The world is a wonderful place and in our mind, it’s made even better by the technology, gadgetry and modern marvels that surround us.
To celebrate all this wonder we’ve put together some interesting facts about tech, gadgets and the history of the web that you might not know. You might be surprised and amused by what we’ve found.
This is the computer that was used to create the web
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is the man famously credited with creating the World Wide Web in the late 1980s.
It was this machine, a NeXT computer, that he used as the world’s first web server. He also used it while working at CERN to code the world’s first web browser known as WorldWideWeb, in 1990.
In a jiffy is more than just an expression
The phrase “in a jiffy” is often used as an expression of time, but it’s much more than that. It’s actually also a unit of time.
It’s used in several scientific spheres for measuring time. For example, in computer engineering, a jiffy is the length of one cycle of the computer’s system clock (roughly 10 milliseconds). Meanwhile, in the physics world, it represents the amount of time it takes light to travel a distance of one centimetre.
Email is older than the World Wide Web
Electronic mail was invented by Ray Tomlinson in the 1960s. It wasn’t until a couple of decades later that the World Wide Web would begin to take shape in the form we know and love today.
The first spam email was sent in 1978 by Gary Thuerk to several hundred users on ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). Since then, plenty of nefarious companies and individuals have jumped on that bandwagon, plaguing our inboxes with unwanted junk.
According to Statista, 47.3 per cent of e-mail sent in September 2020 was spam. And in 2019, around 293.6 billion spam emails were sent.
The average computer user blinks just seven times a minute
Research suggests that the average computer user blinks significantly less than normal while at their screen.
It is said that we blink seven times per minute instead of the usual 20. Hence why your eyes dry out more while working in front of a monitor.
Hewlett-Packard’s company name was almost Packard-Hewlett
Bill Hewlett and David Packard graduated from University in 1935. In typical fashion for the industry (that would become much more commonplace in the years to come) the two started their business in a garage.
The company was properly formed in 1939, though the pair could not decide on a name and ended up flipping a coin to determine whose name would come first. Thus HP was born, it could have easily have been PH instead.
The term robot actually means “forced labour”
Robots come in all shapes and sizes and sure we hope one day they might do our bidding and rid us of the most boring, taxing and unwanted jobs of society.
But did you know the term “robot” comes from a Czech word, robota, meaning “forced labour”? We just hope they never discover that to be the case as we’re fairly sure that’s when the robot uprising will begin.
Most internet traffic isn’t even real
A study in 2012 discovered that most of the traffic on the internet wasn’t actually people, but was quite often made up of bots, hackers and malicious programs.
51 per cent of all internet traffic is said to be “non-human” in that regard. This traffic is often attempting to steal data, hijack sites, carry out denial-of-service attacks and more.
Some people are scared of tech
Plenty of people have different fears. People are scared of spiders, some of thunderstorms, others of the taxman. But plenty of people are scared of tech too.
So much so it even has a name - Technophobia. There’s also “Nomophobia” - the fear of being without your mobile phone and “Cyberphobia” the fear computers. We generally just suffere from FOMO though, the fear of missing out.
A Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves or less
Back in 2010, Google’s researchers used supercomputers and an intelligent algorithm to fathom that any Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves or less.
That research also uncovered that a standard Rubik’s Cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different potential configurations.
Astronaut’s wonderful alternative to life insurance
In 1969, Astronauts embarking on the Apollo 11 space mission hit a bit of a snag when they discovered they couldn’t get life insurance in case the unthinkable should happen. The men obviously wanted their families to be provided for if they didn’t make it back.
They quickly realised that if they did die on the mission, their autographs would probably be in high demand. And thus, these signed envelopes appeared bearing the markings of the significant missions into space that could be sold by their families if need be.
