Did You Know?
15 surprising facts about the tech you use every day.
The first computer bug was an actual bug, a moth trapped in Harvard's Mark II computer in 1947. Grace Hopper's team taped it into the logbook.
Bluetooth is named after Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson, a 10th-century Viking king who united warring Danish tribes, just like the protocol unites devices.
CAPTCHA stands for 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.' It was invented at Carnegie Mellon in 2003.
The first domain name ever registered was symbolics.com on March 15, 1985. It's still active today as a historical artifact.
Python was named after Monty Python's Flying Circus, not the snake. Creator Guido van Rossum was reading the show's scripts while coding.
The first 1GB hard drive, IBM's 3380 (1980), weighed 550 pounds, was the size of a refrigerator, and cost $40,000. Your phone has 128x that.
Email predates the World Wide Web by 18 years. Ray Tomlinson sent the first email in 1971 and chose the @ symbol to separate user from machine.
The word 'robot' comes from the Czech word 'robota' meaning 'forced labor.' It first appeared in Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R.
Nintendo started in 1889 as a playing card company. They made cards for 77 years before pivoting to electronic games in 1966.
The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed in 1873 not for speed, but to prevent mechanical typewriter jams by separating frequently paired letters.
Wi-Fi doesn't stand for 'Wireless Fidelity.' It's a meaningless brand name created by the marketing firm Interbrand in 1999.
The first webcam was invented at Cambridge University in 1991, to monitor a coffee pot so researchers wouldn't walk to an empty machine.
Dark mode is older than light mode. Every computer screen from 1948 to 1973 was light-on-dark because CRT tubes could only glow, not produce white backgrounds.
The word 'emoji' has nothing to do with 'emotion.' It's Japanese: 'e' (picture) + 'moji' (character). The English resemblance is pure coincidence.
Copy-paste inventor Larry Tesler's California license plate read 'NO MODES.' His personal website was nomodes.com. His Twitter bio: 'I invented copy-paste.'