50 Fun Facts About Information Technology

What everyday object did the world's first webcam watch at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory from 1991?

A coffee pot was the star: a camera was aimed at it so nobody trekked to the Trojan Room only to find it empty. The last of the machines was auctioned on eBay for £3,350.

Which Hollywood star co-invented a frequency-hopping radio guidance system for torpedoes with composer George Antheil?

Hedy Lamarr entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, long after her wartime patent had expired. Frequency hopping went on to become a standard technique in wireless communications.

What product carried the first barcode ever scanned at a shop checkout, at a Marsh supermarket in Ohio in 1974?

Chewing gum made retail history when a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit crossed the scanner at 8:01 a.m. on 26 June 1974. A facsimile of the pack went on display at the Smithsonian.

Which piece of internet slang comes from a 1970 Monty Python sketch featuring singing Vikings?

Spam took its name from a sketch in which a restaurant serves the luncheon meat in almost every dish while Vikings sing about it. Early chat-room pranksters flooded screens with lines from it.

Which short-range wireless technology is named after a tenth-century king who united the scattered tribes of Denmark?

Bluetooth borrows the epithet of King Harald, because the standard was meant to unite devices as he united Denmark. Intel's Jim Kardach proposed it in 1997 after hearing tales from a Viking novel.

Which scannable label technology did engineers at Japan's Denso Wave invent in 1994 to track car parts in factories?

QR code is short for quick-response code, and its square pattern was inspired by the black and white stones on a Go board. Ordinary striped labels kept failing under factory oil stains.

Which company, founded as a pulp mill in 1865, was the world's largest mobile phone vendor for a decade from 1998?

Nokia had long been known for rubber and cables before it turned to telecoms. The Finnish Rubber Works, later part of the group, built its factory beside the town of Nokia in 1904.

What two-word greeting was the world's first SMS text, sent by engineer Neil Papworth over Vodafone's UK network?

Merry Christmas was typed on a personal computer and sent to the Orbitel 901 handset of Vodafone's Richard Jarvis on 3 December 1992, three weeks before the day itself.

Which obsolete storage medium, first made in an eight-inch size in 1971, survives as the save icon in many programs?

Floppy disk icons have outlived the disks: Sony ended domestic sales of its last 3½-inch models in 2011. The first version, eight inches across, was a read-only device for loading microcode.

Which company was founded in 1997 by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings as a service renting DVDs by post?

Netflix started in Scotts Valley, California, and did not launch streaming until January 2007. Its monthly subscription arrived in 1999, replacing a fee for every disc rented.

Which English computer scientist proposed the World Wide Web in March 1989 while working at the CERN physics laboratory?

Tim Berners-Lee gave his idea away freely, with no patent and no royalties due, which let anyone build on it. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 2004.

Which keyboard symbol did Ray Tomlinson choose in 1971 to separate user from machine in email addresses?

The at sign was relatively obscure when Tomlinson picked it; in 2010 it joined the Museum of Modern Art's design collection. His first test emails went between two computers placed side by side.

Which invention did Alexander Graham Bell patent in March 1876 but refuse to keep in his own study?

The telephone struck Bell as an intrusion on his real work as a scientist. His mother and his wife were both deaf, which shaped a lifetime of research into speech and sound.

Which company employed Martin Cooper when he made the first handheld mobile phone call in Manhattan in 1973?

Motorola's Cooper rang his counterpart at rival Bell Labs from the sidewalk to make the point. The first handset weighed 1.1 kg and needed a 10-hour recharge after 30 minutes of talk.

Which software company did Bill Gates and Paul Allen found in 1975 to sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800?

Microsoft began as 'Micro-Soft', Allen's shorthand for microcomputer software. Allen flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1975 to demonstrate their interpreter to the Altair's maker.

Which search engine grew out of BackRub, a 1996 research project by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin?

Google got its name from a misspelling of googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, to signal how much of the web it meant to search. It was incorporated in a friend's garage in 1998.

Which language gave Wikipedia the word 'wiki', taken by Ward Cunningham from the name of an airport shuttle bus?

Hawaiian for quick, 'wiki' stuck with Cunningham after a Honolulu airport employee sent him to the Wiki Wiki Shuttle. In 1995 he chose it over calling his editable website quick-web.

Which video-sharing site's first upload, in April 2005, showed co-founder Jawed Karim standing at San Diego Zoo?

YouTube was founded by three former PayPal employees, and that first clip, titled 'Me at the zoo', can still be watched. A Nike advert became its first video to reach a million views.

Which pointing device did Douglas Engelbart first demonstrate publicly in 1968 during the Mother of All Demos?

Mouse was a nickname that likely came from the cord, which trailed behind the device like a tail. In his 1963 notebook Engelbart had first called the idea a 'bug'.

Which keyboard layout did newspaper editor Christopher Latham Sholes devise in the early 1870s for his typewriter?

QWERTY spread with the success of Remington's typewriters, sold from 1874. German keyboards mostly use QWERTZ and French ones AZERTY, each named after the first six letters of its top row.

What was Samuel Morse's established profession before he helped invent the telegraph and the code named after him?

Portrait painter was Morse's trade until middle age, when he turned to telegraphy. His first idea for a code gave way to an alphabet-based one credited to his partner Alfred Vail.

Which inventor reported hearing the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901 through an antenna hung from a kite?

Guglielmo Marconi listened in Newfoundland for the letter S, sent about 3,500 km from Poldhu in Cornwall. Storms had damaged his planned receiving station at Cape Cod, so he set up a temporary one.

Which science fiction author proposed in 1945 that geostationary satellites could relay communications worldwide?

The idea first appeared in a letter to Wireless World magazine. The geostationary orbit, 36,000 kilometres above the equator, is sometimes called the Clarke orbit after Arthur C. Clarke.

Which Scottish inventor built the first working television set from a hatbox, darning needles and a used tea chest?

John Logie Baird demonstrated his mechanical system on 26 January 1926, the year after showing moving silhouettes to shoppers at Selfridges in London. He later demonstrated the first colour system too.

Which cable technology won Charles Kao a 2009 Nobel Prize after he traced its signal losses to material impurities?

Optical fibre carries data as light, and in the 1960s Kao showed that its losses came from impure glass rather than a flaw in the idea. He was knighted a year after his Nobel.

Which satellite navigation system did Ronald Reagan open to civilians after Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down?

GPS signals for civilians were at first deliberately blurred to about 100 metres. The error was switched off during the Gulf War because so many US soldiers were carrying civilian receivers.

Which animal is Tux, the official mascot of the Linux kernel that Linus Torvalds first released in 1991?

A penguin was Torvalds's own idea: he claims to have caught 'penguinitis' after one nibbled him at a zoo in Canberra, Australia, in 1993.

Which mobile operating system named its early versions after sweet treats such as Cupcake, Donut, Eclair and Froyo?

Android dropped its dessert names in 2019 with version 10. The company behind it was founded in Palo Alto in 2003 by Andy Rubin and Chris White, who first set out to build software for digital cameras.

Which Apple product did Steve Jobs unveil at Macworld in January 2007 after two years of development in secrecy?

iPhone was pitched by Jobs as three devices in one: a widescreen music player, a mobile handset and an internet communicator. It grew from his wish for a touchscreen worked by fingers, not a stylus.

Which company, founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 under the name Cadabra, began as an online bookstore?

Amazon moved into cloud computing in 2006, launching its S3 storage service in March and its EC2 service in August. Bezos had moved from New York City to Bellevue, Washington, to start the shop.

Which unit of digital information did Werner Buchholz name in 1956 while designing IBM's Stretch computer?

Byte is a deliberate respelling of 'bite', chosen so that a slip could not accidentally turn it into 'bit'. Buchholz coined it in June 1956, early in the design of the machine.

Which device, invented in 1947 by Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, won its makers the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics?

Transistor experiments at Bell Labs began with two gold contacts pressed onto a crystal of germanium. The result was smaller than a vacuum tube and needed less power to run.

Which observation, first made in Electronics magazine in 1965, holds that chip complexity doubles about every two years?

Moore's law is named after Gordon Moore, later a co-founder of Intel, who at first forecast a doubling every year. In 1975 he slowed his prediction to every two years.

Which chemical element, the second most abundant in Earth's crust, gives California's main tech region its nickname?

Silicon is the base material of most computer chips. Journalist Don Hoefler is often credited with popularising the valley's nickname in a 1971 news story.

Which name did Netscape programmer Lou Montulli give in 1994 to small data files that websites store in a browser?

Cookie came from 'magic cookie', Unix programmers' term for a token of data a program receives and sends back unchanged. Montulli needed the idea for an e-commerce application Netscape was building.

Which online scam, first documented on AOL in 1995, has a spelling generally linked to the older term 'phreaking'?

Phishing attackers pose as someone trusted to trick people into revealing passwords. AOHell, a tool released in 1994, already let users impersonate AOL staff in instant messages.

Which type of office software did VisiCalc pioneer on personal computers in 1979, becoming the Apple II's killer app?

Spreadsheet software occurred to Dan Bricklin as he watched a Harvard Business School professor build a financial model on a ruled blackboard. VisiCalc is short for visible calculator.

Which daughter of Lord Byron is often called the first computer programmer for her notes on the Analytical Engine?

Ada Lovelace set out, in her Note G, a method for Charles Babbage's machine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. A programming language created for the US Department of Defense was later named after her.

Which US Navy rear admiral helped create the COBOL language and had a moth taped into her team's log book?

Grace Hopper's colleagues found the moth jamming a relay in Harvard's Mark II computer in 1947. Its remains are still taped into the log book, now held at the Smithsonian.

Which American mathematician founded information theory with the 1948 paper 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication'?

Claude Shannon published the paper in two parts in the Bell System Technical Journal. It has been called a blueprint for the digital era, and he is credited with laying the foundations of the Information Age.

Which method of sending data did Paul Baran and Donald Davies each invent independently in the 1960s?

Packet switching was named by Davies at Britain's National Physical Laboratory. His work revived an idea that had found little support among network builders when Baran proposed it at RAND.

Which set of networking protocols did Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn begin designing in 1973 to join separate networks?

TCP/IP hid the differences between local networks behind one common protocol and made the host computers, rather than the network, responsible for reliability. The US military adopted it as its standard in 1982.

Which wired networking standard did Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs develop at Xerox PARC in the 1970s?

Ethernet was built to connect Xerox's Alto prototype computers to its prototype laser printers over a shared coaxial cable. By 1976 it linked 100 Altos at the research centre.

Which web browser did Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina build at the University of Illinois, releasing version 1.0 in 1993?

Mosaic was simple to install and ran on ordinary personal computers, which helped carry the web to the general public. It was developed at the university's supercomputing centre, NCSA.

Which communications satellite, launched in July 1962, relayed the first live transatlantic television feed?

Telstar 1 was also the first privately sponsored space launch. Its first test pictures, sent to France the day after lift-off, showed a flag flying outside the Andover Earth Station.

Which Pacific island nation earns royalties from .tv, its internet country code, which doubles as short for television?

Tuvalu began marketing the suffix in 1998, and by 2019 the royalties supplied 8.4% of its government's revenue. Hundreds of thousands of websites were registered under it.

Which text encoding standard, first published in 1963, grew out of seven-bit teleprinter and telegraph codes?

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and defines 128 code points, 95 of them printable. Unlike earlier telegraph codes, it was ordered to make alphabetical sorting easy.

What two letters were the first characters sent over ARPANET in 1969, before the receiving computer crashed mid-command?

LO was all that arrived of the command 'login', typed at UCLA by student programmer Charley Kline. The machine that crashed was an SDS 940 at the Stanford Research Institute.

Which British wartime computer did Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers design to help break Germany's Lorenz cipher?

Colossus is regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer. It is sometimes wrongly credited to Alan Turing, whose earlier Enigma-breaking machine was electromechanical.

Which wireless networking name did the consultancy Interbrand coin in 1999 to replace 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'?

Wi-Fi was picked from a list of ten proposed names, partly because it sounds like hi-fi. Whether it was ever short for 'wireless fidelity' is still disputed.