Tech Trivia That Will Blow Your Mind!

If you’re like me, you love technology and you love trivia. And what better than trivia about technology? Today we’re rounding up our top ten favorite pieces of tech trivia!

PayPal, then and now

Photo Credit: Barron’s

Way back in the dark ages of 1999, a survey found that PayPal, with its unique business model, was voted in the top ten worst business ideas. Ironically, the company is now worth millions of dollars.

Apollo 11

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The Apollo 11, the first spacecraft to carry humans to the moon, is an iconic piece of technology in human history. Fascinatingly, the computers carried onboard have less processing power than modern-day cell phones. You carry technology in your pocket that would have been unthinkable fifty years ago.

Email, pre-WWW

Photo Credit: Amazon

Before the World Wide Web and the establishment of URLs, individual web pages were numbered and accessing them was less than easy. In this era, it was possible to send email, but it required a rotary phone to connect to a now-obscure service called Micronet via your computer. The webpage number for email? 7776.

The First Computer Mouse

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In the early 60’s, Stanford Research Institute professors Douglas Engelbart and Bill English Stanford unveiled their “X-Y Position Indicator for Display Systems,” a device designed to point to elements on a computer display. We would come to refer to such technology as a computer mouse!

First designed for use with the Xerox Alto computer and demoed in 1968, Engelbart also showed off early version of word processing and computer graphics. Engelbart is also responsible for the name “mouse,” as he thought the cord that ran from the pointer to the computer was reminiscent of a mouse tail!

Ever-shrinking Computer Memory

Photo Credit: AIS Computer Centers

It’s well-known that memory is always getting smaller and more efficient: where once SD cards with a few gigabytes of memory cost $100, they now cost less than $30. Going back sixty years, however, is even more quaint.

In 1956, IBM unveiled the RAMAC computer, one of the first devices to use a hard drive-like device for memory. The RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) had 5 megabytes of storage and weighed over 2000 pounds.

Most of the Worlds Currency is Digital

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According to educated guesses by global economists, only 8 percent of money in the world is physical cash. The rest exists only in the form of ones and zeroes on the internet. This is fascinating, showing just how much we’ve come to rely on technology for our global economy. With most transactions occurring digitally and paper money and coins becoming less prevalent, it won’t be surprising to see physical money phased out entirely eventually.

QWERTY May have been invented to slow typists

Photo Credit: USB Typewriters

The story goes that, originally, typewriters were laid out in alphabetical order, but the QWERTY layout was implemented to slow down typists. Supposedly typists had become so fast that they were consistently jamming their typewriters as the arms would cross and lock up. In order to combat this, the QWERTY layout would set commonly used letters further apart, leading to less jams and overall more efficient typing.

Domain Names used to be Free

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Until 1995 it was free to register a domain name. Let that sink in. From as little as 23 years ago, understanding of just how big and important the Internet was going to end up being was almost nonexistent. By 1995, though, a company called Network Solutions was given the rights to charge for domain name registration. A percentage of money from this, though, ended up going to the National Science Foundation for Internet Research.

A Hollywood Star Helped Invent Wi-Fi

Photo Credit: Tablet Magazine

Hedy Lamarr is remembered for her roles in early-era Hollywood films. She is also remembered by many for her exceptional contributions to computer technology! Together with George Antheil, she helped create radio signal technology that was intended to prevent torpedoes from being jammed. While her ideas were patented, they weren’t implemented until the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Navy would use them to develop several new radio forms, including Wi-Fi.

Amazon’s Name was Chosen so it Would Be Higher in Alphabetical Order

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Amazon is the odd Internet giant that has been around since the early days. As a direct example, take the anecdote of how the company got its name. CEO Jeff Bezos originally thought to name the company Cadabra, but a combination of that name being misheard as “cadaver” and a desire for visibility changed his mind. In the 90’s it was common to browse the Internet using Yahoo’s search directory, which listed websites alphabetically. Thus, Amazon was chosen to put the company near the top of the list.