140 Fun Facts About Tech

Which Apple co-founder unveiled the first iPhone at Macworld in January 2007?

He called it a revolution for the mobile phone industry, and the phone went on sale that June.

The short-range wireless standard Bluetooth is named after what?

Intel's Jim Kardach proposed the codename in 1997 after reading about Harald Bluetooth, the tenth-century king who united Denmark.

The name Wi-Fi was coined in 1999 by whom?

The name is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance, and whether it was ever really short for 'wireless fidelity' is still disputed.

The QR code was invented in 1994 by a subsidiary of which car maker, to label auto parts?

Masahiro Hara of Denso Wave based the position-marker pattern on the black and white counters of a Go board.

The first network email, which introduced the @ sign in addresses, was sent in which year?

It travelled over ARPANET, the US defence research network that became the technical foundation of the internet.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at which organisation?

He wanted a better way to store, find and share documents across the sprawling physics lab, and opened the Web to the public in 1993.

The Nokia 3310, launched in 2000, sold about how many units?

Its tough casing earned it a reputation online as 'indestructible', and it shipped with the game Snake II.

The Motorola DynaTAC, unveiled in 1983, holds what distinction?

Motorola's Martin Cooper had made the first publicised handheld mobile call on a prototype ten years earlier, in April 1973.

The first iPod, launched in 2001, was sold on the promise of putting how many songs in your pocket?

It had a 5 GB hard drive and was only Mac-compatible; Tony Fadell was recruited to build it after pitching a better MP3 player.

The compact disc was co-developed by Sony and which other company?

It launched in Japan in 1982, and a standard disc holds about 74 minutes of audio.

ENIAC, the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer, was completed in which year?

The press called it a 'Giant Brain' when it was dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania, and its first programmers were six women.

The transistor was invented in 1947 at which research laboratory?

Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for it.

Moore's law observes that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every how long?

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, first made the observation in 1965 and expected it to hold for about a decade.

Which Rolling Stones song did Microsoft license for the Windows 95 launch, a nod to the new taskbar button?

Reports put the fee at between $8 million and $14 million.

The Apple Macintosh was introduced by a famous TV commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl. Who directed it?

The ad ran once nationally, and the computer went on sale two days later.

The name Google is a misspelling of which mathematical term?

A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros; the founders first ran the company from Susan Wojcicki's garage.

Amazon began in 1994 as an online store for what?

Jeff Bezos founded it in Bellevue, Washington, and later positioned it as 'The Everything Store'.

Facebook was launched in 2004 at which Ivy League university?

It was open only to that campus at first, then spread to other North American universities.

YouTube's three founders had all previously worked at which company?

Google bought the site in November 2006, less than two years after it was founded, for $1.65 billion.

Netflix was founded in 1997 as what kind of business?

Streaming did not launch until 2007, a decade after Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings started the company in Scotts Valley, California.

Posts on Twitter were originally limited to how many characters?

The limit doubled in 2017, and the service was renamed X in 2023.

Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and which co-founder?

It began as a side project to Nupedia, an expert-written encyclopedia that never took off.

The first text message, sent in December 1992, read what?

Engineer Neil Papworth sent it from a computer over the Vodafone network to a colleague at a party in Newbury.

The GPS project was started by which US organisation in 1973?

The full constellation of 24 satellites became operational in 1993, and civilian accuracy was deliberately degraded until 2000.

The widely known 1999 emoji set was created by Shigetaka Kurita for which Japanese mobile carrier?

A 1997 SoftBank set was later found to predate it, and in 2015 Oxford Dictionaries made the crying-laughing emoji its word of the year.

ChatGPT hit 100,000,000 monthly users how long after its November 2022 launch?

The chatbot is built on OpenAI's generative pre-trained transformer models and runs on a freemium model.

The Roomba robot vacuum, introduced in 2002, is made by which company?

The company had roots in MIT robotics research and military robots before it turned to housework.

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the development of what technology?

Since the first commercial cells were sold in 1991, their energy density has tripled and their cost has fallen tenfold.

Who first publicly demonstrated a computer mouse in the 1968 Mother of All Demos?

The same demo showed off hypertext, video conferencing and windows, decades before they were common.

The QWERTY keyboard layout comes from a typewriter sold from 1874 by which company?

The name is simply the first six letters of the top row, and the layout is still the de facto standard 150 years on.

CAPTCHA is a contrived acronym whose letters stand for a 'Completely Automated Public' what?

The term was coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon; the full phrase is 'Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'.

The music-sharing service Napster, launched in June 1999, was founded by Sean Parker and whom?

It shut down in 2001 after a wave of lawsuits, including one from Metallica, and went bankrupt the next year.

The MP3 audio format was developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in which country?

The work was led by Karlheinz Brandenburg, and the standard was published in 1993.

The Tamagotchi digital pet, a global fad from 1997, was made by which Japanese toy company?

The egg-shaped device has three buttons and asks its owner to raise the pet through different life stages.

The Nintendo Game Boy was bundled in North America and Europe with which game?

The pairing widened the console's appeal far beyond traditional gamers after its 1989 launch.

The Bitcoin white paper was published in 2008 under which pseudonym?

The currency went live in 2009, and its supply is capped at 21 million coins, expected to be fully issued around 2140.

In the first known commercial bitcoin transaction, in May 2010, 10,000 bitcoins bought what?

The date is still marked as Bitcoin Pizza Day; at later prices those coins were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

IBM's Deep Blue defeated which reigning world chess champion in a 1997 rematch?

It won two games and drew three in the six-game match, the first time a computer beat a champion under regular time controls.

In 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGo beat which top professional at the board game Go?

It was the first time a computer beat a 9-dan professional without a handicap, and the match was watched by millions.

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

All of Watson's data was held in RAM because hard drives were too slow to keep up with human buzzers.

Alan Turing introduced his famous test of machine intelligence under what name in a 1950 paper?

The paper, 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', was written while he worked at the University of Manchester.

Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, was launched by the Soviet Union in which year?

The polished 58-centimetre sphere broadcast radio pulses for 22 days until its batteries ran out.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, became the first spacecraft to do what in August 2012?

It crossed the heliopause, the boundary of the Sun's influence, and is the most distant human-made object.

A moth found jammed in a relay computer at a Massachusetts university in 1947 popularised which computing term?

Hopper, a US Navy rear admiral, also created the first compiler and helped develop COBOL.

Hedy Lamarr's World War II frequency-hopping radio system was originally meant to guide what?

She and composer George Antheil patented it to defeat radio jamming; the principle underlies Bluetooth and early Wi-Fi.

Which American inventor was granted the first patent for a television?

He also invented the image dissector camera tube and sold complete TV systems from Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the 1940s.

Percy Spencer got the idea for the microwave oven when radar waves melted what in his pocket?

Raytheon's first Radarange went on sale in 1947, and the countertop version arrived from Amana in 1967.

The first product scanned with a UPC barcode, in an Ohio supermarket in June 1974, was a pack of what?

The scan took place at Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, near the factory making the scanning equipment.

The world's first cash machine was installed in June 1967 at a branch of which bank?

The Enfield, London machine was built by De La Rue and beat a Swedish rival by nine days; actor Reg Varney made the first withdrawal.

3M's Arthur Fry invented the Post-it note using a failed adhesive to anchor a bookmark in his what?

Spencer Silver had spent five years promoting his weak adhesive as a 'solution without a problem' before Fry found the use.

The Rubik's Cube was invented in 1974 by a Hungarian professor of what subject?

Ernő Rubik originally called it the Magic Cube, and it reached the wider world through Ideal Toy Corp in 1980.

The Linux kernel was first released in 1991 by which Finnish programmer?

He has said he probably would not have written it if the GNU kernel or 386BSD had been ready that year.

Microsoft was founded in 1975 to sell BASIC interpreters for which early microcomputer?

Bill Gates and Paul Allen started the company in Albuquerque, near the Altair's maker, before moving to Washington state.

Besides the two Steves, who was the third co-founder of Apple in 1976?

He sold his stake within weeks; the company was formed to sell Wozniak's Apple I.

Forced out of Apple in 1985, its co-founder started NeXT and bought which animation studio in 1986?

He remained its chairman and majority shareholder until 2007, and returned to Apple as CEO in 1997.

Guido van Rossum created Python as a successor to which programming language?

He conceived it in the late 1980s at CWI in the Netherlands and released 0.9.0 in 1991.

Java was designed by James Gosling at which company?

It was released in May 1995 as a core part of Sun's Java platform.

Dennis Ritchie created the C language in 1972 as a successor to which language?

Its first purpose was building utilities for Unix, and it was later used to rewrite the Unix kernel.

Who created JavaScript in 1995?

Despite the similar name and syntax, it is a distinct language from Java.

COBOL was partly based on FLOW-MATIC, a language designed by whom?

CODASYL began COBOL's design in 1959 for business, finance and administrative systems.

Intel's 4004 microprocessor grew out of a 1969 commission from which calculator company?

The 4-bit chip was released on November 15, 1971, as the first in Intel's long line of CPUs.

The original IBM PC was designed by a team based in which Florida city?

Model 5150 was released on August 12, 1981, and set the PC-compatible standard.

Which 1979 spreadsheet made the Apple II especially popular with business users?

Steve Wozniak designed the original Apple II, first sold on June 10, 1977.

Which computer does Guinness list as the best-selling desktop model of all time?

Estimates put sales between 12.5 and 17 million units; it launched at $595 in 1982.

Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in which year?

He appointed Larry Roberts as program manager; the aim was resource sharing between remote computers.

Mosaic, released in 1993, was the first browser to do what?

It was developed at NCSA at the University of Illinois; earlier browsers included WorldWideWeb and ViolaWWW.

Whose garage did Google's two founders use as their first office in 1998?

Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim provided the first $100,000 investment that August.

Which Amazon founder was among Google's early angel investors in 1998?

Entrepreneur Ram Shriram also invested that year.

Which of these did NOT expire until September 2019?

All patents associated with PageRank had expired by September 2019.

Windows 1.0, released in November 1985, could not do what with its windows?

Windows were tiled instead; it ran as a 16-bit shell on MS-DOS.

Which two men incorporated Tesla Motors in July 2003?

Musk led the first funding round in 2004, became chairman and was named CEO in 2008.

Which Tesla model went into production first, in 2008?

The Model S followed in 2012, Model X in 2015 and Model 3 in 2017.

Which SpaceX rocket reached orbit in 2008 after three failed attempts?

It made SpaceX the first private company to develop and launch a liquid-fuelled rocket to orbit.

Under what name was Amazon founded on July 5, 1994?

Bezos renamed it Amazon that November; the company began in Bellevue, Washington.

What was the first item sold on eBay's predecessor AuctionWeb, for $14.83?

Pierre Omidyar checked the buyer knew it was broken; he replied that he collected broken laser pointers.

PayPal became a subsidiary of eBay in 2002 at what valuation?

It was spun off again in 2015; the company began as Fieldlink and then Confinity in 1998.

Nvidia's three founders sketched their initial ideas in a 1992 meeting at what kind of venue?

Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem founded the company on April 5, 1993.

Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make what?

Craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi set it up in Kyoto, where the company is still based.

Atari's Pong was created by Allan Alcorn as what?

Nolan Bushnell assigned it, and the quality convinced Atari to manufacture the 1972 game.

Which 1970s PARC computer pioneered the GUI, mouse and Ethernet networking together?

It is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers.

USB was introduced in which year to standardise peripheral connections?

It replaced serial, parallel and game ports as well as the Apple Desktop Bus.

Which Amazon subsidiary developed the Kindle hardware platform?

The Kindle began as a single device in 2007.

On what date was the first-generation iPad introduced?

Taiwanese press had predicted a February announcement based on industry sources.

The Raspberry Pi was originally created for what purpose?

Its low cost and flexibility made it popular far beyond the classroom.

The Arduino platform takes its name from what?

The project began in 2005 as a tool for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

Photoshop was created in 1987 by which pair of brothers?

They sold the distribution licence to Adobe in 1988; Thomas began it on a Macintosh Plus.

Google's 2005 purchase of Android Inc. cost at least how much?

A Google executive later called it the company's best deal ever.

Instagram began development under what name, as a mobile check-in app?

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched it for iOS in October 2010; Facebook bought it for about $1 billion in 2012.

Roughly how much did Facebook pay for WhatsApp in February 2014?

Founders Brian Acton and Jan Koum were former Yahoo employees.

Skype was created by Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis and four developers from which country?

It launched on August 29, 2003, and eBay bought it for $2.6 billion in 2005.

Zoom founder Eric Yuan left which company in 2011 with 40 engineers?

The startup was originally named Saasbee, Inc.

Snapchat's three creators were former students at which university?

Reggie Brown brought the disappearing-pictures idea to Evan Spiegel, who pulled in coder Bobby Murphy.

Uber's idea came after its founders spent how much hiring a private driver on New Year's Eve?

Garrett Camp was also inspired by struggling to find a taxi on a snowy night in Paris.

Airbnb's founders raised $30,000 in 2008 by selling what?

Boxes named after Obama and McCain funded them until Y Combinator took them on in 2009.

ELIZA's most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated what kind of professional?

Joseph Weizenbaum built the program at MIT between 1964 and 1967.

Siri was integrated into which Apple handset at its October 2011 release?

It had launched as a standalone iOS app in December 2010, spun off from SRI International research.

Amazon's Alexa was largely developed from Evi and which Polish speech synthesizer?

Amazon acquired the two technologies in 2012 and 2013; Alexa debuted in the Echo speaker.

How wide is the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror?

Its five main instruments cover ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light.

The James Webb Space Telescope's primary mirror is made of how many hexagonal segments?

The gold-plated beryllium segments form a 6.5-metre mirror, launched on Christmas Day 2021.

David Bradley's soft-reboot shortcut for the IBM PC originally used which key combination?

He changed it because the left side of the keyboard was too easy to bump accidentally.

What diameter were the first floppy disks IBM made in 1971?

The 5¼-inch and then 3½-inch formats followed and lasted into the 21st century.

Which 1956 IBM system was the first commercial computer to use a moving-head hard disk drive?

The first one used in the US auto industry went to Chrysler's MOPAR division in 1957.

Electroluminescence from a solid-state diode was first discovered in 1906 by whom?

Round of Marconi Labs saw carborundum crystals glow yellow, green, orange or blue.

Who built the first working laser in 1960?

He worked at Hughes Research Laboratories, building on theory by Townes and Schawlow.

Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit on 12 September 1958 at which company?

He had recorded his initial ideas that July, shortly after joining the firm.

Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs adapted which network's approach to create Ethernet at Xerox PARC?

Their coaxial-cable network linked Alto computers to prototype laser printers.

Kevlar was developed in 1965 by Stephanie Kwolek at which company?

It was first used commercially to replace steel in racing tyres, and is five times stronger than steel by weight.

George de Mestral got the idea for Velcro from which plant sticking to his dog?

The Swiss engineer conceived the hook-and-loop fastener in 1941 after an Alpine hunting trip.

Martin Cooper made the first handheld cellphone call on April 3, 1973, to a rival at which company?

He was working for Motorola and phoned from a Manhattan sidewalk.

Steven Sasson's 1975 digital camera prototype for Kodak had a resolution of how many megapixels?

It weighed 8 pounds and used a Fairchild CCD sensor of 100 by 100 pixels.

The JPEG image standard was introduced in which year?

By 2015 several billion JPEG images were being produced every day.

PDF has its roots in a 1991 Adobe initiative named after what?

PDF was released in 1993 and standardised as ISO 32000 in 2008.

Firefox was created in 2002 under which codename?

Its makers wanted a standalone browser rather than the Mozilla Application Suite bundle.

Google Chrome launched in September 2008 for which operating system?

It was built with components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla Firefox before Google forked WebKit into Blink.

Reddit's founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian were college roommates where?

Aaron Swartz joined in November 2005, and Condé Nast bought the site in October 2006.

GitHub has been a subsidiary of which company since 2018?

The site launched in April 2008 and is headquartered in San Francisco.

How much did LinkedIn sell for in December 2016?

It was Microsoft's largest acquisition at the time; LinkedIn had launched on May 5, 2003.

Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson originally wrote the game in which language?

Microsoft bought Mojang and the Minecraft IP for $2.5 billion in November 2014.

Twitter's board initially resisted Elon Musk's 2022 takeover bid using what strategy?

It then unanimously accepted his $44 billion offer on April 25; the deal closed on October 27.

Starting with which release did the blue screen of death turn black?

Blue error screens date back to the first Windows in 1985.

The Y2K problem arose because programs stored years using how many digits?

That made 2000 indistinguishable from 1900 to affected software.

Wi-Fi is based on which family of IEEE standards?

The Wi-Fi Alliance, with more than 800 member companies by 2017, certifies interoperability.

Which 1994 IBM device is retrospectively called the first true smartphone?

BellSouth sold about 50,000 units; it had a 4.5-inch touchscreen and could fax and email.

Which company sued Apple in 2015 over the trademark 'iWatch'?

The first Apple Watch was released in April 2015 and quickly became the best-selling wearable.

GoPro was founded in 2002 by whom?

It began as Woodman Labs and is based in San Mateo, California.

Kickstarter launched on April 28, 2009, with which trio of founders?

It opened to UK-based projects in October 2012 and Japan in September 2017.

Craigslist began in 1995 as what?

Craig Newmark was influenced by early online communities like the WELL and Usenet.

News Corporation bought Myspace in July 2005 for how much?

By June 2006 it had become the most visited website in the United States.

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 with what legal structure?

Musk and Altman were co-chairs, and $1 billion in capital was pledged.

Google acquired the British AI lab DeepMind in which year?

It merged with Google Brain to become Google DeepMind in April 2023.

Development of the chess computer Deep Blue began in 1985 at Carnegie Mellon under what name?

It became Deep Thought at IBM and was renamed Deep Blue in 1989.

Ada Lovelace is best known for her work on which proposed machine?

She was the first to see it had uses beyond pure calculation and is often called the first programmer.

On which machine did the future Rear Admiral Hopper start programming in 1944?

She rose to rear admiral in the US Navy and pioneered machine-independent languages.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie began developing Unix in 1969 at which lab?

It grew out of the troubled Multics project shared with MIT and General Electric.

Vint Cerf shares the title 'father of the Internet' with which TCP/IP co-developer?

They co-designed the protocol suite while Cerf was at Stanford in the early 1970s.

Bill Gates befriended Paul Allen at which private Seattle institution?

Gates enrolled at 13 and later dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to lead Microsoft.

Which award did Google's founders receive in 2004 for PageRank?

Page was born in Lansing, Michigan, and became Alphabet's CEO in 2015.

Mark Zuckerberg became the world's youngest self-made billionaire in 2008 at what age?

He launched Facebook at Harvard in February 2004 with roommates including Eduardo Saverin.

Jack Dorsey came up with the idea that became Twitter while studying where?

He and Biz Stone built a prototype in about two weeks after settling on SMS.

Jensen Huang founded Nvidia at what age?

He launched it in 1993 after a master's at Stanford and has been CEO ever since.