50 Fun Facts About Computer History

Before machines took the name, the word 'computer', first recorded in 1613, described what?

A person doing calculations was a 'computer' for three centuries: the word meant 'one who computes', and teams of them worked through astronomical and ballistic tables by hand.

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

A penguin was Linus Torvalds' own idea for the Linux brand character; Ewing drew Tux as an entry to a logo competition, and distributions still swap in their own versions of him.

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

Star Trek supplied the name: Popular Electronics editor Les Solomon said his 12-year-old daughter Lauren suggested Altair because 'that's where the Enterprise is going tonight'.

Hotmail launched on which symbolic 1996 date, chosen to suggest freedom from ISP-tied email?

4 July, American Independence Day, was chosen to symbolise 'freedom' from ISP-based email and the novelty of reading an inbox from anywhere; Microsoft bought Hotmail in December 1997 for about $400 million.

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

A two-way pager called the Inter@ctive Pager 950 was the first BlackBerry; RIM did not ship a BlackBerry that could make phone calls until the 5810 arrived in 2002.

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 architecture, which still irks historians: the unfinished draft was circulated with only his name on it, leaving out ENIAC engineers Eckert and Mauchly.

The 1977 TRS-80, nicknamed the 'Trash-80', was sold through which electronics chain owned by Tandy?

Radio Shack got 3,500 machines in the first run because Tandy's John Roach argued each store could use one for inventory if customers did not buy; instead the computer sold out.

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

Wood housed the prototype, which Bill English built from Engelbart's notes before 1965; the patent, filed in 1967 and granted in 1970, covered that shell and its two perpendicular wheels.

Which MIT engineer who led Apollo's on-board flight software coined the term 'software engineering'?

Margaret Hamilton coined the term so that software would be taken as seriously as hardware, and her team's priority alarm displays helped Apollo 11's computer cope when alarms fired minutes before touchdown.

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.

Who picked 'artificial intelligence' as the 1956 Dartmouth workshop's theme to sidestep cybernetics?

John McCarthy picked the name for the Dartmouth proposal partly for its neutrality, so the new field would not be tied to Norbert Wiener's cybernetics; he went on to create Lisp.

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

France ran Minitel through its PTT, giving millions online directories, mail and train bookings years before the web, and the network still logged 10 million monthly connections in 2009.

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

Ken Olsen admitted making the remark but insisted he meant computers running the household, not personal computers; the quote dogged Digital Equipment Corporation as PCs ate its minicomputer business.

How many host sites, starting with UCLA, did the initial ARPANET configuration link in 1969?

Four sites formed the first ARPANET: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah, whose computing school had just recruited graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland.

The ARM chip design now in most smartphones began in 1983 at which British maker of the BBC Micro?

Acorn Computers started the official Acorn RISC Machine project in October 1983 after its engineers saw a tiny team could design a processor; the architecture was spun off as Advanced RISC Machines in 1990.

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

The laser printer was Starkweather's creation at PARC, the Palo Alto research centre that also produced the Alto and Ethernet; he later took his colour expertise to Apple and then Microsoft Research.

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 8010 arrived three years before the Macintosh, and its designer David Canfield Smith invented the concept of computer icons and the desktop of documents and folders.

Commodore's 1977 PET was named after the Pet Rock fad; its letters were later backronymed to what?

Personal Electronic Transactor was the after-the-fact expansion; Andre Souson had suggested 'PET' after seeing the Pet Rock in Los Gatos and declaring Commodore would make the 'pet computer'.

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.

Who did the hands-on programming of ENIAC in 1945–46, setting its switches and cables by hand?

Six women — Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman — worked out how to program ENIAC, yet most were not invited to its 50th-anniversary event in 1996.

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 housed the Post Office's research station, where Flowers, head of its switching group, designed an electronic machine on his own initiative after the Heath Robinson's synchronised tapes left him unimpressed.

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

In his parents' home, with money from his parents, his sister Lieselotte and fraternity friends, Zuse assembled a machine that was the first freely programmable computer using binary floating point, 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 from 1828, as Stephen Hawking later did?

Lucasian Professor of Mathematics was Babbage's title, in the chair Isaac Newton once held and that Stephen Hawking had to vacate at 67 under Cambridge's retirement rule.

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 source 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 sold almost 2,000 systems before the last left the factory in 1962, and it was the first computer to make IBM a meaningful profit.

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

Los Alamos won a bidding war with Lawrence Livermore for serial number 001, taking it on a six-month trial in 1976; the benches hid the power supplies and the cooling system.

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 on the screen with a newly invented light pen, and the thesis earned Sutherland the Turing Award in 1988 and the Kyoto Prize in 2012.

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

The Perceptron, built as the Mark I Perceptron machine and tested at the Cornell lab in 1959, was the first hardware implementation of the perceptron algorithm; Minsky and Papert's 1969 book 'Perceptrons' spelled out its limits.

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

Alan Perlis, a Carnegie Mellon professor who helped shape ALGOL, received the first award; Maurice Wilkes followed in 1967, and the prize money has since grown to $1 million.

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

The Kenbak-1 predated the microprocessor, so its CPU was built from 7400-series TTL chips driving 256 bytes of memory; production stopped in 1973 when 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, subjects of the first band photo on the web in 1992, were what kind of act?

A parody pop group founded at CERN in 1990, the Cernettes sang doo-wop about lovelorn lab life, and a scanned photo of them became the first band picture on the web in 1992; they played their final show in July 2012.

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

Ajay Bhatt was portrayed by actor Sunil Narkar in Intel's 2009 commercial, which Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show parodied days later; his USB work gave PCs one plug for almost everything.

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

CSIRO also gave the world atomic absorption spectroscopy, polymer banknotes and Aerogard; its Wi-Fi patent case won $205 million in 2009 and a further $105 million by 2016.

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

A Sting CD, Ten Summoner's Tales, went to Phil Brandenberger of Philadelphia, who paid by credit card with the details protected by encryption software; PGP author Phil Zimmermann called it a step towards digital cash.

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

Sinclair's Science of Cambridge sold the ZX80 assembled for £99.95, squeaking under the hundred-pound mark, and the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum followed within two years.

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

Simula 67, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, grew out of a simulation language and handed its class-and-object model to Smalltalk, C++ and many later languages.

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, Ontario, home of the University of Waterloo, stayed the headquarters when RIM announced on 30 January 2013 that it would rebrand as BlackBerry, later shifting 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; after the PDP-11 port, Version 4 was rewritten in C in 1973, which made the system portable.