Fun and Interesting Facts about Technology – Part 2

Samsung was founded in 1938 as a grocery store while Apple was founded in 1976.

It was invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1964. The mouse consisted of a single or pair of wheels to translate motion into movement on a screen. Engelbart patented the mouse as the ‘X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System’.

It was created as an experiment to see how it could spread between computer. It had no malicious intent other than to display the message ‘I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!‘.

With each new computer infected, Creeper would try to remove itself from the previous host.

No one really knew what the internet was capable back then. It was in 1995 that a company called Network Solutions was granted the rights to charge people for domain names. Registration costs began at $100 per two years.

It was named ‘The Water Integrator’ and it was used to solve partial differential equations. Adjusting taps and plugs altered the flow of water and the result was measured via level of water in certain tubes.

The Water Integrator was an early analog computer built in the Soviet Union in 1936 by Vladimir Sergeevich Lukyanov. It functioned by careful manipulation of water through a room full of interconnected pipes and pumps. The water level in various chambers (with precision to fractions of a millimetre) represented stored numbers, and the rate of flow between them represented mathematical operations. This machine was capable of solving inhomogeneous differential equations.

These computers are designed without internet, video, or music capabilities.

Some Amish businesses have seen a need for word processing power, as well as access to useful organisational tools such as spreadsheets – which is how these computer were introduced.

When on the home screen, you would eventually hear transmissions from the Apollo missions.

It was invented in 1787 by Levi Hutchins and it only rang at 4am. It wasn’t until 1847 that a French inventor patented the first adjustable alarm clock.

Topping the charts at 9.9 billion views, followed by ‘Despacito’ at 7.6 billion views.

Statistics updated as of January 4th, 2022.

Yahoo! stands for ‘Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle’.

In July 1994, Cadabra Inc. was launched. A few months later, they rebranded to be Amazon.

‘Cadabra’ was intended as a reference to the word ‘abracadabra’. Jeff Bezos’ lawyer pointed out that the reference was too obscure and people sometimes heard ‘Cadaver’ instead.

In 2006, it sold at a charity auction for £1.5m in Qatar.

Due to a server migration that accidentally corrupted the files, all data uploaded between 2003 and 2015 was wiped.

It is still available to view today at info.cern.ch. 

It was a photo of a comedy band names ‘Les Horribles Cernettes’. The band was formed by employees at CERN.

It stands for: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

123456, 123456789, qwerty, password, 12345, are among the top 5 passwords.

See the full list, and how to make a stronger password, in our Worst Passwords of 2024 post.

As of August 2021, 18.77 million bitcoins have been mined.

Bill Gates originally wanted Windows to be call ‘Interface Manager’, however, the name Windows prevailed shortly after.

In 2016, the number of websites almost doubled – from 900 million to 1.7 billion.

That equates to more than 66 thousand orders per hour.

There are over 290 million daily active users.

There are roughly 2.89 billion monthly active users as of Q2 2021.

China has the most active internet users in the world. There are more than 854 million internet users in China. followed by India with 560 million.

There are over 4 billion email users worldwide. It is reported that the average office worker receives 120 emails per day.

Although most of the design was drawn by hand, the remainder was designed on a Mac.

It marked the first time that the editors selected a non-human recipient for the award.

It was uploaded on April 24, 2005 by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim.

The keyword ‘Google’ is the most popular search query on Bing, with a search volume of almost 41 million per month.

It commenced in 1988 to raise awareness about cyber security issues and is celebrated each year.

Read our tips for Computer Security Day, or see how our Managed Cyber Security services protect businesses all year round.