99 Fun Facts About Computers

Which daughter of the poet Lord Byron is often called the first computer programmer for her notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine?

Ada Lovelace's notes described how Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine could go beyond simple calculation to perform a sequence of operations, which is why she is called the first programmer.

What does the acronym RAM stand for in computing?

RAM stands for Random Access Memory: any location can be read or written in about the same time regardless of where it physically sits, unlike sequential tape.

Which 1977 personal computer was one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers?

The Apple II, released in 1977, was a groundbreaking personal computer that achieved significant commercial success and helped popularize home computing.

What is the full form of CPU in the context of computer hardware?

CPU stands for Central Processing Unit, the circuitry that carries out a program's arithmetic, logic, control and input/output instructions.

What software manages hardware and resources and provides common services for programs?

An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs.

Who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web?

Tim Berners-Lee, a CERN scientist, proposed the Web in March 1989 and by the end of 1990 had written the first browser, web server, HTML and HTTP.

What network security system controls incoming and outgoing traffic based on predetermined rules?

A firewall is a network security system that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predetermined security rules, establishing a barrier between a trusted internal network and untrusted external networks.

What is the primary function of a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)?

A GPU's primary job is accelerating image rendering: thousands of small cores process pixels and vertices in parallel, a design later adopted for training AI models.

What is the smallest unit of data in computing, holding a single 0 or 1?

A bit, a portmanteau of 'binary digit', is the smallest unit of data in computing, representing either a 0 or a 1.

In computing, what is a 'byte' composed of?

A byte is 8 bits, the de facto standard since IBM's System/360 in 1964; six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common on earlier machines.

What is an IDE in the context of software development?

An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development, typically including a source code editor, build automation tools, and a debugger.

What does VPN stand for?

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network: traffic is wrapped in an encrypted tunnelling protocol so a remote user appears to be plugged straight into the private network.

In computing, what is a 'daemon'?

A daemon is a background process that runs without user interaction; by Unix convention their names end in the letter d, as in syslogd or sshd.

Which programming paradigm builds software from entities that bundle data together with the functions that act on it?

Object-Oriented Programming is based on objects, software entities that encapsulate data and the code that operates on it.

Which kind of integrated circuit is built to be configured by the customer or designer after it leaves the factory?

A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can be programmed again and again after manufacture, unlike an ASIC, whose logic is fixed when the chip is made.

What term describes data sets characterized by the 'three Vs' of volume, velocity and variety?

Big Data means data sets too large or complex for traditional data-processing software, typically described by high volume, velocity and variety.

What type of cyberattack exploits leaked information such as timing, power use or electromagnetic emissions?

A side-channel attack is a security exploit that leverages information inadvertently leaked by a system—such as timing, power consumption, or electromagnetic or acoustic emissions—to gain unauthorized access to sensitive information.

In cryptography, what maps data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values, used for integrity checks and password storage?

A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values (hash values or digests), commonly used for data integrity, digital signatures, and password storage.

ENIAC, completed in 1945, was originally built to calculate what for the US Army?

ENIAC was built to compute artillery firing tables for the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory; designed by Mauchly and Eckert, it cost about $487,000 and the press dubbed it a 'Giant Brain'.

Where was ENIAC formally dedicated in February 1946?

It had already been put to practical work at the University of Pennsylvania the previous December.

Which Charles Babbage design did London's Science Museum finally build from his plans in 1991?

The Difference Engine No. 2 was built by the Science Museum from Babbage's 1840s drawings, completed in 1991 for his bicentenary; it tabulates polynomials by the method of finite differences.

Alan Turing's portrait appears on which Bank of England banknote, first issued on his birthday in 2021?

The polymer £50 note bearing Turing entered circulation on 23 June 2021, his 109th birthday; he had received a royal pardon in 2013.

During World War II, Alan Turing worked at which British codebreaking centre?

Turing worked at Bletchley Park, wartime home of the Government Code and Cypher School, where he developed the bombe from the Polish bomba to find Enigma settings.

The first working transistor was invented in 1947 at which research laboratory?

The point-contact transistor was demonstrated at Bell Labs in December 1947; Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for it.

Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit in 1958 while working for which company?

Kilby built his germanium integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in September 1958 and shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for it; his version still used external gold-wire connections.

In 1975 Gordon Moore revised his forecast to say transistors per chip would double roughly how often?

In 1975 Moore revised his 1965 'doubling every year' observation to a doubling every two years, which works out to about 41% compound annual growth.

Steve Jobs secured the Apple-1's first order, for 50 machines, from which retailer?

Paul Terrell's Byte Shop in Mountain View ordered 50 Apple-1s at $500 each after Jobs pitched it; Wozniak had demonstrated the prototype at the Homebrew Computer Club.

The original IBM Personal Computer, model 5150, was powered by which processor?

The IBM PC 5150 ran a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088; released on 12 August 1981, its open architecture spawned the PC-compatible industry.

The team that created the IBM PC worked in which Florida city?

The IBM PC was developed by a small team at IBM's Boca Raton, Florida site, led by William C. Lowe and then Philip 'Don' Estridge.

Windows 1.0, released in November 1985, was originally developed under what working name?

Microsoft developed Windows 1.0 under the working name Interface Manager before announcing it as Windows in 1983; it was a graphical shell running on top of MS-DOS.

The Linux kernel was first released on 17 September of which year?

Linus Torvalds released Linux 0.01 on 17 September 1991, writing it because the GNU project still lacked a working kernel.

Unix became the first portable operating system after being rewritten in which language in 1973?

Rewriting almost all of Unix in C let it run on many platforms; development had begun at Bell Labs in 1969 under Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie after Multics ran into trouble.

The first public demonstration of a computer mouse, in 1968, has become known by what nickname?

Douglas Engelbart's 9 December 1968 presentation in San Francisco became known as 'The Mother of All Demos'; Bill English had built the first mouse prototype at SRI in 1964.

The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised in the early 1870s by which newspaper editor and printer?

Christopher Latham Sholes, a Milwaukee newspaperman, patented his typewriter in 1868; the QWERTY layout took off with the Remington No. 2 of 1878.

How much data did IBM's first hard disk drive, shipped in 1957 and the size of two refrigerators, store?

The IBM 350 disk storage unit held five million six-bit characters, about 3.75 megabytes, on fifty 24-inch disks spinning at 1,200 rpm.

What was the diameter of the first floppy disks, invented by IBM in 1971?

The 5¼-inch and then the 3½-inch formats followed, the latter dominating by the mid-1990s.

The Intel 4004, released in 1971, grew out of a commission from which Japanese calculator company?

Intel engineer Marcian Hoff proposed the simpler single-chip design that replaced Busicom's original plan.

Colossus, the wartime codebreaking machine, was designed by which General Post Office telephone engineer?

Tommy Flowers of the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill designed Colossus; the Mark 2 first ran on 1 June 1944, just in time for D-Day.

Colossus was built to help break which German cipher?

Colossus attacked the Lorenz SZ cipher ('Tunny') used for German high-command teleprinter traffic, not Enigma; it is regarded as the first programmable electronic digital computer.

Grace Hopper popularised the term "bug" after operators found what trapped in a Harvard Mark II relay?

Operators traced a Mark II error to a moth in a relay around 1947 and taped it into the log book with the note 'First actual case of bug being found'.

Guinness World Records lists which machine as the best-selling desktop computer model of all time?

Guinness World Records names the Commodore 64, launched in 1982 at $595, the best-selling single computer model, with sales estimates from 12.5 to 17 million units.

IBM's chess machine got its final name in a renaming contest as a play on which company nickname?

Deep Blue's name, chosen in a 1989 renaming contest, plays on IBM's nickname 'Big Blue'; formerly Deep Thought, it beat Garry Kasparov in a six-game rematch in 1997.

The Alto, which pioneered the graphical user interface in 1973, was developed at which research centre?

The Alto was built at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto; the first machines appeared in March 1973, a decade before its ideas inspired Apple's Lisa and Macintosh.

The Altair 8800 grew famous after appearing on the cover of the January 1975 issue of which magazine?

The Altair 8800 was the cover story of Popular Electronics' January 1975 issue; its Altair BASIC, written by Gates and Allen, was Microsoft's founding product.

The Antikythera mechanism, the earliest known analog computer, was designed to calculate what?

The Antikythera mechanism modelled astronomical positions, predicting eclipses and the cycles of the Sun and Moon; found in a shipwreck in 1901, it dates to around the second or first century BCE.

Which German engineer built the Z3, the first working programmable relay computer, in 1941?

The Z3 ran on 2,000 relays and used a 22-bit word length; his earlier Z2 of 1939 was among the first relay computers.

In which English city did the first stored-program computer run its first program in 1948?

The Manchester 'Baby' (SSEM) ran its first program on 21 June 1948; built by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, it led to the Ferranti Mark 1.

Which British tea-shop firm's LEO I ran the world's first routine office computer job in 1951?

J. Lyons & Co., the teashop and catering firm, built LEO I on the design of Cambridge's EDSAC; it ran bakery valuation jobs from November 1951.

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer, tested in 1942, was developed at which university?

John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry built the ABC at Iowa State College in Ames; all-electronic with about 300 vacuum tubes, it is described as the first automatic electronic digital computer.

According to the OED, the first known use of the word 'computer' appeared in a book from which year?

Richard Brathwait's The Yong Mans Gleanings (1613) used 'computer' for a person who calculates, a sense that lasted into the 20th century.

Which Harvard physicist conceived the Mark I calculator that IBM built in 1944?

Aiken's press release listed himself as sole inventor, which so enraged IBM chairman Thomas Watson that he only reluctantly attended the dedication.

In 1952, CBS used a UNIVAC I on live television to predict the outcome of what?

CBS used UNIVAC I on election night 1952 to forecast the presidential election; with a few percent of the vote counted it called an Eisenhower landslide that the network doubted and delayed airing.

Who led the Cambridge team whose EDSAC ran its first programs in May 1949?

Maurice Wilkes led the EDSAC team at the Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory; it ran a table of squares on 6 May 1949, and David Wheeler invented the subroutine on the project.

Herman Hollerith's electric tabulating machines were first used for which US census?

Hollerith's punched-card tabulators were first used for the 1890 census, cutting tabulation time by years compared with the 1880 count; his Tabulating Machine Company later merged into what became IBM.

Joseph Marie Jacquard's 1804 loom controlled its woven patterns using what?

Jacquard's loom read its pattern from a chain of punched cards, an idea Babbage borrowed for the Analytical Engine; punched cards stayed in computing use into the 1980s.

How many letters of 'login' got through before the first ARPANET link crashed in 1969?

Only two letters, 'l' and 'o', arrived before the SRI system crashed; UCLA student Charley Kline was typing to an SDS 940 at Stanford Research Institute at 10:30 pm on 29 October 1969.

Robert Metcalfe named Ethernet in a 1973 memo after which discarded physics concept?

Metcalfe took the name from the luminiferous aether, the discarded medium once thought to carry light, stressing that Ethernet could run over any medium; it first ran on 11 November 1973 at 2.94 megabits per second.

John Backus proposed Fortran as an alternative to assembly language for which IBM machine?

Backus proposed Fortran for the IBM 704 in late 1953; the draft specification for the 'IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System' was finished by November 1954 and the compiler shipped in 1957.

Guido van Rossum named his 1991 programming language after which British comedy series?

Van Rossum named Python after Monty Python's Flying Circus; he built it at CWI in the Netherlands as a successor to ABC and served as 'benevolent dictator for life' until 2018.

Apple's '1984' commercial introducing the Macintosh was directed by which filmmaker?

Ridley Scott, fresh from Blade Runner, directed '1984'; its only national US airing was during Super Bowl XVIII, and English athlete Anya Major played the hammer-throwing heroine.

Roughly how much did the Osborne 1, the first successful portable computer, weigh?

The Osborne 1 weighed 24.5 lb (about 11 kg); it cost $1,795 in April 1981, ran CP/M, and its bundled software alone was said to be worth $1,500.

Compaq's first product, shipped in 1983, achieved IBM PC compatibility through what?

Compaq's engineers reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS in a clean-room process so the Compaq Portable, shipped in 1983 at $2,995, could run IBM PC software; that approach became the template for the clone industry.

What was the launch price of the first Raspberry Pi Model B in February 2012?

The Model B launched on 29 February 2012 at $35 (the Model A was $25); the Foundation had formed in 2008 after Cambridge noticed applicants arriving with fewer programming skills.

Sir Clive Sinclair's ZX Spectrum home computer was manufactured in Dundee, Scotland, by which company?

Timex built the rubber-keyed machine in Dundee and later sold a version in the US as the Timex Sinclair 2068; Rick Dickinson designed its rainbow motif.

The 1988 Morris worm was written by a graduate student at which university?

Robert Tappan Morris, a Cornell graduate student, released it from MIT to muddy the trail and became the first person convicted of a felony under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The ILOVEYOU worm of May 2000 was created by a college dropout from which country?

Onel de Guzman, a dropout from Manila's AMA Computer College in the Philippines, wrote it in VBScript; it tried to steal dial-up credentials and spread to tens of millions of PCs.

The Stuxnet worm damaged Iran's nuclear programme by wrecking which equipment?

Stuxnet made Natanz's gas centrifuges spin at damaging speeds while reporting normal readings; it exploited four Windows zero-day flaws to reach Siemens Step7 software controlling the PLCs.

Flash memory was invented in 1980 by Fujio Masuoka at which company?

A colleague suggested the name because the erasure process reminded him of a camera going off. Toshiba began selling it in 1987.

Claude Shannon's 1937 MIT thesis showed switching circuits could implement whose logic?

Shannon, then 21, showed relay and switching circuits could implement George Boole's algebra of logic; the thesis has been called the most important master's thesis of all time.

In 1989 Apple buried about 2,700 unsold Lisa computers in a landfill in which state?

The guarded dump in Logan, Utah earned Apple a tax write-off on working machines nobody would buy.

The first web server and browser were developed at CERN on a computer from which company?

Berners-Lee used a NeXT Computer; the black magnesium cube cost $6,500 at its 1988 launch and was the first computer with a magneto-optical drive as main storage.

Michael Dell founded PC's Limited in 1984 from a dorm room at which university?

Dell started PC's Limited from his University of Texas at Austin dorm room in 1984, dropping out after freshman year with about $1,000; the Turbo PC sold for $795 in 1985.

The 'traitorous eight' who founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 left whose lab?

Shockley had failed to lure his old Bell Labs colleagues west, so he hired top graduates instead, and then lost them too.

Intel's name is a contraction of which two words?

Intel is short for Integrated Electronics; Moore and Noyce rejected 'Moore Noyce' because it sounded like 'more noise', and bought the rights to the Intel name from a hotel chain.

Alan Turing's 1950 paper introduced his famous test under what name?

Turing's 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' called it the imitation game: in its original form an interrogator questions a man and a woman in another room and tries to tell which is which.

Which statement did Edsger Dijkstra's 1968 letter famously brand 'considered harmful'?

Dijkstra's 1968 letter to the CACM was titled 'Go To Statement Considered Harmful'; he had devised his shortest-path algorithm in 1956 to demonstrate the ARMAC computer and won the 1972 Turing Award.

Donald Knuth paid $2.56 for each error found in his books because 256 pennies make what?

Knuth's $2.56 reward is 'one hexadecimal dollar', since 256 is 0x100; the rarely cashed checks have been called 'among computerdom's most prized trophies'.

Which symbol did Ray Tomlinson pick in 1971 to separate a username from a machine name?

He adapted a program called SNDMSG at BBN so that mail could cross between different ARPANET hosts.

Google's name misspells 'googol', the number written as 1 followed by how many zeros?

A googol is 10 to the power 100, written as 1 followed by 100 zeros; Page and Brin picked the name to signal a search engine meant to index a vast number of websites.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin ran Google in 1998 from the garage of which friend?

They rented Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park in September 1998; their first cheque, $100,000 from Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, had arrived that August.

DEC's PDP-8, launched in 1965, was the first minicomputer to sell for under what price?

The original 'Straight-8' listed at $18,500, and more than 50,000 PDP-8s were sold over the line's life.

The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first computer built from which components?

The AGC was the first computer built from silicon integrated circuits (Fairchild NOR gates); designed at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, it first flew in 1966 and stored most software in hand-woven core rope memory.

Apollo astronauts' DSKY unit, pronounced 'DISS-kee', was short for what?

DSKY stood for Display and Keyboard; the Block II computer behind it had just 2,048 words of erasable memory and 36,864 words of read-only memory.

Which Shanghai-born physicist patented a core-memory device developed at Harvard in 1949?

An Wang filed the patent alone because Harvard had no interest in promoting its lab's inventions; he later sold it to IBM and founded Wang Laboratories in 1951.

Spacewar!, the 1962 space-combat game from MIT, was written for which DEC minicomputer?

Spacewar! was written for the PDP-1 that DEC donated to MIT; Steve Russell led the project, and the game spread to the few dozen other PDP-1 installations.

VisiCalc, released in 1979, was the first program of which kind for personal computers?

VisiCalc, by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, was the first spreadsheet program for personal computers; it turned the Apple II into a business tool and helped prompt IBM's 1981 entry into the market.

Which IBM engineer designed the Ctrl+Alt+Del reboot combination in 1981?

David Bradley, an engineer on the IBM PC team, first tried Ctrl+Alt+Esc but found it too easy to hit by accident; he said the whole job took five or ten minutes.

Microsoft's Windows 95 launch campaign licensed which Rolling Stones song?

'Start Me Up' was a nod to the new Start button; Microsoft reportedly paid the Rolling Stones several million dollars for the rights.

The name 'Wi-Fi' was coined in 1999 by which brand-consulting firm?

The alliance (then WECA) hired Interbrand, which offered ten names catchier than 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'; Wi-Fi was chosen and the group became the Wi-Fi Alliance.

Microsoft bought the rights to 86-DOS, the basis of MS-DOS, from which company in 1981?

Microsoft bought 86-DOS, written by Tim Paterson, from Seattle Computer Products for about $50,000 in July 1981 and reworked it into PC DOS for the IBM PC.

Linus Torvalds began writing Git in 2005 after losing free use of which tool?

BitMover withdrew BitKeeper's free licence in April 2005 after accusing kernel developer Andrew Tridgell of reverse-engineering its protocols; Torvalds wrote Git within weeks.

The first known 'hello, world' program appeared in a 1972 tutorial for which language?

Brian Kernighan's 1972 'A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B' printed 'hello, world'; he reused the example in a 1974 Bell Labs C memo and the 1978 C book that made it famous.

An IPv4 address is how many bits long?

An IPv4 address is 32 bits, written as four 8-bit octets; that allows about 4.29 billion addresses, too few for the global Internet, forcing the move to 128-bit IPv6.

IBM's Watson beat champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011 on which quiz show?

Watson won the February 2011 Jeopardy! exhibition and its $1 million first prize; its DeepQA system could process 500 gigabytes, about a million books, per second.

Joseph Weizenbaum's 1960s chatbot ELIZA was named after a character from which play?

Weizenbaum named it after Eliza Doolittle of Shaw's Pygmalion: like her learning an upper-class accent, the program could be incrementally improved by its users.

Which researcher co-coined the term CAPTCHA in 2003?

Luis von Ahn coined CAPTCHA with Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford; it is a contrived acronym for 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'.

Google's Sycamore processor, behind its 2019 quantum-supremacy claim, has how many qubits?

Sycamore ran with 53 working qubits (one of its 54 was faulty); Google said it finished in 200 seconds a task that would take a top supercomputer 10,000 years, a claim IBM disputed.

Which Polish mathematician reconstructed the German military Enigma machine in late 1932?

Marian Rejewski did it sight unseen using permutation theory, and in 1943 escaped through Spain, Portugal and Gibraltar to Britain.

MIT's Whirlwind I, operational in 1951, began as a Navy project to drive what?

Whirlwind began as a Navy flight-simulator project in the mid-1940s before becoming a digital computer; it was one of the first real-time computers and led to the SAGE air-defence system.