50 Fun Facts About Software

The web browser Firefox, developed by the Mozilla community, takes its name from a nickname for which animal?

The red panda is sometimes called a firefox, although the browser's logo shows a stylized fox. The project was first named Phoenix, then Firebird, before naming disputes forced two renamings.

Which card game did Microsoft bundle with Windows 3.0, helping newcomers learn to drag and drop with a mouse?

Solitaire was written by summer intern Wes Cherry, with cards drawn by Susan Kare. His planned 'boss key', which swapped the screen for a fake spreadsheet, was removed before release.

Thomas Knoll began which image-editing program in 1987 as a tool called Display on his Macintosh Plus?

Photoshop grew out of Display after Knoll's brother John, who worked at Industrial Light & Magic, urged him to build a full editor. Early copies shipped bundled with Barneyscan slide scanners.

Bliss, the green hillside photograph used as the default wallpaper of Windows XP, was taken in which US state?

California's wine country supplied the hill: Charles O'Rear shot it in 1996 near the Napa–Sonoma county line. Vines had been cleared after a pest infestation, and the slope is a vineyard again.

Microsoft Excel 97 concealed a famous Easter egg that let users play which kind of hidden game?

A flight simulator was tucked inside Excel 97, while Word 97 hid a pinball game. Microsoft formally stopped adding Easter eggs in 2002 under its Trustworthy Computing push.

The standard 'save' icon in most software still depicts which storage medium, rarely seen since the early 2000s?

A floppy disk still means 'save' long after the drives vanished from computers. The most popular 3.5-inch version, first shipped in 1986, held just 1.44 MB.

Which playful Microsoft typeface did Vincent Connare design after seeing cartoon characters speak in Times New Roman?

Comic Sans was modelled on the hand lettering of graphic novels such as Watchmen. Connare finished it too late for Microsoft Bob, the cartoon-guided program that had prompted it.

Microsoft reportedly paid millions to use which Rolling Stones song in its 1995 advertising campaign for Windows 95?

Start Me Up was picked as a nod to the new Start button on the taskbar. Microsoft was widely reported to have paid the band between $8 million and $14 million for it.

The free VLC media player, first developed by students in Paris, is known for an icon showing which roadside object?

A traffic cone became the logo because the student networking club at École Centrale Paris collected them. Each Christmas the cone in the program wears a Santa hat.

The three-line menu icon that Norm Cox designed for the Xerox Star in 1981 is nicknamed after which food?

A hamburger is what the three stacked bars unintentionally resemble. After the Xerox Star, the same icon turned up in each window's control menu in Windows 1.0 in 1985.

Microsoft Office's animated assistant, widely mocked for interrupting users, took the shape of which office supply?

A paper clip named Clippit, nicknamed Clippy, was the default helper introduced with Office 97. Microsoft switched the feature off by default in Office XP and built its marketing around the change.

Linus Torvalds began writing the Linux kernel in 1991 while a computer science student in which country?

Finland's University of Helsinki was where Torvalds, then 21, announced his project online as just a hobby. He comes from the Swedish-speaking minority there.

James Gosling first called which programming language Oak, after a tree outside his office at Sun Microsystems?

Java took its final name from a type of Indonesian coffee after a trademark search found Oak already in use. The wider project it belonged to was known as Green.

Markus Persson, known as Notch, created which block-building game that Microsoft bought in 2014 for $2.5 billion?

Minecraft grew from prototypes Persson worked on after leaving the games company King in 2009. He passed control of its development to Jens Bergensten after the full release.

Alexey Pajitnov created which falling-block puzzle game in the mid-1980s at the Soviet Academy of Sciences?

Tetris blends 'tetra', meaning four, with tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport. The idea came from a pentomino puzzle set he had bought and played with in his office.

Google's Gmail, announced to the public on April Fools' Day 2004, officially kept which status label until July 2009?

Beta stayed attached to Gmail for more than five years after its debut. The launch offer of one gigabyte of storage was far more than competitors gave at the time.

Which presentation program did Forethought release for the Macintosh in 1987, just months before Microsoft bought it?

PowerPoint was called Presenter until lawyers found that name already taken just before release. Microsoft paid about $14 million for it, the company's first significant acquisition.

Which file-sharing service did Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker launch in 1999, only for lawsuits to close it in 2001?

Napster was named after Fanning's high-school nickname, 'Nappy'. Lawsuits alleging copyright infringement closed it in July 2001, and it filed for bankruptcy the following June.

Which photo-sharing app began as Burbn, a mobile check-in app built by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger?

Instagram launched for the iPhone in October 2010 and reached a million registered users within two months. Facebook bought it in April 2012 for about $1 billion.

Before switching to place names in 2013, Apple named each major Mac OS X release after which kind of animal?

Big cats supplied the names from Cheetah and Puma through to Mountain Lion. Mavericks, named after a surfing spot, then began the run of place names.

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

Deep Blue won two games and drew three, a year after losing its first match to Kasparov. Its name, a play on IBM's nickname, was the winning entry in a company contest.

Microsoft's name, first written as Micro-Soft in 1975, shortens the word 'software' and which other word?

Microcomputer software was what Bill Gates and Paul Allen set out to sell, and Allen suggested the blended name. Their first target was the Altair 8800, featured that year in Popular Electronics.

John Warnock's Camelot project at Adobe led in 1993 to which now-ubiquitous document file format?

PDF, the Portable Document Format, was built so a document looks the same whatever hardware or operating system opens it. It was standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008.

The GIF image format, whose creator insisted on a soft-G pronunciation, was introduced in 1987 by which online service?

CompuServe engineer Steve Wilhite said the name should echo the peanut butter brand Jif. Polls have nonetheless shown that the hard-G pronunciation is the more common one.

Which once-ubiquitous browser plug-in for web animations and games was officially discontinued at the end of 2020?

Flash declined after Steve Jobs wrote an open letter in 2010 refusing to allow it on the iPhone and iPad. It had begun in 1995 as an animation tool called FutureSplash Animator.

Luis von Ahn, the Guatemalan-born inventor of reCAPTCHA, went on to co-found which language-learning app?

Duolingo followed von Ahn's sale of reCAPTCHA to Google in 2009. That earlier tool put the words people typed to prove they were human to work digitizing books.

Larry Tesler and Tim Mott, working at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, developed which everyday pair of editing commands?

Copy and paste went into Gypsy, a word processor the pair built for the Xerox Alto. Tesler also campaigned against 'modes', wanting every action available to a user at all times.

Which US Navy rear admiral is often credited with creating the first compiler, finished in 1952 for the A-0 System?

Grace Hopper believed code should be written in something close to English and then translated into machine code automatically. She is also credited with writing the first computer manual.

Microsoft's first product, written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975, was a version of which programming language?

BASIC for the Altair 8800 was written without an Altair to test it on: Allen adapted an emulator that ran on a PDP-10 at Harvard. Gates hoped it would make the machine attractive to hobbyists.

In the name of OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT, released in late 2022, the letter T stands for which word?

Transformer is the neural-network design at the core of GPT models, introduced by Google researchers in 2017. The G and P stand for generative and pre-trained.

Which block-based programming language for children came from the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab?

Scratch is named after the way disc jockeys manipulate vinyl records on a turntable. Like a DJ mixing sounds, its users combine graphics and audio and 'remix' one another's projects.

The ILOVEYOU worm, which spread worldwide by email in May 2000, was written by a former student in which country?

The Philippines had no law against hacking at the time, so prosecutors dropped all charges against the author, Onel de Guzman. The president soon signed an e-commerce law to close the gap.

Which computer worm, first uncovered in 2010, was built to sabotage the centrifuges of Iran's nuclear program?

Stuxnet reportedly made the fast-spinning centrifuges tear themselves apart, destroying almost a fifth of Iran's stock. It is thought to have been in development since at least 2005.

Duke Nukem Forever, announced in 1997 and not released until 2011, became a byword for which kind of software?

Vaporware was first reported in use in 1982 by a Microsoft engineer and reached print through analyst Esther Dyson. Bill Gates later got a Golden Vaporware award for shipping Windows 18 months late.

Which workplace chat app began as an internal tool for Stewart Butterfield's team as it built the online game Glitch?

Slack, Butterfield has said, stands for 'Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge'. It replaced the codename 'linefeed' and opened to the public in August 2013.

Which 1979 spreadsheet program turned the Apple II from a hobbyist's machine into a serious business tool?

VisiCalc, short for 'visible calculator', came to Dan Bricklin as he watched a Harvard Business School professor work a financial model on a blackboard. It is seen as the Apple II's killer application.

Which ambient-music pioneer composed the startup sound of Windows 95, using a Macintosh because he disliked PCs?

Brian Eno was asked for a piece that felt inspiring, optimistic and futuristic yet lasted only a few seconds. In 2025 the sound was chosen for the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry.

Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created which pioneering web browser, released in 1993, at the University of Illinois?

Mosaic was written at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Microsoft later licensed a commercial offshoot, Spyglass Mosaic, to create Internet Explorer in 1995.

Which Linux distribution, funded by Mark Shuttleworth, is named after an African philosophy of humanity to others?

Ubuntu was planned in April 2004, when Shuttleworth invited a dozen developers to his London flat. He paid for it with the fortune he made selling the security firm Thawte to Verisign.

Larry Ellison's database company Oracle took its name from the codename of a 1977 project for which US agency?

The CIA was Oracle's first customer, and the founders received permission to reuse the project's code name for their product. The firm itself was first called Software Development Laboratories.

Which statistician, who also coined the term 'bit', is credited with the first published use of the word 'software'?

John Tukey used 'software' to describe computer programs in a 1958 article in American Mathematical Monthly. He had come up with 'bit', a contraction of binary digit, at Bell Labs in 1947.

Microsoft built MS-DOS from 86-DOS, a purchased system nicknamed QDOS, in which the letters Q and D stood for what?

Quick and Dirty Operating System was written in 1980 by 24-year-old Tim Paterson for a Seattle firm's 8086 computer kit. Microsoft bought all rights to it for $50,000 a month before the IBM PC went on sale.

George R. R. Martin said in 2014 that he writes on an MS-DOS computer using which vintage word processor?

WordStar keeps Martin clear of spell-checking, which he dislikes, and of internet distractions. The program dominated its market in the early and mid-1980s.

Which term for free-software licensing did Richard Stallman borrow from a letter joking that all rights were 'reversed'?

Copyleft turns copyright law around: anyone may reuse and change the work, but must pass the same freedoms on. Stallman's Emacs General Public License of 1985 was the first license of the kind.

Old spell checkers that changed 'cooperation' into the name of the city where Apple is based inspired which term?

The Cupertino effect arose because older dictionaries held only the hyphenated 'co-operation'. The slip reached official documents, one of which named a 'South Asian Association for Regional Cupertino'.

Microsoft Excel deliberately treats 1900 as a leap year to match a bug in which older rival spreadsheet?

Lotus 1-2-3 skipped the proper leap-year rule on purpose to save memory, and Excel copied the flaw so that dates would match. Excel still accepts the phantom date February 29, 1900.

Linus Torvalds wanted to call his kernel which name, before a server administrator labeled the upload folder 'linux'?

Freax blended 'free', 'freak' and the letter X, a nod to Unix. Torvalds kept his files under that name for about half a year, until Ari Lemmke, who ran the server, chose another.

Bell Labs researchers named Unix as a play on which larger operating system they had abandoned?

Multics stood for Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, so the leaner successor became the 'Uniplexed' Unics. The spelling changed to Unix later, and nobody on the team could remember who did it.

Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser on a computer from which firm, founded by Steve Jobs after leaving Apple?

NeXT was founded in 1985, and the browser Berners-Lee wrote on its machine at CERN doubled as a web page editor. Apple bought the firm for $427 million in 1997, which brought Jobs back.

Karlheinz Brandenburg refined the MP3 format by listening again and again to which a cappella Suzanne Vega song?

Tom's Diner was his test because early compression made Vega's unaccompanied voice sound terrible. Among audio engineers the story earned her the informal title 'Mother of the MP3'.