Did You Know? Technology and Computer Facts

A computer understands a language made of just two digits, 0 and 1.

Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse in the 1960s.

Wi-Fi lets devices connect to the internet without cables.

The first six letters on the top row of most English keyboards are QWERTY.

Robots can do jobs that are dangerous for people, such as exploring volcanoes and space.

The shortcut Ctrl + Z undoes your last step in most programs.

The @ sign in an email address separates the user name from the domain.

A smartphone has cameras, location services and sensors that know when you turn it.

The first iPhone came out in 2007.

A strong password is long and mixes letters, numbers and symbols.

Never share your password with anyone online.

GPS finds your location using signals from satellites orbiting the Earth.

One byte is made of 8 bits.

The internet connects billions of devices around the world.

The QR code was invented in Japan in 1994 to track car parts in factories.

The first website went online in 1991.

Emojis first appeared in Japan in the late 1990s.

A screen image is made of tiny dots called pixels.

Phone touchscreens respond to the tiny electrical charge in your finger.

Bluetooth is named after an old Danish king nicknamed Harald 'Bluetooth'.

Pong, released in 1972, was one of the first video games to become widely popular.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN in Switzerland.

The internet and the web are not the same thing: the web is a service that runs on the internet.

ENIAC, from 1945, was one of the first electronic computers and weighed about 27 tonnes.

The first recorded computer 'bug' was a real moth found inside a computer in 1947.

'Moore's law' says the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years.

HTML is the language used to build web pages.

The Python programming language was named after a British comedy show, not the snake.

A modern smartphone is far more powerful than the computers used for the Apollo Moon missions.

In traditional computing, one kilobyte equals 1,024 bytes.

Cloud storage keeps your files on remote servers that you can reach from any device.

Phishing messages try to trick you into revealing passwords or card details.

Two-factor authentication adds a second step to protect an account, such as a code sent to your phone.

The first text message (SMS) was sent in 1992.

Ada Lovelace is considered the first computer programmer: in the 1840s she wrote steps of calculation for a machine not yet built.

Alan Turing is considered one of the fathers of computer science and artificial intelligence.

AI chatbots learn patterns from huge amounts of text.

The USB standard for connecting devices to computers appeared in 1996.

The Unicode standard lets computers display Arabic and most of the world's other scripts correctly.

3D printers make objects by adding one layer on top of another.

The central processing unit (CPU) is the computer's 'brain' that carries out instructions.

Search engines use programs called web crawlers that visit pages and index them.

Transistors in modern chips are just a few nanometres in size, and a single chip can hold billions of them.

Quantum computers use qubits, which can be 0 and 1 at the same time.

HTTPS encrypts the data passing between your browser and a website, so others cannot easily read it.

In 1950 Alan Turing proposed a test of whether a machine can imitate human conversation.

The IPv4 address system provides only about 4.3 billion addresses, which is why IPv6 was developed.

Fibre-optic cables carry data as pulses of light.

Undersea cables carry most of the internet traffic between countries.

Linus Torvalds created the Linux operating system in 1991.

The 'Year 2000 problem' arose because many programs stored the year with only two digits.

Machine learning lets computers learn from data instead of following rules written in advance.

A blockchain is a shared digital record that is very hard to change once written.

The digital currency Bitcoin was launched in 2009.

Open-source software has code that anyone can read and improve.

ARPANET, launched in 1969, was the forerunner of today's internet.

The computer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match in 1997.

Data centres use huge amounts of electricity and water to keep their servers cool.

GPS satellites carry precise atomic clocks whose time must be corrected for relativity to keep locations accurate.

The developers of lithium-ion batteries, which power phones and electric cars, won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Artificial neural networks are inspired by the way nerve cells work in the brain.

The number of internet users worldwide has passed 5 billion.