100 Fun Facts About Computer History

Which 2016 film follows Black women who worked as 'human computers' at NASA during the Space Race?

Hidden Figures follows NASA's human computers, a reminder that for centuries before machines took the name, a 'computer' was a person who calculated.

Which animal is Tux, the official mascot of the Linux kernel, drawn by Larry Ewing in 1996?

A penguin was Linus Torvalds' own choice, and he said a small, timid penguin had once bitten him on a visit to Canberra.

The 1975 Altair 8800 hobby computer reportedly took its name from a destination in which TV series?

Star Trek, in editor Les Solomon's telling, supplied the name: his daughter suggested Altair because that was where the Enterprise was headed.

On which symbolic date in 1996 did the webmail service Hotmail launch?

4 July, American Independence Day, was picked because the founders saw free email you could read from anywhere as a kind of independence.

What kind of gadget was the first BlackBerry, launched by Research In Motion in 1999?

A two-way pager was the first BlackBerry, and its always-on email made it an enterprise device long before RIM courted consumers.

Whose 1945 'First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC' gave the stored-program design its familiar name?

John von Neumann's name stuck to the design because the draft Herman Goldstine circulated credited only him, leaving out ENIAC engineers Eckert and Mauchly.

Which electronics chain owned by Tandy sold its 1977 home computer?

Radio Shack reportedly built just 3,500 at first, planning to use any unsold ones for store bookkeeping, but the TRS-80 far outsold that.

Douglas Engelbart's first mouse, patented with two wheels in 1970, had a shell made of what?

Wood housed that first mouse, and in the team's speed tests against rivals such as a joystick and a knee control, the mouse won.

Which MIT engineer, who led Apollo's on-board flight software, says she began calling her field 'software engineering'?

Margaret Hamilton designed priority displays that let the software interrupt astronauts with warnings, as it did during the Apollo 11 landing.

Blaise Pascal built his 1642 calculator to ease which job held by his father Étienne in Rouen?

Tax supervisor was Étienne Pascal's post, and the laborious arithmetic it demanded drove his teenage son to design a machine that added and subtracted directly, with gears handling the carries.

Which organiser of the 1956 Dartmouth workshop that named artificial intelligence went on to create Lisp?

John McCarthy's proposal rested on the conjecture that every feature of intelligence could in principle be described precisely enough for a machine to copy it.

Which country rolled out Minitel, a pre-web online service for shopping and chat, in 1982?

France's Minitel put banking, travel bookings and the phone directory online for millions in the 1980s, and it was only switched off in 2012.

Which DEC founder declared in 1977 'no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home'?

Ken Olsen admitted saying it but said the line was taken out of context: he meant computers that run a household, not personal computers.

Which university became the first node of the ARPANET, the internet's forerunner, in 1969?

UCLA sent the first message, to SRI, but the host crashed after 'l' and 'o', so the first word online was 'lo'.

Which British maker of the BBC Micro started the ARM processor project in 1983?

Acorn chose to design its own processor after a 1983 visit showed that a tiny firm was updating the 6502 chip, and ARM was spun off in 1990.

PARC engineer Gary Starkweather invented which office machine before turning to colour management?

The laser printer's first working model was built by Starkweather at PARC in 1971, and the machine went on to become ubiquitous in offices.

Hollerith's punched cards were partly inspired by railway conductors who marked tickets with what?

Punch photographs let a conductor punch out a passenger's description — light hair, dark eyes, large nose — so a ticket could not be resold, and Hollerith said he simply made a punch photograph of each person.

Mike Sendall, Tim Berners-Lee's manager, gave what three-word verdict on his 1989 web proposal?

'Vague, but exciting' was enough to let Berners-Lee carry on, and Robert Cailliau, who had independently proposed a hypertext system at CERN, joined him to get the web off the ground.

Which 1981 workstation was the first commercial computer sold with icons, folders and a desktop?

The Xerox Star's windows, mouse and icons set it apart in 1981, and other computers soon copied those features, which are now standard.

Which after-the-fact expansion did Commodore give the letters of its 1977 PET computer?

Personal Electronic Transactor was the official reading, and the PET was born after Commodore bought chipmaker MOS Technology, whose engineer Chuck Peddle pushed it into computers.

The 1996 PalmPilot made users learn which single-stroke shorthand alphabet for pen input?

Graffiti gave each letter a simplified glyph drawn in a dedicated input zone, and a patent suit over its resemblance to PARC's Unistrokes pushed Palm to release Graffiti 2 in 2003.

The 1982 GRiD Compass, the first portable with a clamshell design, famously flew aboard what?

The Space Shuttle carried the Compass in the early 1980s because it was powerful, light and compact, and its folding screen leads some historians to call it the first true laptop.

At which university did six women do ENIAC's hands-on programming in 1945–46, setting its switches and cables?

The University of Pennsylvania drew ENIAC's six programmers from women doing ballistics sums by hand, yet their work was long left out of official histories.

The 1948 Manchester Baby, the first stored-program computer, was mainly a testbed for which memory?

A cathode-ray tube, the Williams tube, stored bits as a grid of dots on its screen and was the first truly random-access memory; the Baby was its testbed, never meant as a practical machine.

Tommy Flowers built Colossus at the Post Office Research Station in which London district?

Dollis Hill is where Flowers's team built and tested Colossus, which was then taken apart, shipped to Bletchley Park and put back together.

Where did Konrad Zuse build the Z1, his motor-driven binary mechanical computer, from 1936 to 1938?

In his parents' home, on private money alone, Zuse built the first freely programmable binary floating-point computer, though it proved unreliable.

What happened to the original Z3, Konrad Zuse's 1941 relay computer, on 21 December 1943?

Destroyed in an air raid on Berlin, the original Z3 — first called V3, then renamed to avoid confusion with Germany's V-weapons — survives only as a working 1961 replica built by Zuse KG.

Which Cambridge mathematics chair did Charles Babbage hold, as Stephen Hawking later did?

Lucasian Professor of Mathematics was Babbage's chair for more than a decade, though he neglected the teaching the post was expected to carry.

Ada Lovelace's 1843 notes went with her translation of an Analytical Engine paper by which Italian?

Luigi Menabrea, a military engineer, wrote the article in French; Lovelace's seven notes ran far longer than it, and Menabrea went on to serve as Italy's prime minister from 1867 to 1869.

A 1973 court ruling voided the ENIAC patent, finding its inventors drew on whose earlier machine?

John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry's ABC, prototyped at Iowa State in 1939, was ruled the origin of ENIAC's key ideas in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, leaving the electronic digital computer unpatented.

Which 1950s IBM machine, its memory a spinning magnetic drum, was the first mass-produced computer?

The IBM 650 is where a generation of university students first learned programming, and nearly 2,000 were installed before production ended in 1962.

The 1976 Cray-1, a C-shaped supercomputer ringed by padded benches, went first to which US lab?

Los Alamos received the first Cray-1 in 1976, and the padded bench wrapped around its column hid the power supplies.

At Bill Gates' suggestion, IBM approached Gary Kildall's Digital Research in 1980 to buy which OS?

CP/M-86 was the version IBM wanted for its PC; the deal never came together and Microsoft supplied PC DOS instead, though Digital Research later sold its own IBM PC software on bootable CP/M-86 floppies.

Which statistician's January 1947 Bell Labs memo first shortened 'binary digit' to three letters?

John Tukey wrote the memo on 9 January 1947, and Claude Shannon then put 'bit' into print in his 1948 paper 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication', crediting Tukey for the coinage.

What did Alan Kay name his 1972 concept of a portable computer 'for children of all ages'?

Dynabook described a slate-like device for children with near-eternal battery life, a vision Kay had first sketched as the KiddiComp in 1968 and that prefigured laptops and tablets by decades.

What was Ivan Sutherland's 1963 MIT thesis program, the ancestor of modern CAD, called?

Sketchpad let users draw straight onto the screen, and it earned Ivan Sutherland the 1988 Turing Award and helped inspire the graphical user interface.

What did Frank Rosenblatt name the learning machine he built at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory?

The Perceptron made headlines as a Navy device that 'learns by doing', but in 1969 Minsky and Papert's book Perceptrons laid out its limits.

Who received the first ACM Turing Award, computing's 'Nobel Prize', in 1966?

Alan Perlis graduated in chemistry, but after Army service in World War II he switched to mathematics at MIT.

Which 1971 machine by John Blankenbaker does the Computer History Museum call the first PC?

The Kenbak-1 came before the microprocessor, so its processor was built from small integrated circuits, and fewer than 50 were made before the company failed.

Which British firm made the Organiser, a 1984 handheld with a sliding cover over a 6×6 keypad?

Psion's Organiser II of 1986 then competed with the Filofax and is counted the first usable electronic organiser, pairing a diary with a searchable address book in a pocketable device.

Les Horribles Cernettes, pictured in one of the first photos on the web in 1992, were what kind of act?

A parody pop group, the Cernettes began when a CERN employee whose physicist boyfriend was always on shift sang about her lonely nights on stage.

Which Intel architect, played by an actor in a 2009 Intel commercial, is best known for USB?

Ajay Bhatt was played by actor Sunil Narkar in Intel's 2009 'Rockstar' advert, which The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien then spoofed.

Which Australian science agency won hundreds of millions from chipmakers over a core Wi-Fi patent?

CSIRO's patent grew from radio astronomers' early-1990s work on making wireless networks as fast as wired ones, and it won $205 million in 2009.

What did NetMarket sell on 11 August 1994, in the New York Times' view the first secure web sale?

A Sting CD was the item, and NetMarket's Dan Kohn said that even if the NSA was listening in, it couldn't get the buyer's encrypted card number.

The ZX80, launched in 1980 and among the first UK computers under £100, came from which company?

Sinclair's ZX80 had no video chip, so its processor drew the TV picture itself, and the display blanked out whenever a program was running.

Which 1960s language from the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo introduced classes and objects?

Simula 67, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, introduced objects and classes, and the creator of C++ took his idea of classes from it.

Douglas Engelbart's 1970 patent for the mouse described the device under what name?

'X-Y position indicator for a display system' was the patent's phrase for the shell with two metal wheels that Engelbart had developed with lead engineer Bill English before 1965.

Which 1820 Thomas de Colmar machine became the first commercially successful mechanical calculator?

The Arithmometer was manufactured from 1851 to 1915, and its reputation for reliability made it a key player in the shift from human computers to calculating machines in the late 19th century.

Research In Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry, was headquartered in which Canadian city?

Waterloo stayed home to the company after Research In Motion renamed itself BlackBerry Limited and moved from handsets to software.

Unix was first written in assembly for which DEC minicomputer before its 1970 port to the PDP-11?

PDP-7 assembly was the first form of Unix, written by Ken Thompson in 1969, and rewriting its kernel in C in 1973 made the system portable.

Which insect did Harvard Mark II operators tape into their logbook in 1947 as a real computer 'bug'?

A moth had got trapped in one of the machine's relays, and the logbook, insect and all, ended up in the Smithsonian's collection.

What did the world's first webcam, switched on at Cambridge University in 1991, point at all day?

A coffee pot in the Trojan Room was filmed so researchers elsewhere in the building could see whether it was empty before making the trip. The last machine sold on eBay for £3,350.

Ada Lovelace, hailed as the first computer programmer, was the only legitimate child of which poet?

Lord Byron separated from her mother and left England for good within months of Ada's birth. He had hoped for a boy.

What did Larry Page and Sergey Brin call their Stanford search engine before renaming it Google?

BackRub grew out of Larry Page's interest in backlinks, the links pointing to a web page, which he compared to citations in academic papers.

Which game did Microsoft bundle with Windows 3.0 in 1990, partly to teach people to drag and drop?

Solitaire was meant to soothe people intimidated by the new system, and moving its cards around got them used to handling a mouse.

Which 1995 film starring the voice of Tom Hanks was the first feature made entirely by computer animation?

Toy Story was also the first feature film from Pixar, with Tim Allen voicing the spaceman Buzz Lightyear opposite Hanks's cowboy Woody.

Which IBM chess computer beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game rematch in 1997?

Deep Blue had lost to Kasparov the year before. Its name, the winner of a company contest, plays on IBM's nickname Big Blue.

Which Hollywood actress of the 1940s co-patented a frequency-hopping guidance system for Allied torpedoes?

Hedy Lamarr devised it with the composer George Antheil and won the patent in 1942. The principle of hopping between frequencies is related to techniques used in Bluetooth.

Junk email is called 'spam' after a 1970 café sketch by which British comedy troupe?

Monty Python set the sketch in a café where nearly every dish comes with Spam luncheon meat, while a table of Vikings keeps singing the word over everyone else.

Bluetooth is named after Harald Bluetooth, a 10th-century king who united which country's tribes?

Denmark was pulled into one kingdom by Harald, just as the standard was meant to unite devices. The Bluetooth logo merges the runes for his two initials.

Which engineer sent the first email between two networked computers in 1971 and chose the @ sign for addresses?

Ray Tomlinson's @ sign was a little-used key back then. In 2010 New York's Museum of Modern Art added it to its design collection, crediting him.

Which cipher machine was Alan Turing's electromechanical Bombe built to help crack at Bletchley Park?

Enigma was the German forces' cipher machine. Turing produced the first Bombe design in 1939, and his colleague Welchman added a vital refinement a year later.

In which city, base of Altair maker MITS, did Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft in 1975?

Albuquerque proved a hard place to recruit top programmers, so on 1 January 1979 the young company moved to Bellevue, Washington.

Which Apple co-founder, a Hewlett-Packard engineer by day, designed the Apple I and Apple II computers?

Steve Wozniak spent his days designing calculators at HP, and built Apple's first machines because he wanted to use them and they didn't exist.

Which film director, fresh from Blade Runner, made Apple's '1984' Super Bowl advert for the Macintosh?

Ridley Scott shot it in England, and it had only one national airing in the US, during Super Bowl XVIII.

Linus Torvalds was studying at a university in which country when he created the Linux kernel?

Finland's University of Helsinki was where he began it as a student in 1991. He wanted to call it Freax, but the administrator of the server hosting the files named it Linux without asking.

Which ancient calculating tool is known as the suanpan in China and the soroban in Japan?

The abacus is far from a museum piece: Japanese primary schools go on teaching it, mainly as a way to speed up mental arithmetic.

Which machine did Joseph Marie Jacquard run with chains of punched cards, an idea Charles Babbage borrowed?

A weaving loom with his 1804 attachment could turn out complex patterns automatically. Babbage owned a silk portrait of Jacquard that took 24,000 cards to weave.

Which glowing glass components, about 18,000 of them, did the 1940s computer ENIAC use as its switches?

Vacuum tubes were ENIAC's weak point: at first several burned out almost every day, leaving the machine out of action about half the time.

Which Atari arcade game of two paddles and a bouncing dot became the first commercially successful video game?

Pong was built by engineer Allan Alcorn as a warm-up exercise. Atari's Nolan Bushnell told him it was for a General Electric contract, secretly meaning it only as practice.

Which tiny switch, first built at Bell Labs in 1947, won its three inventors a Nobel Prize in Physics?

The transistor earned John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley the 1956 prize. Bardeen went on to become the only person to win the physics Nobel twice.

At which company did newly hired engineer Jack Kilby build the first integrated circuit in the summer of 1958?

Texas Instruments had only just taken Kilby on, so he had no right to a summer holiday. He spent the quiet weeks on the idea that won him a share of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Which Intel co-founder forecast in 1965 that the number of components on a chip would keep doubling?

Gordon Moore later called the forecast, famous as Moore's law, a wild extrapolation. In 1975 he slowed it from a doubling every year to one every two years.

The Intel 4004, a 1971 chip designed for a Japanese desktop calculator, was the first commercially sold what?

Microprocessor design squeezed a computer's central processor onto one chip. Busicom, the calculator firm, had at first asked Intel for a family of seven chips.

Which computer correctly predicted Dwight Eisenhower's landslide live on CBS on election night in 1952?

UNIVAC made its call from a sample of just 5.5% of the vote, while the final Gallup poll had pointed to a close race.

Which US Navy rear admiral pioneered compilers in the 1950s, letting programmers write in English-like words?

Grace Hopper saw that business customers were uneasy with mathematical notation, so her FLOW-MATIC language used English terms and went on to shape COBOL.

Which programming language did John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create for Dartmouth College students in 1964?

BASIC was meant for students outside science and engineering too: its authors wanted everyone on campus to have access to a computer.

Which 1983 Apple computer brought the mouse and on-screen windows to buyers but flopped at $9,995?

Lisa officially stood for Local Integrated Software Architecture, but Steve Jobs later admitted the machine was obviously named for his daughter.

Which company's black cube workstation did Tim Berners-Lee use as the world's first web server?

NeXT was the firm Steve Jobs founded in 1985 after being ousted from Apple. Berners-Lee said its built-in software tools made programming the web remarkably easy.

Which 1993 browser from the University of Illinois was the first to show images inline with text?

Mosaic made the web popular with the public. Its lead developer, Marc Andreessen, left to co-found the company behind Netscape Navigator, the browser that soon overtook it.

Which two letters were the first message sent over the ARPANET in 1969, before the receiving computer crashed?

LO was all that got through of the command 'login' before the computer at the far end, at the Stanford Research Institute, crashed. The full login worked about an hour later.

Which three-key combination did IBM engineer David Bradley devise in 1981 to restart a frozen PC?

Control-Alt-Delete was picked because nobody could press it with one hand on the original IBM PC keyboard, so the machine would not be restarted by accident.

Which logarithm-based tool did engineers carry until the HP-35 pocket calculator arrived in 1972?

The slide rule was developed in the 17th century by the clergyman William Oughtred and others, building on John Napier's new work on logarithms.

The Antikythera mechanism, often called the oldest analogue computer, came from a shipwreck off which country?

Greece is where sponge divers found the wreck, off the island of Antikythera. The bronze gearwork came up in 1901 from a ship that sank around 70–60 BC.

On which TV quiz show did IBM's Watson computer beat champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011?

Jeopardy clues had to be answered from Watson's memory alone, because data on hard drives would have been too slow. The machine took the $1 million first prize.

In which country did Alexey Pajitnov create the puzzle game Tetris on an Elektronika 60 computer?

The Soviet Union's Academy of Sciences employed Pajitnov as a speech recognition researcher. His machine had no graphics, so he drew the falling pieces out of plain text brackets.

Which entrepreneur began selling PC upgrade kits from his Austin dorm room as a pre-med freshman?

Michael Dell started out in Room 2713 of the Dobie Center, and dropped out at 19 after earning a gross profit of nearly $200,000 in his first year of business.

What was the only product Jeff Bezos's Amazon sold when the site opened to the public in 1995?

Books beat four other products on his shortlist because so many titles were in print and each cost little. The store took its name from the world's biggest river.

Which bare-board British computer went on sale for $35 in 2012 to help schools teach computer science?

Raspberry Pi built its hype early: ten of the 25 test boards were auctioned on eBay before the launch. Its low price then won over hobbyists far beyond the classroom.

Which animal names the drawing cursor that children steer in Logo, a language co-created by Seymour Papert?

A turtle in Logo could also be a small floor robot obeying the same movement commands. The first working one was built in 1969.

At which company did engineer Steven Sasson build the first self-contained digital camera in 1975?

Kodak's prototype weighed 8 pounds and needed 23 seconds to record each black-and-white picture onto a cassette tape.

The MP3 audio format was developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society, a research body in which country?

Germany's Karlheinz Brandenburg tuned the format by replaying Suzanne Vega's a cappella song Tom's Diner, checking that compression did not spoil her voice.

Which British designer led the team behind the teardrop-shaped, translucent iMac that Apple launched in 1998?

Jony Ive had been thinking of leaving Apple until Steve Jobs came back and made industrial design a core part of the company's comeback.

IBM's adverts for its original 1981 PC featured a lookalike of which silent-film comedian's famous character?

Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp was licensed by IBM for a series of adverts based on his films, with Billy Scudder playing the part.

Which 1979 spreadsheet program for the Apple II is remembered as the first 'killer app' for microcomputers?

VisiCalc, short for visible calculator, turned the Apple II from a hobbyist's machine into a serious business tool and prompted IBM to bring out its own PC two years later.

Which online service introduced the GIF image format in 1987, years before the World Wide Web existed?

CompuServe's developers, led by Steve Wilhite, said the name with a soft g, a deliberate echo of the American peanut butter brand Jif.

Which co-designer of TCP/IP with Bob Kahn later became Google's Chief Internet Evangelist?

Vint Cerf worked out the internet's core protocols with Kahn while an assistant professor at Stanford in the 1970s, and the pair shared the 2004 Turing Award.

What was the Java programming language first called, after a tree outside creator James Gosling's office?

Oak had to be dropped when a trademark search showed another firm, Oak Technology, was using the name. Its replacement, Java, was borrowed from a type of coffee.

Which film studio gave Hewlett-Packard an early big order, eight audio oscillators for a 1940 release?

Walt Disney's sound engineers bought the oscillators at $71.50 apiece for the film Fantasia, an early boost for the firm Bill Hewlett and David Packard had started in a rented garage.

Which mathematician's 1854 work The Laws of Thought set out the true-or-false algebra of digital circuits?

George Boole was a shoemaker's son with only a primary school education, yet he became the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork.