Interesting Facts About Computers

So, today instead of the usual ‘how to’ posts etc I’m usually fond of writing. I decided to post something different, something fun, educative (don’t know about you guys, but it is to me). 

Now here are a few interesting fun facts about computers that I bet you never knew.

1. Only 8% of the world’s currency is physical money, the rest only exists on computers. (PayPal and the rest of them) - Source

 

2. A computer as powerful as the human brain would be able to perform about 38 thousand trillion operations per second. (our brain is wonderful) - source

3. MIT has developed a computer software that can distinguish a real smile from a smile of frustration - source

4. The first entirely computer generated movie sequence in cinema history was the Genesis Device demonstration video in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The studio that made the scene would later become Pixar - source

5. The first actual computer “bug” was a dead moth that got stuck in a Harvard Mark II computer in 1947. source

6. There was a computer worm that would gain access to Windows XP systems, download a patch from Microsoft to close the vulnerability that it used to infect the system, attempt to delete the infamous Blaster worm (if present) from the system, then self destruct itself. – Source

7. In 1978, Apple Corps (owned by The Beatles) sued Apple Computer for trademark infringement. The case settled for $80,000 along with the condition that Apple Computer should not enter the music business, and Apple Corps agreed not to enter the computer business. – Source

8. A Catholic nun by the name of Mary Kenneth Keller, was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science in the United States and also helped develop computer programming languages. – Source

 

9.  John Lasseter (CEO of Pixar) was fired from Disney for promoting computer animation – Source

 

10. The new Texas Instrument calculators have ABC keyboards because if they had QWERTY keyboards, they would be considered computers and wouldn’t be allowed for standardized test taking.

11. Three students from a school in Nevada had installed keystroke loggers on their teachers’ computers to intercept the teachers’ usernames and passwords, and then charged other students up to $300 to hack in and increase their grades – Source

 

12. In 1936, the Russians made a computer that ran on water. Sounds unbelievable, but its actually true – Source

 

13. In July, after receiving a warning from the FBI on his PC, Washington resident Jay Matthew Riley turned himself into police for possessing child pornography. The warning was fake and generated by a worm that had infected his computer. – Source

 14. Alan Turing the father of computer science, artificial intelligence and who helped break German WW2 cyphers, committed suicide after being forced to undergo hormonal treatment for homosexuality and barred from continuing his cryptographic work. – Source

 

15. A 15 year old hacked NASA computers and caused a 21-day shutdown of their computers. Same kid later went ahead to hack Pentagon weapons computer. (I wonder where he is now)  – Source

 

16. In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first ‘SUPER’ computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5 MB of data (just enough to store one mp3 file in this our generation). – Source

 

17. U.S. chose 00000000 as the password for its computer controls of nuclear tipped missiles for eight years. (Some risks are just not worth taking) – Source

 

18. Although 95% of mail is now sorted by computers, the U.S. Postal Service still employs clerks to decipher addresses that are too messy for the computers to understand. These clerks are expected to process 1,000 letters an hour, and upwards of 20% of them quit within the first 5 weeks. – Source

 

19. CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” – Source

 

20. There is a Scandinavian company that is working on a way to translate what a dog is thinking using EEG-sensors and microcomputers. They already have a prototype available. – Source

21. Over 6,000 new computer viruses are released every month. WTF.

22. The first computer mouse was designed in 1964 was by a chap called Doug Engelbert, and it was constructed out of wood. source

23. The average human being blinks around 20 times in a minute. A computer user blinks only 7 times a minute Wtf. - source

24. The very first electro-mechanical computer was called the Z2, and was developed by konrad zuse back in 1939. The same year WWII broke out. - source

25. The internet might be filled with a very large amount of information, but in actuality five in six online pages are focused with adults contents in mind

26. Over one million domain names per month are registered online

27. Facebook boasts over 1 billion users. Were it a country, it would be the third largest in the world behind India and China - source

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