50 Fun Facts About Computer Hardware

Douglas Engelbart's first computer mouse, which rolled on two metal wheels, had a shell made of which material?

Wood formed the shell of the first prototype, which Bill English helped Engelbart build in 1964. The nickname mouse likely came from the cord, which looked like a tail.

Which outdated storage medium still appears as the save icon in many programs, long after computers stopped using it?

Floppy disk icons are a classic of skeuomorphic design, where an on-screen symbol copies a physical object. IBM made the first ones in 1971, a full 8 inches across.

The world's first webcam, set up at the University of Cambridge in 1991, kept watch on which everyday object?

A coffee pot in the Trojan Room was put on camera so researchers could check it was full before walking over. One of the machines seen on the feed later sold on eBay for £3,350.

Which term for the smallest controllable dot on a screen blends a slang word for pictures with the word 'element'?

Pixel combines 'pix', a slang shortening of pictures, with the first syllable of 'element', and first appeared in print in 1965. Voxel and texel were later built on the same pattern.

Which element, the second most abundant in Earth's crust after oxygen, is the base material of most computer chips?

Silicon makes up about 28% of Earth's crust, though chipmakers use only a highly purified fraction of it. The very first integrated circuit, built by Jack Kilby, relied on germanium instead.

Which keyboard layout, devised for 1870s typewriters, is named after the first six keys of its top letter row?

QWERTY was devised by Christopher Latham Sholes, a Wisconsin newspaper editor, and reached buyers on a typewriter sold by Remington from 1874.

Which Apple co-founder designed the Apple I computer and was the primary designer of the Apple II?

Steve Wozniak built the Apple I for his own use after the Altair 8800 impressed him at Homebrew Computer Club meetings. Selling it as a product was his friend Steve Jobs's idea.

Which precious metal is plated onto connector contacts inside a PC because it conducts well and resists corrosion?

Gold does not corrode, so a thin plated layer keeps contacts conducting for years. A nickel barrier usually sits beneath it, because copper would otherwise creep through and tarnish the surface.

Which keyboard key is named for what it did on typewriters, physically moving the type to print capitals?

Shift keys physically moved a typewriter's type so each key could print a second character. The first machine to have one was the Remington No. 2 of 1878, since the earlier No. 1 typed only capitals.

Which company marketed its 1999 GeForce 256 graphics chip as the world's first GPU?

Nvidia was founded in 1993 by three engineers who sketched out their plans at a Denny's diner in San Jose. A plaque now marks the corner booth where they sat.

Which main circuit board, also called a logic board, links a PC's processor, memory and expansion cards?

Motherboard is the everyday name, though Apple's technical documents say 'logic board' for machines from the Apple II to the Mac. Unlike a simple backplane, it carries major subsystems of its own.

In RAM, the working memory sold in sticks called DIMMs, what does the letter R stand for?

Random access means any item can be read or changed in almost the same time, wherever it sits in the memory. A tape, by contrast, takes longer the further away the item is.

Which connector, first specified in 2002, carries both video and sound to a monitor or TV over one cable?

HDMI was designed to be backward-compatible with DVI, so a simple adapter joins the two with no signal conversion or loss of picture quality.

Which tiny board, created to teach coding in schools, became the best-selling British computer of all time?

Raspberry Pi boards have sold in the tens of millions. The first batches in 2012 sold out almost immediately, with one distributor reporting over 100,000 pre-orders on day one.

Which common computer part counts as both an input device and an output device?

Touchscreen displays pair a touch panel for input with a visual display for output. The first finger-driven one was developed by Eric Johnson at Britain's Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern.

PC builders often clip a grounded strap to one wrist to protect chips from which invisible hazard?

Static electricity can damage some components with discharges as faint as 30 volts, in sparks that are neither seen nor heard. The harm sometimes shows up only after long use.

Which compound do PC builders spread between a processor and its cooler to fill tiny air gaps?

Thermal paste pushes out trapped air, which would otherwise act as insulation and keep heat in the chip. It adds no strength to the joint, so screws or clips still have to hold the cooler down.

The protective solder mask coating on a printed circuit board has traditionally been which colour?

Green is the traditional solder mask colour, though boards now come in many others. The coating's real job is to stop solder bridging neighbouring tracks and causing shorts.

Which company, started in a Palo Alto garage in 1939, settled the order of its founders' names with a coin toss?

Hewlett-Packard could just as easily have been Packard-Hewlett had the coin landed the other way. Its first big contract supplied audio oscillators for Walt Disney's film Fantasia.

Blu-ray discs, which hold far more data than DVDs, are named after the colour of what?

The laser in a Blu-ray drive is blue rather than red, and its shorter wavelength lets data be packed more densely than on a DVD.

Which Intel co-founder gives his name to the 'law' that the components on a chip double about every two years?

Gordon Moore first predicted in 1965 that components per chip would double every year, then slowed his forecast to every two years in 1975. It has held up well enough to be called a law.

Which tiny electronic switch, invented at Bell Labs in 1947, is the basic building block of modern processors?

Transistor pioneers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention. Their first working device was made from germanium.

ENIAC, the pioneering American computer completed in 1945, ran on about 18,000 of which fragile glass components?

Vacuum tubes burned out so often, several almost every day, that ENIAC sat broken about half the time. Special high-reliability versions did not arrive until 1948.

A monitor's refresh rate is counted in which unit, named after the German who proved electromagnetic waves exist?

Hertz, written Hz, means cycles per second, so a 144 Hz monitor shows a new image 144 times every second. Heinrich Hertz proved in the 1880s that the waves James Clerk Maxwell had predicted were real.

What do PC enthusiasts call running a processor faster than its rated speed, sometimes with liquid nitrogen cooling?

Overclocking can squeeze extra performance from a chip, but most manufacturers' warranties do not cover any damage it causes. Liquid nitrogen is reserved for record attempts, not everyday machines.

Which PC part, often sold with an '80 Plus' efficiency badge, turns wall-socket AC into low-voltage DC?

Power supply unit makers earn the voluntary 80 Plus badge, launched in 2004, by proving that more than 80% of the energy drawn is delivered to the PC at several load levels.

Which screen technology uses organic compounds that glow when powered, so it needs no backlight?

OLED panels emit their own light when current flows, while an LCD merely changes how light from its backlight passes through. They now appear in TVs, monitors, phones and handheld consoles.

Which laptop line, created by IBM and later sold to Lenovo, is known for the red pointing nub in its keyboard?

ThinkPad laptops were for many years the only ones certified for use on the International Space Station. IBM sold its PC business, the line included, to China's Lenovo in 2005.

Which connector, introduced in 2014 with 24 pins, was designed so it can be plugged in either way up?

USB-C plugs are reversible, so there is no wrong way up. The connector was designed to supersede every earlier USB plug, all of which were designated legacy in 2014.

Which rechargeable battery type, whose developers won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, powers most laptops?

Lithium-ion cells first went on sale in 1991, six years after Akira Yoshino built the first prototype. He went on to share the Nobel Prize with two other pioneers of the technology.

Intel named which 1993 processor after the Greek for 'five' once a judge ruled that '386' could not be trademarked?

Pentium blends the Greek 'pente' with a Latin ending, because the chip would otherwise have been called the 80586. Intel had lost its trademark fight over the name '386' in 1991.

Which brand of AMD processors, first delivered in 2017, succeeded the company's FX line?

Ryzen chips arrived with up to eight cores and did 52% more work per clock cycle than AMD's previous processors. Zen was a clean-sheet design that replaced the long-standing Bulldozer line.

Which chip architecture, begun in 1983 by Britain's Acorn Computers, has become the most widely used in the world?

ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine. Its chips are cheap, run cool and use little energy, which suits phones and tablets, and more than 230 billion have been produced.

Intel's 4004 of 1971, the first commercial microprocessor, was designed for a Japanese maker of which product?

Calculators made by Busicom were the reason Intel built the 4004: the Japanese firm had asked for a set of seven chips in 1969. The first working chip went into its 141-PF printing model in March 1971.

What term describes computer memory, such as RAM, that loses its contents as soon as the power is cut?

Volatile memory needs constant power to hold its data, which is why unsaved work vanishes in a blackout. Storage such as flash and hard disks keeps its contents with the power off.

Which firmware, whose name Gary Kildall coined for his 1975 CP/M system, tests a PC's hardware at start-up?

BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System, and once its checks pass it hands over to a boot loader. Kildall used the name for the machine-specific part of CP/M.

Which coin cell, whose code spells out its diameter and height, keeps a desktop PC's clock running?

CR2032 cells are 20 mm across and 3.2 mm tall, just as the code says. They are not rechargeable, and when one runs flat the PC's firmware settings reset to their defaults.

Which Japanese firm developed bubble-jet printing after a hot soldering iron made an ink-filled syringe squirt?

Canon engineer Ichiro Endo's team had been trying a different method in 1977 when the accident showed that heat alone could fire ink from a nozzle. The company's first bubble-jet printer arrived in 1985.

The smallest movement a computer mouse can detect is measured in a unit named after which Disney character?

Mickey is the unit, and mouse software reports motion as counts of horizontal and vertical mickeys. Sensitivity is usually quoted in mickeys per inch.

Which Taiwanese PC hardware maker took its name from part of the name of the winged horse of Greek myth?

Asus says it kept only the last four letters of Pegasus so that its name would sit high in alphabetical listings.

Which layout standard for desktop PC cases and boards did Intel release in 1995?

ATX stands for Advanced Technology Extended, and it was the first major change to desktop case and board design in many years. Smaller boards such as microATX still share its mounting points.

IBM's 1973 hard drive, planned with two 30 MB spindles, was nicknamed after which make of rifle?

Winchester stuck because the famous 30-30 rifle shared the planned drive's numbers. In some non-English-speaking countries the word is still used for any hard disk.

Before chips took over in the 1970s, computer memory was woven by hand from tiny rings of which material?

Ferrite rings, called cores, were strung on wires almost entirely by hand, despite repeated efforts to automate the job. Copying a computer's whole main memory to a file is still called a 'core dump'.

Which low-cost 1975 processor, or variants of it, powered the Apple II, the Atari 2600 and the Nintendo NES?

MOS 6502 chips first sold for less than one-sixth the price of rivals from larger companies, making them by far the cheapest microprocessor on the market.

Which standards body, formed in 1989 to promote Super VGA, gives its name to the screw-hole mounts on monitors?

VESA began as an NEC-led push for a successor to IBM's VGA display standard. Its original mount was a 100 mm square of four screw holes, and its other standards include DisplayPort.

In a RAID 1 storage array, which technique keeps an exact copy of the same data on two or more disks?

Mirroring gives a RAID 1 array no extra space: it can only be as big as its smallest member disk. The term RAID was coined at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987.

Which Singapore company's Sound Blaster cards were the de facto standard for PC audio until Windows 95?

Creative Technology's cards lost their grip only when Windows 95 standardised how programs talk to audio hardware, so games no longer needed Sound Blaster compatibility.

The trackball in the Royal Canadian Navy's 1950s DATAR system used which sporting item as its roller?

A bowling ball of the standard Canadian five-pin kind served as the roller, with four discs picking up its motion, two for each direction.

Which 1982 laptop, the first portable with a folding clamshell case, was used by NASA aboard the Space Shuttle?

Grid Compass machines had a magnesium-alloy case whose screen folded flat over the keyboard. Some historians call the original model the first true laptop.

Which engineer, called the father of supercomputing, designed a 1976 machine shaped like a C and ringed by benches?

Seymour Cray's Cray-1 went first to Los Alamos National Laboratory, which won a bidding war for it. The benches around its cabinet hid the cooling system.