Fun Facts from the History of Computer Science

Abstract

164 surprising, verifiable facts from the history of computing, covering the people who built the field, the accidents that shaped it, the machines that defined it, and the decisions nobody planned for. Each fact links to a dedicated deep-dive article.

👤 People & Origins

The bug was real. On September 9, 1947, Grace Hopper’s team found a moth jammed in relay 70 of the Harvard Mark II and taped it in the logbook: “First actual case of bug being found.” The word “bug” for a defect predated the moth by 70 years.
Python is named after Monty Python. Guido van Rossum was reading BBC scripts of Monty Python’s Flying Circus over Christmas 1989 when he started implementing the language. Not the snake.
Linus Torvalds named Git after himself. “Git” is British slang for an unpleasant, stupid person. He wrote it in 10 days after losing access to BitKeeper.
Wozniak offered Apple to HP five times. HP rejected the Apple I and II designs every time. Policy required him to offer his inventions to his employer first.
“Algorithm” comes from a person’s name. From al-Khwarizmi, a 9th-century Persian mathematician. His book also gave us the word “algebra.”
“Robot” was invented by a playwright. Karel Čapek coined it in the 1920 play R.U.R., from Czech robota (forced labor). He was not a scientist.
Donald Knuth pays $2.56 per bug. One “hexadecimal dollar” for errors in The Art of Computer Programming. Most recipients frame the check rather than cash it.
Grace Hopper was 37 when she enlisted. The Navy waived its maximum age limit to take her. She was also underweight by Navy standards (105 pounds), requiring a second waiver. She went on to serve until age 79, the oldest active-duty officer in the US military at the time of her retirement.
Alan Turing ran a 2:46 marathon. In 1948, this time would have qualified him for the British Olympic team. He ran 40 miles to attend a meeting in London rather than take a train. His athletic ability was as exceptional as his mathematical one.
Dennis Ritchie died one week after Steve Jobs. Ritchie (co-creator of Unix and C) died on October 12, 2011. Jobs died October 5. Jobs’s death received days of global coverage; Ritchie’s passed with minimal mainstream attention despite his arguably greater impact on computing infrastructure.
John von Neumann memorized the Budapest phone directory. He could multiply 8-digit numbers in his head and recite pages of memorized text verbatim. During the Manhattan Project, he was considered the fastest human calculator alive.
Edsger Dijkstra never used a word processor. All of his papers, research memos, and the 1,300+ EWD (Edsger W. Dijkstra) manuscripts were written by hand with a fountain pen. He considered typewriters an inferior tool for mathematical thought.
Donald Knuth stopped using email in 1990. He announced that email had “already consumed fifteen years of my life” and switched back to paper mail. He reads his physical mail roughly once every three months and has a secretary who handles the backlog.
Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004 for inventing the World Wide Web. He never patented it, never took a royalty, and never became a billionaire. He has been asked why; he said a patent would have killed it.
The creator of JavaScript completed the first version in 10 days. Brendan Eich built JavaScript under deadline from Netscape management in May 1995. The design decisions made in those 10 days (prototype inheritance, coercion rules, the equality operators) became permanent by the time anyone noticed their consequences.
In 1968, one man demonstrated the mouse, video conferencing, collaborative editing, and hypertext — simultaneously. Doug Engelbart’s 90-minute presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco showed technologies that wouldn’t reach consumers for 15 to 40 years. The audience gave a standing ovation. It was later named “The Mother of All Demos.”
Linux was named by someone other than Linus Torvalds. Torvalds wanted to call his kernel “Freax.” The FTP server admin at Helsinki University, Ari Lemmke, disliked the name and renamed the upload directory “linux” without asking. Torvalds later admitted it was the better choice.
Dijkstra’s shortest-path algorithm was designed in 20 minutes at a café. In 1956, Edsger Dijkstra was sitting with his fiancée in Amsterdam when he conceived the algorithm in his head, no paper, no pencil. “Without pencil and paper you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities,” he later said. It now runs billions of times daily in GPS and network routing.
Charles Babbage declared war on street musicians. He filed 18 legal complaints in a single year, petitioned Parliament, and calculated that street noise cost him a quarter of his working time. The campaign may have consumed energy he might otherwise have directed toward completing the Analytical Engine, which he never finished.
The internet’s governance culture exists because no professors showed up. At the August 1968 ARPANET kickoff meeting in Santa Barbara, every attendee was a graduate student or staff member. The students expected “real experts” to take over, so they kept their design memos deliberately humble; SRI programmer Bill Duvall suggested the title “Request for Comments”. The experts never came, and RFCs still govern the internet today. See The Open Standards Process.

💻 Software & Languages

Apple’s third founder quit after twelve days. Ronald Wayne held 10% of Apple at its April 1976 founding, drew the first logo, and wrote the Apple I manual, then sold his stake back for $800, fearing unlimited partnership liability. He maintains it was the right call.
“Hello, World!” appeared before C was finished. Brian Kernighan used it in a 1972 Bell Labs tutorial for the language B. The phrase became universal through the 1978 K&R book.
IBM engineers thought the FORTRAN compiler was impossible. When Backus proposed it in 1953, colleagues were convinced no compiler could match hand-coded assembly. The 1957 result proved them wrong.
Ada Lovelace wrote a program for a machine that didn’t exist yet. Her 1843 Bernoulli number algorithm was correct: run on modern software emulations of the Engine (correcting one typo in the printed table), it produces the right results.
More COBOL exists than Python. COBOL (1959) processes an estimated $3 trillion in daily commerce. Total COBOL code in production exceeds all Python code ever written.
JavaScript was called “Mocha,” then “LiveScript.” It was renamed “JavaScript” as a marketing decision to capitalize on Java’s popularity, despite sharing almost nothing with Java beyond curly-brace syntax. The name confusion persists 30 years later.
PHP was created to track who visited a resume. Rasmus Lerdorf built the first version of PHP in 1994 to show him when people read his online CV. The name stood for “Personal Home Page.” It now officially stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”, a recursive acronym.
SQL was originally called SEQUEL. IBM had to rename it when they discovered SEQUEL was trademarked by a UK aircraft manufacturer. The original paper (Chamberlin & Boyce, 1974) is still titled “SEQUEL: A Structured English Query Language.”
The Linux kernel has grown 2,700× since 1991. Torvalds’s original release was approximately 10,000 lines of code. As of 2024, the kernel contains over 27 million lines, maintained by thousands of contributors from hundreds of companies.
The first Easter egg in software was hidden because Atari didn’t credit programmers. In 1979, Warren Robinett hid “Created by Warren Robinett” in the Atari 2600 game Adventure, accessible only through a hidden room. When Atari discovered it, they decided to keep it rather than reprogram every cartridge already shipped.
Ruby 1.0 shipped on Christmas Day. Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto began work on Ruby on February 24, 1993, and released version 1.0 on December 25, 1996. New Ruby versions still traditionally ship on December 25. He wanted a language that made programmers happy rather than treating them as machines.
The Space Shuttle’s backup flight computer was deliberately written by a different team who had never seen the primary code. Both systems were written in HAL/S, but by different contractors with different compilers, and the backup team was forbidden to see the primary code, so no single design error could appear in both. They achieved zero common-mode failures across 135 missions.
MS-DOS was purchased for $50,000. Microsoft bought QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products, sold it to IBM for a per-copy license, and retained rights to sell it to others. The deal made Microsoft a software empire. The original programmer, Tim Paterson, was later hired by Microsoft.
BASIC was invented so non-scientists could use computers. John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth created it in 1964 specifically for arts and humanities students who had no interest in learning machine code. The language ran on a time-sharing system that allowed 20 students to use the same computer simultaneously.
The goto controversy was renamed by an editor. Dijkstra submitted his famous 1968 letter under a different title. Editor Niklaus Wirth changed it to “Go To Statement Considered Harmful”, which launched the “X Considered Harmful” template that tech writers have used ever since.
C has no defined behavior for division by zero. The C standard classifies it as “undefined behavior,” meaning compilers can legally do anything, return garbage, crash, or continue. Some compilers optimize around undefined behavior in ways that produce subtly incorrect programs, a persistent source of security vulnerabilities.
Unix was built to play a video game. Ken Thompson found a disused PDP-7 at Bell Labs and wanted to run his game “Space Travel” on it. To run the game, he needed an operating system. Over roughly three weeks in 1969, he wrote one. The operating system became Unix, ancestor of Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android.
Java was named Oak first. James Gosling named the language Oak (after a tree outside his office) while working in Sun’s “Green Project.” Then “Oak” turned out to be trademarked. They held a brainstorming session over coffee and chose Java (after the Indonesian island’s coffee) from a shortlist that included “Silk” and “DNA.”

🔧 Hardware & Architecture

The Apollo Guidance Computer had 4 KB of RAM. The ROM was literally woven by hand, wires threaded through or around magnetic cores at Raytheon. A programming error discovered late required weeks to weave a new rope.
The IBM PC ran at 4.77 MHz because of a cheap TV part. IBM clocked the machine off the standard 14.31818 MHz NTSC television crystal: divided by 3 it gave the CPU clock, divided by 4 the color burst the CGA video card needed. One commodity part served both.
The first mouse was wooden. Engelbart’s 1964 prototype had a wooden shell with two metal wheels. He received no royalties when the mouse became universal: the patent (granted 1970, expired 1987) had nearly run out by the time the Macintosh made the mouse standard.
The CD’s 74-minute capacity is tied to Beethoven’s Ninth. Sony rejected Philips’s 60-minute proposal so a disc could hold the entire Ninth Symphony; the account is usually credited to vice-president Norio Ohga, a trained singer, and engineers on the project call the Beethoven story undocumented. The resulting 120mm disc held 650 MB, the storage unit for the entire first decade of CD-ROM software.
The first transistor was demonstrated on December 16, 1947. Bardeen and Brattain did the work; Shockley, who ran the lab, received most of the credit. All three won the 1956 Nobel Prize. Shockley later founded Shockley Semiconductor, and his management style was so destructive that eight of his engineers left to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which gave birth to Silicon Valley.
Intel’s first product was a memory chip, not a processor. The 3101 SRAM (1969) preceded the 4004 microprocessor by two years. Intel was founded as a memory company; the microprocessor was a side project requested by a Japanese calculator manufacturer.
The Commodore 64 is the best-selling single personal computer model in history. Approximately 17 million units were sold between 1982 and 1994. It’s in the Guinness World Records. The machine sold primarily because it was cheap ($595 at launch, half the price of competitors) and had excellent gaming and sound capabilities.
The first hard drive was the size of two refrigerators. The IBM 350 RAMAC (1956) weighed over a ton, required a fork lift to move, stored 5 MB, and rented for $3,200 per month. Today’s microSD cards store 1 TB (200,000 times as much) in a 15mm × 11mm chip.
Moore’s Law was about transistor count, not speed. Gordon Moore’s 1965 prediction was that the number of components on a chip would double approximately every year. The popular version (“computing power doubles every 18 months”) is a misquotation. Moore himself later described the law as more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than a natural law.
The first iPhone’s screen was originally plastic. Steve Jobs called Corning CEO Wendell Weeks about six months before the June 2007 retail launch and demanded scratch-resistant glass. Corning had invented the chemically strengthened glass in the 1960s (the “Chemcor” process) but shelved it when no market materialized. Corning converted a Kentucky plant and delivered on schedule.
The original iPhone had no copy-paste for two years. Launched June 29, 2007, with no way to select, copy, or paste text between apps. Steve Jobs reportedly argued it was unnecessary. Copy-paste arrived in iPhone OS 3.0, June 2009.
The Raspberry Pi sold out in minutes — to adults. The £25 computer designed in 2012 to teach children to program was bought almost entirely by adult hobbyists and engineers. The founders expected to sell 10,000 units total; they sold 100,000 in the first day and have shipped over 50 million since.
The ENIAC’s operators were told it was a weather predictor. By later project accounts (the story is thinly documented), the Army recruits who kept the machine running (replacing vacuum tubes, patching cables) were given a cover story about meteorology. The machine was actually computing ballistic tables for artillery targeting.
The original Macintosh (1984) has its team’s signatures molded inside the case. Steve Jobs believed that artists sign their work. The signatures of the roughly four dozen members of the early-1982 Mac team were embossed in the plastic, visible only if you removed the case. No customer ever saw them in normal use.
The Xerox Star (1981) was the first commercial GUI computer — at $16,595. The full workstation with server cost $75,000. Steve Jobs saw a demo of the Alto (Star’s predecessor) in 1979 at Xerox PARC and immediately understood its significance. Xerox management did not.
UNIVAC correctly called the 1952 election — and CBS hid the result. Early on election night, with 3 million votes counted, UNIVAC predicted Eisenhower would win with 438 electoral votes (final: 442). CBS decided the prediction contradicted pollsters’ expectations and suppressed it. After Eisenhower’s landslide, CBS sheepishly admitted the computer had been right all along.
Apple designed a touchscreen phone in 1983. Design consultant Hartmut Esslinger sketched a corded desk telephone fused with a Mac, operated by a stylus on a built-in screen, 24 years before the iPhone. It was never built; the drawings surfaced in 2011 from Stanford’s Apple archive. It was a landline with a pen, not a pocket multi-touch device.

🌐 Networks & Internet

The first ARPANET message was “LO.” Charley Kline tried to type “LOGIN.” The system crashed after two letters. An hour later he tried again and succeeded.
The @ symbol was chosen because it appeared in no one’s name. Tomlinson’s thirty-second decision in 1971 became the universal mark of internet identity.
The Web was nearly called TIM. Among the names Tim Berners-Lee considered and rejected in 1990: “Mine of Information” (MOI, French for “me”), “The Information Mine” (initials: TIM), and “Information Mesh” (too close to “mess”). He judged the first two too egocentric and settled on World Wide Web: three separate words, no hyphens, W3 for short.
Symbolics.com was the first registered domain name. March 15, 1985. Registration was free. The company, which made Lisp Machines for AI research, no longer exists.
Ray Tomlinson forgot the first email he sent. Probably “QWERTYUIOP.” He called it “the first email not worth reading.” He said he invented it on the side because “it seemed like a neat idea,” with no sense it would become the world’s dominant communication medium. He died in 2016.
Netscape’s IPO started the dot-com boom — the company had never made a profit. Priced at $28 a share, the stock hit $75 intraday and closed at $58.25. The company was 16 months old.
The internet was not designed to survive nuclear war. This is a persistent myth. ARPANET’s purpose was resource sharing between universities. The distributed routing was an engineering elegance, not a military requirement. RAND Corporation’s Paul Baran separately designed a survivable communications network, but ARPANET was not built to those specs.
Amazon started as “Cadabra.” Jeff Bezos changed it when his lawyer kept hearing “cadaver” on the phone. Bezos also considered “Relentless.com”: that URL still redirects to Amazon.
Google’s first server was in a Lego case. Page and Brin built their first storage system from ten 4 GB hard drives in a Lego brick enclosure because Lego allowed cheap, modular expansion. The server is now in the Stanford Computer History collection.
HTTP 418 “I’m a Teapot” is a real status code. Defined in RFC 2324 (1998), an April Fools’ Day RFC for the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP). It returns a 418 error when you try to brew coffee with a teapot. Modern web frameworks implement it.
IPv4 officially ran out of addresses on February 3, 2011. IANA allocated the last blocks. The internet has continued to function only because NAT (Network Address Translation) lets multiple devices share a single IP address, a hack that was supposed to be temporary in 1994 and became permanent.
Email spam is named after a Monty Python sketch. In the sketch, a Viking chorus drowns out all conversation by chanting “spam”, just as unsolicited email drowns out wanted messages. The same Python sketch inspired Python’s spam and eggs variable naming convention.
Pets.com spent $2 million on a Super Bowl ad in 2000, then went bankrupt 9 months later. The sock puppet mascot became an icon of dot-com excess. The company had $22 million in revenue against $147 million in expenses and lasted 268 days after its IPO.
The world’s first webcam watched a coffee pot. In 1991, Cambridge researchers pointed a camera at the shared coffee machine so they could check from their desks whether it was empty. Connected to the web in November 1993, the Trojan Room coffee pot became the first thing ever watched by a webcam. The camera was switched off in August 2001; the pot sold on eBay for £3,350.
“Surfing the internet” was coined by a librarian. The metaphor was popularized in print by Jean Armour Polly, who titled a 1992 article “Surfing the Internet”, reaching for a water metaphor while looking at a mousepad with a surfer on it. Not a marketer, not a programmer.

🤖 AI & Games

Deep Blue’s most puzzling move against Kasparov was a bug. Game 1, 1997: the program fell back to a near-random move. Kasparov (who actually won that game) misread it as machine intelligence, was rattled, and lost his composure (and Game 2) for the rest of the match.
Tennis for Two (1958) was built to make a physics lab seem interesting to visitors. Physicist William Higinbotham never filed a patent. The game ran on an analog computer and a 5-inch oscilloscope.
Claude Shannon juggled while riding a unicycle through Bell Labs. He derived the first mathematical theorem about juggling, built a maze-learning robot mouse in 1950, and built a wearable roulette computer with Edward Thorp in 1961.
Shannon’s “Ultimate Machine” did nothing except switch itself off. When you flipped it on, a mechanical arm emerged from the box, turned the switch off, and retreated. The idea came from Marvin Minsky; Shannon built it and kept one on his desk. Arthur C. Clarke found it “unspeakably sinister.”
ELIZA (1966) was designed to demonstrate how superficial chatbots are. Joseph Weizenbaum built it to show that people would anthropomorphize any sufficiently responsive program. He was horrified when his secretary asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it privately. His book Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) was a direct response to his own invention.
The “Mechanical Turk” of 1770 — a chess-playing automaton — had a human hidden inside. The “machine” that beat Napoleon and Frederick the Great at chess was actually a master player concealed in a cabinet. Jeff Bezos named Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform after it as a joke about “artificial artificial intelligence.”
AlphaZero learned chess in 9 hours and then beat Stockfish. Starting from only the rules (no human games) AlphaZero played 44 million games against itself and then defeated the world’s strongest traditional chess engine 155 wins to 6 losses in 1,000 games. It evaluates 80,000 positions per second; Stockfish evaluates 70 million.
IBM’s Watson won Jeopardy by processing 200 million pages of content. It could not access the internet during the game. Its most memorable moment was answering “What is Toronto?????” to a Final Jeopardy clue in the category “U.S. Cities”, while wagering an oddly precise $947.
The first commercial video game was Computer Space (1971), and it failed. Nolan Bushnell sold about 1,500 units of his coin-op Space War clone. He then designed Pong (1972) to be simpler, specifically because Computer Space’s controls confused bar patrons. Bushnell went on to found Atari.
The original Doom (1993) spread through user-to-user piracy — intentionally. id Software released the first episode as shareware and relied on copying to distribute it. John Carmack publicly said piracy was fine; the goal was for the game to be played. This was the first large-scale “viral” software distribution strategy.
AlphaGo’s “Move 37” in Game 2 against Lee Sedol (2016) was a move no human would have played. Professional commentators initially thought it was an error. AlphaGo won that game and the match 4-1. The one game Sedol won (Game 4, Move 78) is now called “God’s Touch” and was the only move that defeated AlphaGo in the entire match series.
The first AI-generated artwork sold at Christie’s went for $432,500. “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy” (2018), created by the Paris collective Obvious using a GAN, sold for 45× its estimate. The “signature” at the bottom is part of the GAN’s loss function: min_G max_D Ex[log(D(x))] + Ez[log(1 - D(G(z)))].
Spacewar! (1962) was the first video game to spread between computers. Created at MIT on a PDP-1, it propagated to virtually every institution that owned one, an early form of viral software distribution. It directly inspired Nolan Bushnell to create Pong and found Atari.
The first esports champion won John Carmack’s Ferrari. Dennis “Thresh” Fong won id Software’s Red Annihilation Quake tournament at E3 1997 (final score 14 to −1) and drove home Carmack’s Ferrari 328 GTS. Guinness lists him as the first professional gamer; his WASD+mouse setup became the standard FPS control scheme.

🔐 Security

The first computer virus was a teenage prank. Rich Skrenta, 15, wrote Elk Cloner in 1982 for Apple II computers. Every 50th boot displayed a poem. He wanted to annoy his friends.
The first computer criminal convicted in the US was Robert T. Morris — who later co-founded Y Combinator. His 1988 Morris Worm infected ~6,000 internet-connected computers. He said he released it to measure the size of the internet. He was convicted in 1990 and fined $10,050. He went on to become a professor at MIT and co-found Y Combinator with Paul Graham.
The first antivirus program was written to delete the first virus. “Reaper” (1972) was created specifically to hunt and destroy “Creeper” (1971). The cybersecurity industry’s arms race began with these two programs on the ARPANET, before most people knew what a computer was.
Kevin Mitnick’s primary hacking tool was the telephone. The most wanted computer criminal in America in the 1990s used social engineering (calling people and persuading them to give him information) for most of his intrusions. He had remarkable technical skills but his fastest path into secure systems was always human psychology. See Kevin Mitnick.
Stuxnet used four zero-day exploits simultaneously. The worm that destroyed Iranian nuclear centrifuges (2010) used four previously-unknown Windows vulnerabilities, unprecedented complexity. The previous record for exploits in a single piece of malware was one. It was the first cyberweapon to cause physical industrial damage.
The NSA spent $250 million per year to weaken encryption standards. The BULLRUN program, revealed by Snowden in 2013, included inserting a backdoor into the Dual EC DRBG random number generator, which was in NIST standards and used by RSA Security’s products. RSA Security had accepted $10 million from the NSA to use the weakened standard as default.
The most common password after every major breach is “123456”. After the 2012 LinkedIn breach (117 million accounts), the top 10 passwords included “linkedin,” “password,” “123456789,” and “12345678.” Security researchers have found that password policies requiring special characters actually make passwords less secure, users choose “Password1!” rather than a longer random passphrase.
The SSL protocol that secures HTTPS was invented by Netscape. Every encrypted web connection traces to a company that was acquired in 1999 and no longer exists. The “S” in HTTPS is Netscape’s legacy.
MD5 can be cracked for a single password in under one second on a modern GPU. MD5 was designed as a checksum algorithm, not a password hash. Using it for passwords was always incorrect, but it was used by millions of websites through the 2010s.
The “I Love You” virus infected 50 million computers in 10 days in 2000. That was roughly 10% of all internet-connected machines at the time. The creators were from the Philippines; at the time, the Philippines had no computer crime laws and they were never prosecuted.
The man who wrote the world’s password rules apologized for them. Bill Burr’s 2003 NIST guidance (special characters, change every 90 days) was written under time pressure from a 1980s whitepaper and copied by IT departments worldwide. In 2017 he told the Wall Street Journal: “Much of what I did I now regret.” NIST had just replaced his rules with the opposite advice: long memorable passphrases, no forced rotation. See The History of Passwords and Authentication.
Google recruited engineers with an anonymous billboard. In July 2004 a Highway 101 billboard read only “{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com”. The answer (7427466391) led to a second puzzle and finally a Google hiring page. No logo anywhere: only solvers ever learned who was asking. See Recruiting by Puzzle.

💰 Business & Industry

Google was named BackRub before it was named Google. The “Google” name is a misspelling of “googol” (10^100); investor Andy Bechtolsheim made it permanent in 1998 by writing his $100,000 check to “Google Inc.” before any such company existed.
WhatsApp had 55 employees when Facebook paid $19 billion for it. Per-employee acquisition price: $345 million. WhatsApp had 450 million users, more than Twitter at the time. The company’s operating costs were kept low by using Erlang, which allowed extremely efficient server operations.
Instagram had 13 employees when Facebook paid $1 billion for it. The app was 551 days old. Instagram’s estimated 2021 revenue: $24 billion. The acquisition is considered one of the greatest bargains in tech history and the subject of antitrust investigation.
eBay’s “Pez dispenser” founding story was a PR fabrication. Founder Pierre Omidyar’s publicist invented the story about eBay being created for his fiancée to trade Pez dispensers because it was more charming than the truth (a marketplace for collectibles). The fabrication was revealed by Adam Cohen in the 2002 book The Perfect Store.
AOL’s dial-up CDs at peak accounted for 50% of all CDs manufactured in the world. Marketing chief Jan Brandt’s estimate. AOL distributed 250 million CDs in the US. The total marketing spend on CD distribution was $300 million. The strategy was spectacularly effective, until it wasn’t.
Apple was the first company valued at $1 trillion: August 2, 2018. Amazon crossed $1T in September 2018. Microsoft in April 2019. Alphabet in January 2020. By 2024, Apple and Microsoft both crossed $3 trillion.
Netscape’s 1995 IPO valued a profitless, 16-month-old company at almost $3 billion on day one. It became the “big bang” of the dot-com era despite raising only about $140 million. The largest tech IPO ever by capital raised is Alibaba’s 2014 listing at roughly $25 billion. The largest IPO of any company in history is Saudi Aramco at $29.4 billion (2019).
Microsoft lost 80% of its value between 1999 and 2009. At its dot-com peak, Microsoft was worth $619 billion (roughly $1.1T in 2024 dollars). By March 2009, under Steve Ballmer, it was worth about $135 billion. It recovered to $3 trillion under Satya Nadella in January 2024.
Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game. Publishers had rejected the nearly bankrupt Finnish studio 51 times for earlier titles; Angry Birds (2009) was the last attempt. It became the most downloaded app in App Store history at the time and spawned a franchise worth over $2 billion.
Amazon’s first product was a book, but Bezos’s original list had 20 categories. He chose books because there were more books in print (3 million titles) than any retailer could stock, making the “infinite selection” advantage greatest in that category. He called it an “everything store” from the beginning.
Yahoo turned down $44.6 billion from Microsoft. In 2008, Microsoft offered a 62% premium over Yahoo’s market price. Yahoo’s board rejected it as undervaluing the company. Microsoft withdrew. Nine years later, Verizon acquired Yahoo’s core business for $4.83 billion, roughly 11 cents on the dollar.
Google tried to sell itself for $1 million — and was refused. In early 1999, Page and Brin offered Google to Excite for $1 million (venture capitalist Vinod Khosla talked them down to $750,000). Excite CEO George Bell turned it down, reportedly worried that a search engine too good at finding answers would drive users away from the portal. Excite filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
The inventor of the computer never held a patent on it. Konrad Zuse filed his Z3 patent application in 1941; Triumph-Adler and IBM filed oppositions, and in 1967 Germany’s Federal Patent Court rejected it for good, citing “mangelnde Erfindungshöhe” (insufficient inventive step). Of Zuse’s 58 patent applications, eight were granted.

🎲 Culture, Standards & Trivia

The first tweet sold for $2.9 million — then the buyer couldn’t get $280 for it. Jack Dorsey’s March 21, 2006 test tweet was sold as an NFT in 2021. When the buyer tried to resell it a year later, the best offer was $280.
January 19, 2038 is the next Y2K. At 03:14:07 UTC, 32-bit Unix timestamps overflow. Many embedded systems have no update path.
The number 42 has no hidden significance. Douglas Adams chose “The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” by picking an ordinary, middle-sized number. He explicitly denied any deeper meaning, calling any interpretation “too simple” to be real. Despite this, programmers worldwide use 42 as the canonical magic number in examples and demonstrations.
The GIF creator insists it’s pronounced “JIF.” Steve Wilhite, who designed the Graphics Interchange Format in 1987 at CompuServe, stated definitively at the 2013 Webby Awards that it’s pronounced like the peanut butter brand, soft G. The internet continues to disagree. Unisys’s enforcement of the GIF compression patent from 1994 led to PNG, a patent-free replacement released in 1996.
The first emoji set is in the Museum of Modern Art. Shigetaka Kurita designed 176 12×12-pixel images for NTT DoCoMo in Japan in 1999. MoMA acquired the original set in 2016, calling it “an example of interface design” worthy of preservation.
TRON (1982) was disqualified from the Academy Awards for “cheating.” The film used computer-generated imagery for approximately 15-20 minutes of screen time. The Academy’s special effects committee ruled that using computer assistance was cheating. It remains one of the most spectacular misjudgments of the awards committee.
HAL 9000’s name is IBM shifted one letter earlier. H=I-1, A=B-1, L=M-1. Arthur C. Clarke denied it was intentional in some interviews and seemed less certain in others. Stanley Kubrick never commented. The initials are too precise to be accidental.
The first computer-generated music was played in 1951. The CSIRO Mark 1 (CSIRAC) in Melbourne played “Colonel Bogey March.” The first computer to play music was Australian, two years before IBM’s 701 and four years before the transistor radio. CSIRAC’s performances were never recorded; the oldest surviving recording of computer music is the Ferranti Mark I in Manchester, captured by the BBC in 1951.
Stack Overflow was founded because of a podcast. Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky were podcasting about software development in 2008 and kept complaining about the poor quality of programming Q&A sites. They decided to build a better one. The public beta launched on September 15, 2008.
USB was designed to be reversible — and then wasn’t. The USB Type-A connector, designed in 1994–1996 by a seven-company consortium, was supposed to be easy to plug in. Users flip it to the wrong orientation roughly 50% of the time on first try. USB-C (2014) finally solved the problem. The 20-year gap between identifying the problem and fixing it is a case study in standards committee inertia.
The world’s first commercial online purchase was a Sting CD in 1994. Phil Brandenberger bought Ten Summoner’s Tales from NetMarket on August 11, 1994, using a prototype of the first secure credit card transaction system. The transaction was encrypted with PGP, the first secure e-commerce purchase in history.
IPv6, designed to replace IPv4, was finalized in 1998 but took 20+ years to gain majority adoption. IPv6 allows 340 undecillion addresses (3.4 × 10^38, enough for every atom on Earth to have its own IP address). As of 2024, approximately 45% of Google traffic is IPv6. The transition has been described as “the world’s longest scheduled migration.”
The Commodore 64’s SID chip (sound) was so sophisticated it’s still used in music. Designer Robert Yannes built the MOS 6581 with features that no commercial synthesizer had at the time. There are still active musicians who use original SID chips for their distinctive sound, and the fan-maintained High Voltage SID Collection archives over 50,000 SID tunes.
Wikipedia has no defined maximum length for articles. Its policy states “Wikipedia is not paper.” The most edited page in English Wikipedia’s history is “George W. Bush” with over 48,000 edits, overtaken by 2025 only by “List of WWE personnel.”
The Internet Archive has saved over 800 billion web pages. The Wayback Machine (founded 1996) stores snapshots of websites at various points in time. Link-rot studies find that roughly a quarter of older deep links no longer work; the Wayback Machine is often the only surviving copy. The Archive also preserves books, music, films, and software, including the source code of thousands of games.
ARPANET’s first international connection was to Norway (1973). Before the internet connected countries, ARPANET reached the NORSAR seismic array in Norway via satellite. The UK (via the Royal Radar Establishment and University College London) followed shortly after. The first truly international connection predates most people’s awareness of ARPANET existing.
The term “Silicon Valley” was popularized by a journalist in 1971. Don Hoefler used it in a three-part series titled “Silicon Valley USA” in Electronic News (the term itself was suggested to him by friend Ralph Vaerst and had appeared in print slightly earlier). The region already existed as a semiconductor cluster; the name gave it an identity that eventually meant more than semiconductors.
South Korea’s internet speeds are exceptional because of a financial crisis. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the Korean government subsidized broadband deployment as an economic stimulus measure. The policy was not primarily about internet access but about creating construction jobs. South Korea has had some of the world’s fastest consumer internet ever since.
Estonia has the world’s most digital government, because it had no legacy systems. After regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Estonia built its government infrastructure from scratch on digital-first principles: online voting, digital identity, e-residency for non-citizens, and fully digital medical records. Starting from zero was an advantage.
Rebuilding the Linux kernel from scratch would cost over a billion dollars. A Linux Foundation study using the COCOMO cost model priced kernel 2.6.25 (6.8 million lines, an estimated 7,500 person-years of work) at $1.4 billion in 2008. A 2024 Harvard study estimated that firms would have to spend $8.8 trillion to recreate the open-source software they use. All of it is freely available.
“Every two days we create as much information as we did up to 2003.” Eric Schmidt’s 2010 claim (about five exabytes every two days) was marketing arithmetic resting on a 2003 Berkeley study, but the direction held: IDC estimated the world’s total data at approximately 120 zettabytes in 2023 (1 zettabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes).
The space bar is the most frequently pressed key. In English text, spaces account for approximately 17-20% of all keystrokes. The letter ’e’ is second. The least-frequently used letter keys in English text are ‘z,’ ‘q,’ and ‘j.’
The original Game Boy had no backlight. Nintendo never added a light; third parties filled the gap with accessories like the licensed Light Boy magnifier-light and Nyko’s Worm Light (1999, for the Game Boy Color). The Game Boy’s battery life of 15+ hours was achieved partly by eliminating the backlight entirely. Players routinely angled the device toward windows or lamps to see the screen.
The first software patent was granted in 1968. US Patent 3,380,029, a data-sorting method by Martin Goetz of Applied Data Research. The question of whether software should be patentable at all remains unresolved and continues to generate litigation.
The first HTTP specification fits on one page. Tim Berners-Lee’s HTTP 0.9 specification (1991) runs about 700 words and supports a single command: GET. The protocol has been revised continuously since: HTTP/2 (2015), HTTP/3 (2022), but the core concept of a request-response protocol for hypertext has not changed.
Nobody designed the blue link. The first browser showed links as plain underlined text on a grayscale NeXT screen. Blue arrived when browsers went color (NCSA Mosaic in 1993 did the most to spread it); Berners-Lee has said he recalls no design rationale for it. The web’s most universal visual convention was never anyone’s decision.
“Wi-Fi” doesn’t stand for anything. The name was invented in 2000 by the branding consultancy Interbrand (the firm that also named Prozac) because “IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence” would not sell routers at Best Buy. The “Wireless Fidelity” tagline in early marketing was a retroactive invention. The Wi-Fi Alliance officially dropped it and confirmed Wi-Fi has no meaning.
The save icon is a floppy disk nobody has seen. The square “save” glyph depicts a 3.5-inch floppy disk, a 1.44 MB medium obsolete since around 2000 that a whole generation has never touched. It’s the most famous skeuomorph in software: a fossil of dead hardware you press thousands of times a year.
Tor got its name because people kept asking “which onion routing project?” Roger Dingledine’s stock answer was that he worked on “the onion routing”; colleague Rachel Greenstadt pointed out the acronym. Dingledine liked that “Tor” is also a standalone German word (it means “gate”). See Tor and Anonymity Networks.
The first head of state to send an email was Queen Elizabeth II, in 1976. On March 26, 1976, during a visit to the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern, the Queen sent a message over the ARPANET, arranged by internet pioneer Peter Kirstein. Most heads of state followed roughly two decades later.
“All your base are belong to us” came from a bad video-game translation. Sega of Europe’s clumsy 1991 English translation of the intro to the shooter Zero Wing produced the line spoken by villain CATS. Rediscovered around 1999 and made into a Flash animation in 2001, it became one of the first worldwide internet memes, and turned up on real street signs. See Internet Memes.

🌍 Geographic & Geopolitical

China manufactures over 70% of the world’s smartphones. Foxconn’s Zhengzhou facility assembles an estimated 350,000 iPhones per day at peak production, employing 350,000 workers. Apple’s supply chain involves over 200 suppliers in 43 countries, but final assembly is almost entirely in China.
Taiwan’s TSMC makes over 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. A single company on a single island produces the overwhelming majority of chips at 3nm and below. The geopolitical implications (Taiwan’s strategic importance as chip supplier) are covered in Morris Chang and TSMC.
India produces more engineering graduates per year than the US and Europe combined. The IT boom made software engineering the country’s most aspirational career and built Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune into global technology hubs. The IT industry’s history is covered in India’s IT Industry.
The Soviet Union’s decision to clone IBM mainframes in the 1970s is considered its fatal computing error. Instead of developing original architectures (like the competitive BESM-6), Soviet engineers were directed to copy IBM’s System/360. The result was permanent technical dependency on a foreign standard and no ability to innovate ahead of it. See Soviet and Russian Computing.
Finland produced three globally significant tech contributions: Linux, Nokia, and Angry Birds. A country of 5.5 million people produced the world’s dominant mobile operating system kernel, the dominant mobile phone manufacturer of the early 2000s, and the most-downloaded paid app of the early App Store years. Nokia’s collapse and Linux’s rise happened simultaneously, one Finnish technology failure and one global success.
Germany’s early computer science students ran their programs on a bishop’s and a brewery’s computers. When the Fachhochschule Regensburg (today OTH Regensburg) started its Informatik degree in 1973, programming courses ran on borrowed machines: the electrical engineering department’s Zuse Z23, the university computing center’s TR 440, and an IBM System/360 owned by the regional power utility. Extra computing time came from the diocese of Regensburg and the princely Thurn und Taxis brewery. See European Computer Science Academia.
East Germany had a top-level domain that was never connected to the internet. The GDR’s country code .dd stood on the ISO list, but Jon Postel never delegated it: adding Warsaw Pact states to the root zone was politically impossible during the Cold War. The domain was used anyway, in isolated university networks in Jena and Dresden, and vanished with reunification in 1990. See The Domain Name System.

🔢 Numbers & Scale

Google’s search index contains over 100 petabytes of data. The engine processes over 8.5 billion queries per day (roughly 100,000 per second). Even so, the index covers only a fraction of the total web; the rest sits behind logins, paywalls, and dynamic generation.
The number of lines of code in a modern car exceeds 100 million. Boeing 787: 6.5 million lines. Android OS: ~12 million lines. F-35 fighter jet: ~8 million lines. A modern car (all systems combined): ~100 million lines. Windows NT 3.1 (1993): 4 million lines. Windows 10 (the complete OS): ~50 million lines.
The conscious mind is a low-bandwidth device. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi estimated conscious attention at roughly 120 bits per second, about enough to follow two people speaking at once. Global internet traffic passed a zettabyte per year around 2016; no human attends to more than a vanishing fraction of what the network moves.
There are more possible chess games than atoms in the observable universe. The Shannon number (estimated games of chess) is approximately 10^120. Observable universe atoms: approximately 10^80. This is why chess is not “solved” and why Deep Blue and Stockfish cannot simply enumerate all possibilities.
A single strand of DNA can theoretically store 215 petabytes per gram. DNA data storage has been demonstrated in laboratory conditions. Microsoft and the University of Washington have stored and retrieved 200 MB of data in synthetic DNA strands. DNA is the highest-density storage medium in existence.
The first computer worm (Morris Worm, 1988) crashed 10% of the internet. At the time, the internet had approximately 60,000 connected computers. The worm infected 6,000 of them. By comparison, the internet now has approximately 5 billion connected devices.
A USB-C charger outcomputes the Apollo Guidance Computer. A 2020 analysis by engineer Forrest Heller found that the controller chip in a modern 45W USB-C charger runs at 48 MHz with more RAM and ROM than the AGC, which flew crews to the Moon at about 2 MHz with roughly 4 KB of RAM.
Stack Overflow’s archive answers most questions before they are asked. The site accumulated over 24 million questions and 36 million answers by 2025, and the vast majority of its tens of millions of monthly visitors find an existing answer without posting anything new.
The Bitcoin blockchain uses more energy per year than some countries. Bitcoin’s annual energy consumption has been estimated at 120–150 TWh (comparable to Argentina or the Netherlands). A single transaction has been estimated at roughly 1,400 kWh, enough electricity to power an average US household for 50 days.
The most manufactured artifact in human history is the MOSFET. An estimated 13 sextillion (1.3 × 10²²) transistors had been produced by 2018, 99.9 percent of them MOS devices, orders of magnitude more than the number of stars in the Milky Way. The device type was demonstrated at Bell Labs in 1960 and shelved there as too slow to pursue. See The Transistor.
Claude Shannon estimated the information content of English at 1.0-1.3 bits per character. This means typical English text has approximately 75% redundancy; you could remove 75% of letters and a reader could reconstruct the original. This is why file compression works, why autocomplete works, and why you can read this sentence wth sme lttrs mssng.
“Gangnam Style” outgrew YouTube’s view counter. YouTube counted views in a signed 32-bit integer (maximum 2,147,483,647). In December 2014, PSY’s video became the first to pass it; Google engineers had quietly moved the counter to 64 bits before the rollover. Guinness certified it as the first video to require a 64-bit counter.
Pac-Man’s ghosts cannot aim upward. Direction vectors are two signed bytes packed into one 16-bit register; doubling the “up” vector lets a carry corrupt the other byte. Pinky’s “four tiles ahead” ambush becomes “four up and four left” whenever Pac-Man faces up, and Inky inherits the same bug. Shipped in every cabinet; and on level 256, the 8-bit level counter wraps and garbage covers half the maze, ending every game ever played at exactly 3,333,360 possible points.
The first computer-generated literature was a love letter, in 1952. Christopher Strachey programmed the Ferranti Mark I at Manchester to assemble ardent notes from sentence templates and random word lists, signed “M.U.C.” (Manchester University Computer). It could produce about 318 billion different letters and predates ELIZA by fourteen years. Strachey, who used the machine’s Turing-recommended hardware random generator, knew it was “a rather simple trick.”
Stephen Hawking refused to upgrade his 1980s American voice. His speech ran on a Speech Plus CallText 5010 synthesizer built on Dennis Klatt’s MITalk (the same lineage as DEC’s “Perfect Paul”). The American accent was an accident of the hardware he was handed after his 1985 tracheotomy; he kept it for three decades, turning down cleaner and British-accented voices: “I have identified with it.” When the electronics died, engineers reverse-engineered the circuit onto a Raspberry Pi so nothing would change.
An Excel formula that skipped five rows helped justify austerity. A 2010 Reinhart-Rogoff paper claimed government debt above 90% of GDP cut growth to -0.1%, and Paul Ryan and EU officials cited it for spending cuts. In 2013 grad student Thomas Herndon got the authors’ spreadsheet and found the AVERAGE formula covered only 15 of 20 countries. Corrected, the -0.1% became +2.2%; the 90% cliff was not in the data.
Iomega’s Zip drive died of a “Click of Death” its own users named. In the late 1990s the 100 MB Zip cartridge was on tens of millions of desks. Then some drives began to click: a misaligned head that could not find its track, retreating and retrying with an audible tick. A bad drive could scar a cartridge, and the scarred cartridge would then wreck the next healthy drive. Steve Gibson’s free Trouble in Paradise tool diagnosed the cross-infection; a 1998 class action settled in 2001. The phrase outlived the product and now means any dying hard drive.
Bill Gates has an Erdős number of 4. Paul Erdős wrote 1,416 papers indexed by Mathematical Reviews and has 514 known coauthors, and mathematicians measure their distance from him in coauthorship hops. Gates gets his 4 from the only research paper he ever wrote, a 1979 pancake-sorting result with Christos Papadimitriou whose upper bound stood for thirty years. Erdős died in 1996 and is still gaining coauthors as unfinished joint work appears.

Facts with [[double-bracket links]] have dedicated deep-dive articles. Facts without links are self-contained.

📚 Sources

Facts with links carry their sources in the linked deep-dive articles. Sources for self-contained facts: