’s first website is still online; it is primarily text and links.
36. If one could sum time spent online into monetary value, global online activity represents trillions of dollars in economic value.
37. The Internet (network infrastructure) and the World Wide Web (information service) are distinct systems.
38. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, was knighted for his contributions.
39. The first picture uploaded to the Web was of the CERN parody pop group Les Horribles Cernettes.
40. eBay sees millions in transactions per minute, adding up to enormous yearly commerce.
41. Domain names registered before mid-1995 were often free; prime domain names can now be worth millions.
42. Symbolics.com is the oldest registered domain still in existence; it was registered on March 15, 1985.
43. Stolen credit card data is traded cheaply on criminal marketplaces including parts of the deep web.
44. In the U.S., many internet users value online communication more than voice calls.
45. Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
46. In 1956, storing 5 MB of data required a ton of physical memory hardware.
47. The QWERTY keyboard layout was originally designed to slow typists enough to reduce mechanical jams.
48. A large share of global money exists in digital rather than physical form.
49. A single Google search produces a small amount of CO2; aggregated searches have measurable energy use.
50. Spam email response rates are extremely low — about one response per 10 million messages for some campaigns.
51. Email existed before the World Wide Web but became widely popular with the Web’s growth.
52. Intel’s first commercially significant microprocessor was the 4004.
53. Seagate released an early hard disk drive in 1979 with about 5 MB storage.
54. The first widely publicized computer virus was created by the Alvi brothers (reported in some sources).
55. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was among the first companies to register domain names.
56. The Ctrl+Alt+Delete shortcut was written by David Bradley.
57. “The Dirty Dozen” was a nickname sometimes used for the IBM PC engineering team (various sources).
58. Hewlett-Packard (HP) was founded in a Palo Alto garage in 1939.
59. The Micral N (1972) was an early microcomputer using the Intel 8008 processor.
60. Major software companies include Microsoft, Adobe, SAP, and CA Technologies.
61. Yahoo’s original URL pointed to an academic Stanford address in its earliest days.
62. Yahoo has had more than a billion monthly users at peak times.
63. On April 1, 2005, NASA made an April Fools’ joke about discovering water on Mars.
64. Radio took about 38 years to reach 50 million users.
65. Television took about 13 years to reach 50 million users.
66. The iPod reached 50 million users in about three years.
67. Early photographic exposures required subjects to sit for many hours to capture an image.
68. Dentist Alfred Southwick developed the electric chair as a method of execution.
69. The PNG image format’s creators considered naming it “ping.”
70. Skype has been restricted or blocked at times in some countries, including parts of China.
71. By 2012, many parents had named babies “Siri” after Apple’s virtual assistant.
72. Floppy disks were once a primary means to transfer data before CDs, DVDs, and flash drives.
73. The first floppy disk’s approximate capacity was 75–80 KB.
74. Early USB flash drives sold around 2000 had capacities as low as 8 MB.
75. Tech companies often pilot products in New Zealand because the market is small, English-speaking, and representative.
76. In Japan, many phones are water-resistant because people use phones in bathrooms and wet environments.
77. Companies like Facebook run bug bounty programs that pay researchers for reporting security flaws.
78. November 30 is observed by some as Computer Security Day.
79. The first banner ads appeared on the web around 1994.
80. New domain registrations occur at rates of hundreds of thousands per month worldwide.
81. A typical 21-year-old today may have spent thousands of hours gaming and using mobile devices.
82. About two-thirds of American internet users have made online purchases.
83. Every minute, approximately 10 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.
84. Konrad Zuse’s Z2 (1939) was among the first electro-mechanical programmable computers.
85. Google’s global energy use is massive — on the order of billions of kilowatt-hours per year — and the company invests in renewable energy.
86. The inauguration of U.S. President Bill Clinton in January 1997 was among the first major webcasts.
87. Early computer games released in the U.S. included Asteroids and Lunar Lander in 1980.
88. Around 4.2 billion people use the internet; Asia accounts for about 2 billion of those users.
89. China has established many rehabilitation centers and camps addressing severe internet addiction.
90. Tens of thousands of websites are hacked daily worldwide.
91. The first webcam at Cambridge University monitored a coffee pot to avoid wasted trips to an empty pot.
92. The web sends hundreds of millions of emails per minute; a large percentage of email traffic is spam.
93. Jack Dorsey posted Twitter’s first tweet on March 21, 2006. The first YouTube video, “Me at the zoo,” was uploaded April 23, 2005 by Jawed Karim.
94. Analysts predicted tens of billions of devices would be connected to the Internet by 2020 (IoT growth).
95. The portion of the Internet indexed by search engines is called the Surface Web; the rest is often called the Deep Web.
96. The Deep Web and some dark web sites are accessed using special tools like Tor rather than standard browsers.
97. In 2010, Finland became one of the first countries to grant internet access legal recognition as a right.
98. Facebook reached a scale where roughly half of internet users were on the platform in some regions.
99. Every minute, tens of hours of new video content are uploaded to YouTube alone, requiring massive storage.
100. Tim Berners-Lee designed the first web browser in 1990; its early names included WorldWideWeb and later Nexus.
101. Microsoft Excel was among Microsoft’s earliest applications; early versions were called Multiplan and later Excel.
102. The first version of Microsoft Excel was developed for the Apple Macintosh, not MS-DOS.
103. By the time Microsoft released Windows 2.0 in 1987, early Mac and app ecosystems had already evolved.
104. Microsoft released the first Microsoft Office suite in October 1990, bundling Word 1.1, Excel 2.0, and PowerPoint 2.0.
105. Email marketing originated in 1978 when Gary Thuerk of DEC sent a mass message via ARPANET, reportedly generating significant sales.
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