189 Fun Facts About Tech

Which games console, launched in 1994, grew out of a collapsed partnership with Nintendo?

PlayStation began as a CD add-on Sony was building for Nintendo's console; when Nintendo publicly switched to a rival partner, Sony turned the project into a machine of its own.

The wireless standard Bluetooth is named after a tenth-century king of which country?

Denmark's Harald Bluetooth was famed for uniting Scandinavian lands, much as the standard would unite PCs and phones; the name was meant as a stopgap codename, and the logo joins the runes for H and B.

The name Wi-Fi was coined in 1999 by whom?

The brand consultancy Interbrand was hired because the industry group wanted something catchier than its engineering label; Wi-Fi was picked from ten proposed names, and the 'Wireless Fidelity' slogan was bolted on afterwards.

The QR code was invented in 1994 to track car parts at Denso, a parts maker in which car company's group?

Toyota's supplier Denso wanted a code that held far more than a barcode and could still be read at speed; engineer Masahiro Hara found his pattern in the black and white stones of a lunchtime game of Go.

Who sent the first network email in 1971 and chose the @ sign for its addresses?

Ray Tomlinson wanted a keyboard symbol that would never turn up in a username; his first message went between two computers standing side by side, and he later admitted he had forgotten what it said.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at which organisation?

CERN, the physics lab near Geneva, was where Berners-Lee's boss scribbled 'Vague, but exciting' on his 1989 proposal; four years later CERN put the Web software in the public domain, so anyone could build on it for free.

Which Nokia phone, launched in 2000, is joked about online as being indestructible?

Nokia 3310 handsets sold about 126 million units, and the jokes about their toughness outlived them: in 2017 a new maker revived the name and shape for a nostalgic relaunch, complete with a version of Snake.

Which company's brick-sized DynaTAC 8000X became the first handheld cellphone sold to the public?

Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first public call on a prototype in 1973, cheekily ringing his rival at AT&T; the finished phone took another decade to reach shops and cost $3,995.

The first iPod, launched in 2001, was sold on the promise of putting how many songs in your pocket?

1,000 songs fitted on its 5 GB drive, but Apple's other boast was speed: a FireWire cable copied a whole CD in under ten seconds when USB players needed minutes, and the first iPod worked only with Macs.

The compact disc was co-developed by Sony and which other company?

Philips and Sony engineers settled the format over six meetings in 1979 and 1980; even the hole in the middle has a story, since the Dutch side sized it to match their own ten-cent coin, the dubbeltje.

Which US Army computer, unveiled in 1946, was first programmed by six women?

ENIAC's six programmers, among them Kay McNulty and Betty Snyder, had to work out how to program it without manuals, yet their part went unacknowledged for half a century, until they were honoured in 1997.

The transistor was invented in 1947 at which research laboratory?

Bell Labs, the research arm of the AT&T phone company, produced a device that did the vacuum tube's job at a fraction of the size and power; Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for it.

Moore's law observes that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every how long?

Chip pioneer Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that transistor counts were doubling yearly, then in 1975 slowed his forecast to a doubling every two years, the form now known as Moore's law.

Which Rolling Stones song did Microsoft license for the Windows 95 launch?

'Start Me Up' was a nod to the new Start button and fronted a launch so lavish that the Empire State Building was lit in the Windows colours; reports of the song's fee ran from $3 million to $14 million.

Who directed Apple's famous '1984' Macintosh commercial aired during the Super Bowl?

Ridley Scott, fresh from Blade Runner, shot the ad for the Macintosh launch; Apple's board hated it and the agency was told to sell the Super Bowl airtime, but it resold only the shorter of the two slots and the ad ran anyway.

The name Google is a play on which mathematical term?

Googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, is said to have been named by a mathematician's nine-year-old nephew; Google's founders borrowed it to signal how much information they meant to organise.

Amazon began in 1994 as an online store for what?

Books beat CDs, software and videos on the founder's shortlist because so many titles were in print, far more than any physical shop could stock; the firm began in a garage in Bellevue, Washington.

Facebook was launched in 2004 by students at which university?

Harvard students signed up so fast that more than half the undergraduates had joined within a month; the site then spread from campus to campus and opened to everyone in 2006.

YouTube's three founders had all previously worked at which company?

PayPal alumni Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim first launched YouTube as a video dating site with the slogan 'Tune In, Hook Up'; when that flopped, they opened it to any kind of clip.

Which company began in 1997 as a service that posted rental DVDs to its customers' homes?

Netflix started when DVDs were so new that its founders tested the idea by posting themselves a CD in an envelope; the streaming it is now known for did not begin until 2007.

Posts on Twitter were originally limited to how many characters?

Tweets were capped at 140 characters so they fit inside a 160-character SMS with room for a username; the limit doubled to 280 in 2017.

Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and which co-founder?

Larry Sanger was the editor of Nupedia, whose expert review was so slow that it finished only 21 articles in its first year; the wiki he proposed as a side project to feed it soon swallowed it.

The first text message, sent in December 1992, read what?

'Merry Christmas' was typed on a computer by engineer Neil Papworth and sent to Richard Jarvis, who was at a Christmas party; Jarvis never answered, because phones of the day could receive a text but not write one.

The GPS project was started by which US organisation in 1973?

The Department of Defense built GPS for its own forces and deliberately blurred the signal civilians received; when that was switched off in May 2000, ordinary receivers became far more accurate overnight.

The widely known 1999 emoji set was created by Shigetaka Kurita for which Japanese mobile carrier?

Shigetaka Kurita drew the 176-character set for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service in 1999; a 1997 SoftBank phone set was later found to predate it.

ChatGPT reached an estimated 100 million monthly users how long after its November 2022 launch?

Two months was the analysts' estimate, a record for a consumer app that fell within the year, when Meta's Threads passed 100 million sign-ups in five days.

Which company introduced the Roomba vacuum cleaner in 2002?

iRobot was founded in 1990 by three MIT roboticists and built robots for the military and for space research before it sent the Roomba out to clean living-room floors.

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the development of what technology?

Lithium-ion batteries grew out of the 1970s oil crisis: Stanley Whittingham's first version was too explosive to sell, and John Goodenough and Akira Yoshino made it powerful and safe enough for a pocket.

Who first publicly demonstrated a computer mouse in the 1968 Mother of All Demos?

Douglas Engelbart never earned royalties from the mouse: his employer SRI held the patent and, he recalled, licensed it to Apple for about $40,000 with little idea of what it was worth.

The QWERTY layout comes from the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, sold from 1874 by which American gunmaker?

E. Remington and Sons, an arms maker looking to diversify, also built sewing machines, and it showed: the first typewriters came painted with flowers and mounted on an iron sewing-machine stand, treadle and all.

The reCAPTCHA tests launched in 2007 put web users' typing to work on which task?

Digitising old books was the hidden job: one of the two words shown came from a scan that software could not read, so every answer helped transcribe library books and the New York Times archive.

Which file-sharing service, launched by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker in 1999, was sued by Metallica?

Napster, written by Fanning as a student, spread so fast that music swaps made up most of the traffic on some college networks, until the record industry's lawsuits forced it offline in July 2001.

The MP3 audio format was developed largely in which country?

Germany's Fraunhofer engineers, led by Karlheinz Brandenburg, tuned the format on an a cappella Suzanne Vega song, replaying it to check how well their compression coped with a lone human voice.

The Tamagotchi digital pet, a global fad from 1997, was made by which Japanese toy company?

Bandai's toy ate so much of its owners' time that its creators won the spoof Ig Nobel Prize in economics, for diverting millions of person-hours of work into the husbandry of virtual pets.

The Nintendo Game Boy was bundled in North America and Europe with which game?

Tetris got the slot after publisher Henk Rogers told Nintendo of America's president that a Mario game would sell the Game Boy to young boys, while a puzzle game would sell it to everyone.

Under which name was the Bitcoin white paper published in 2008?

Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first coins in January 2009, then handed the project on, telling a fellow developer in 2011 of having 'moved on to other things'.

In the first known commercial bitcoin transaction, in May 2010, 10,000 bitcoins bought what?

Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoins for two Papa John's pizzas on 22 May 2010, a date bitcoin fans celebrate as Bitcoin Pizza Day; at later prices the coins were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

IBM's Deep Blue defeated which reigning world chess champion in a 1997 rematch?

Garry Kasparov had beaten Deep Blue 4-2 a year earlier; after losing the rematch he accused IBM of cheating, convinced that a human grandmaster had been behind one of the machine's moves.

In 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGo beat which South Korean Go champion 4-1 in Seoul?

Lee Sedol's single win, in game four, turned on a move so unexpected that a fellow professional called it divine; three years later he retired, saying AI was 'an entity that cannot be defeated'.

Which IBM computer beat quiz champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on American television in 2011?

Watson won the $1 million first prize on Jeopardy!, which IBM gave to charity; Ken Jennings conceded by adding to his final answer, 'I for one welcome our new computer overlords.'

Alan Turing introduced his famous test of machine intelligence under what name in a 1950 paper?

The imitation game was a party game in which a questioner tries to tell a hidden man from a hidden woman by their written answers; Turing put a machine in one seat to replace the vague question 'Can machines think?'

What was the first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957?

Sputnik 1 was a 58 cm metal ball that did little but beep for three weeks, yet the shock it caused in the United States set off the Space Race and led to the creation of NASA.

Which spacecraft, launched in 1977, became the first to enter interstellar space in August 2012?

Voyager 1 actually left Earth 16 days after its twin, Voyager 2, but flew a quicker route past the giant planets; the twin did not follow it out of the Sun's bubble until 2018.

The 'first actual case of bug being found', taped into a 1947 computer logbook, was what kind of insect?

A moth trapped in a relay earned the note, which was a pun rather than a coinage: engineers had been calling faults 'bugs' since at least the 1870s, when Edison used the word in a letter.

Which Hollywood star co-invented a frequency-hopping radio system for torpedoes in World War II?

Hedy Lamarr devised it with the composer George Antheil, using a player-piano roll to keep transmitter and receiver hopping in step; they patented it in 1942, but the Navy declined to use it.

Which American inventor was granted a 1930 patent for an all-electronic television system?

Philo Farnsworth first sketched the idea for his high-school chemistry teacher, whose memory of that drawing later helped him beat the giant RCA in a patent fight and collect royalties from it.

Percy Spencer got the idea for the microwave oven when radar waves melted what in his pocket?

A candy bar going soft near a live magnetron is how the story is usually told; what Spencer went on to do was hold popcorn kernels up to the tube and watch them pop.

The first product scanned with a UPC barcode, in an Ohio supermarket in June 1974, was a pack of what?

Wrigley's chewing gum, a ten-pack of Juicy Fruit, is often said to have been simply the first item out of the trolley, but the shopper later said he picked it on purpose, as Wrigley had managed to fit a barcode on so small a pack.

The cash machine widely credited as the world's first opened in June 1967 at a branch of which bank?

Barclays had television actor Reg Varney make the first withdrawal, in Enfield; inventor John Shepherd-Barron wanted a six-digit code but cut it to four because that was all his wife could remember.

3M's Arthur Fry invented the Post-it note using a failed adhesive to anchor a bookmark in his what?

Fry's bookmarks kept falling out of his church choir hymn book in 1974; he coated them with Spencer Silver's weak adhesive, which Silver had pitched for years as a 'solution without a problem'.

The Rubik's Cube was invented in 1974 by a Hungarian professor of what subject?

Architecture was Ernő Rubik's subject at a Budapest design academy; when he first scrambled his wooden prototype, even he needed about a month to work out how to put it right.

The Linux kernel was first released in 1991 by a university student in which country?

Finland's Linus Torvalds announced it as 'just a hobby' and wanted to call it Freax; the volunteer who hosted the files disliked that name and filed them under Linux without asking him.

Microsoft was founded in 1975 to sell BASIC interpreters for which early microcomputer?

Altair 8800 buyers got their BASIC from a bluff: Gates and Allen offered its maker a program they had not yet written, built it in weeks on a simulated machine, and first ran it on a real Altair at the demonstration.

Besides the two Steves, who was the third co-founder of Apple in 1976?

Ronald Wayne drew the first Apple logo and held a 10% stake meant to break ties between the two Steves; twelve days after the founding he walked away, and he was later paid $800 for his share.

Forced out of Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs founded NeXT and became the main backer of which future animation studio in 1986?

Pixar was then a hardware firm selling a pricey graphics computer, and its short films were made to show the machine off; Jobs kept funding it until Toy Story turned it into a film studio in 1995.

Which programming language did Guido van Rossum start writing in his spare time in December 1989?

Python was named after Monty Python's Flying Circus, whose scripts van Rossum was reading at the time; he wanted a name that was short, unique and slightly mysterious.

Java was designed by James Gosling at which company?

Sun Microsystems unveiled Java in 1995; Gosling had first called the language Oak, after a tree that stood outside his office, and it went by a second working name before the coffee-inspired one stuck.

Which language, created by Dennis Ritchie in 1972, was used to rewrite the Unix kernel a year later?

C grew out of Ken Thompson's typeless B, to which Ritchie added data types; rewriting Unix in it later let the system be carried to quite different machines.

Which programming language did Brendan Eich create for the Netscape browser in 1995?

JavaScript shipped in test versions as LiveScript and was renamed for the full release, a move Eich himself called a marketing ploy to borrow the buzz around Java, a quite different language.

Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC, which used English words instead of symbols, was a model for which 1959 language?

COBOL grew out of an idea Hopper was at first told would not work; she persisted, arguing that most people find an English statement easier to write than symbols.

Which company built the first commercial microprocessor, the 4004, in 1971 for a Japanese calculator maker?

Intel was hired by Busicom to make a set of custom chips for its calculators; engineer Ted Hoff proposed one programmable processor instead, and Intel later won the right to sell it to everyone else.

The adverts that launched the original IBM PC in 1981 starred a lookalike of which silent-film star?

Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp was chosen as a simple, friendly Everyman to soften a famously buttoned-up company; the PC broke with IBM habit too, built in about a year by a team in Boca Raton.

Which 1979 spreadsheet made the Apple II especially popular with business users?

VisiCalc was reason enough to buy the machine: shoppers told that the $100 program needed a $2,000 Apple II simply added the computer to the order, yet its authors never patented it, as software could not then be patented.

Which computer has Guinness listed as the best-selling desktop model of all time?

Commodore 64 sales are put anywhere from 12.5 million to its maker's own 17 million; it reached homes no computer dealer served, because it was sold in toy shops, discount chains and department stores.

Which US government-funded network carried its first message in 1969?

ARPANET's first message, sent from UCLA in October 1969, was meant to be the command 'login', but the receiving computer crashed after two letters, so all that arrived was 'lo'.

Which 1993 web browser was the first to show images on the same page as text, helping the Web take off?

Mosaic fathered both sides of the browser wars: its co-author Marc Andreessen left to co-found Netscape, and the first Internet Explorer was built on a licensed commercial version of Mosaic.

Whose garage did Google's two founders use as their first office in 1998?

Susan Wojcicki rented out the garage of her new Menlo Park house to help with the mortgage; within a year she had joined her tenants as Google's first marketing manager, and she later ran YouTube.

Which online-retail founder was among Google's angel investors in 1998?

Jeff Bezos put in about $250,000 of his own money while Google was still working out of a garage; the stake turned into some 3.3 million Google shares.

What does the image format name GIF stand for?

GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format; Steve Wilhite's team at CompuServe introduced it in 1987, and Wilhite insisted the name is pronounced 'jif'.

Windows 1.0, released in 1985, was not a full operating system but a graphical shell running on top of what?

MS-DOS did the real work underneath: Windows 1.0 could only tile its windows side by side, never overlap them, and it reached shops two years after it was first announced.

Which two engineers incorporated Tesla Motors in July 2003, before Elon Musk invested?

Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning drew on AC Propulsion's electric tzero prototype, whose new battery pack Eberhard helped pay for; Elon Musk led the first funding round in February 2004 and became chairman.

Which Tesla model went into production first, in 2008?

The Roadster, built on a chassis from Britain's Lotus, reached buyers in 2008; ten years later Elon Musk's own Roadster was launched into space as the dummy payload of a SpaceX test flight.

Which SpaceX rocket reached orbit in 2008 after three failed attempts?

Falcon 1 reached orbit on its fourth flight, in September 2008, after failures that nearly bankrupted Elon Musk; NASA's $1.6 billion cargo contract that December then kept SpaceX alive.

Under what name was Amazon founded on July 5, 1994?

Cadabra lasted only months: a lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver', so the founder renamed the company after the Amazon River, partly because a name starting with A would top alphabetical listings.

What was the first item sold on eBay's predecessor AuctionWeb, for $14.83?

Pierre Omidyar checked the buyer knew it was broken; he replied that he collected broken laser pointers.

Which company bought PayPal for about $1.5 billion in 2002, then spun it off again in 2015?

eBay had tried since 2000 to push its own payment service, Billpoint, but its auction users preferred PayPal, so it bought the rival and shut Billpoint down.

Nvidia's three founders sketched their initial ideas in meetings at what kind of venue?

A Denny's diner in East San Jose hosted the talks that led to Nvidia; Jensen Huang had worked for the chain as a teenage dishwasher and busboy, and in 2023 Denny's unveiled a plaque at the diner.

Which Japanese company began in Kyoto in 1889 as a maker of handmade hanafuda playing cards?

Nintendo's founder, Fusajiro Yamauchi, made hanafuda, the Japanese 'flower cards'; the firm turned to toys in the 1960s, among them the 1966 Ultra Hand, and only in the 1970s to video games.

Which Atari arcade game did new engineer Allan Alcorn build in 1972 as a training exercise?

Pong was only meant to teach Alcorn the ropes: Nolan Bushnell pretended it was a contract for General Electric, and the test machine in a local bar soon jammed because it was overflowing with quarters.

Which 1970s PARC computer pioneered the mouse-driven graphical interface that later inspired Apple's Macintosh?

The Xerox Alto, built at PARC in 1973, paired a bitmapped graphical display with a mouse; an Apple team saw it on visits in 1979 and borrowed ideas for the Lisa and Macintosh.

Which Amazon subsidiary developed the Kindle hardware platform?

Lab126 began in 2004, when Amazon's founder told staff to build the world's best e-reader before rivals could; the first Kindle took three years and went by the code name Fiona.

Which Apple product went on sale in April 2010 and sold three million units within 80 days?

The iPad was unveiled that January; Apple's chief later said work on the tablet had begun before the iPhone, but was shelved so that the phone could be built first.

The tiny, low-cost Raspberry Pi was originally created for what purpose?

Teaching computer science in schools was the goal: Eben Upton and colleagues at Cambridge had seen applications for the subject fall, and wanted a computer cheap enough for children to experiment on.

The Arduino platform takes its name from what?

A bar in Ivrea, Italy, the Bar di Re Arduino, was co-founder Massimo Banzi's regular pub, so he named the board after it; the bar itself honours Arduin, a local noble who became King of Italy in 1002.

Photoshop was created in the late 1980s by which pair of brothers?

Thomas and John Knoll split the work: Thomas wrote the first version on a Macintosh Plus to show greyscale images, while John, an effects artist at Industrial Light & Magic, pushed for a full editor and sold the licence to Adobe.

Which start-up, co-founded by Andy Rubin to make software for digital cameras, did Google buy in 2005?

Android Inc. reworked its camera software for phones as the smartphone market took off; Rubin had earlier founded Danger, maker of the T-Mobile Sidekick, which Microsoft bought in 2008.

Which photo app grew out of Burbn, a location check-in app, in 2010?

Instagram kept little of Burbn but photo sharing: founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger decided the original did too much, pared it down to one feature and launched on iOS in October 2010.

Which messaging app did Facebook agree to buy in February 2014 for about $19 billion?

WhatsApp cost Facebook $4 billion in cash and the rest in stock, then its largest purchase; three months earlier Snapchat had turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook.

Skype was created by Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis and four developers from which country?

Estonia's programmers, among them Jaan Tallinn, had already built the file-sharing network Kazaa for the Swede Zennström and the Dane Friis; Skype reused its peer-to-peer design to carry phone calls.

Zoom founder Eric Yuan left which company in 2011 with 40 engineers?

Cisco had bought WebEx, where Eric Yuan was an early engineer, and made him a vice-president; unhappy with the product, he left in 2011 with about 40 engineers to build what became Zoom.

Snapchat's three creators were former students at which university?

Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown built the app as Stanford students in 2011; Brown, who brought the disappearing-pictures idea, was ousted within months and later sued his co-founders and settled.

Which ride-hailing company started out in San Francisco with 'Cab' in its name, dropped after a 2010 cease-and-desist order?

Uber began as UberCab; San Francisco's transport agency ordered it to stop in October 2010 and threatened fines, but it carried on and simply cut 'Cab' from its name.

Airbnb's founders raised money in 2008 by selling what?

Presidential-themed cereal paid the bills: the founders repackaged shop-bought cereal as Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's during the 2008 election, and Y Combinator took them on a few months later.

ELIZA's most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated what kind of professional?

A psychotherapist of the Rogerian school, DOCTOR simply turned users' statements back into questions, yet Joseph Weizenbaum's own secretary is said to have asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it in private.

Siri was integrated into which Apple handset at its October 2011 release?

Siri debuted built into the iPhone 4s in October 2011; it had started as a standalone app from an SRI International spin-off, which Apple bought in April 2010, later pulling the app from its store.

Amazon's voice assistant Alexa made its debut in November 2014 inside which device?

Echo, a speaker first sold by invitation, introduced Alexa, whose voice came from the Polish text-to-speech firm Ivona; the name was picked for its distinctive 'x' and as a nod to the Library of Alexandria.

Which space telescope's 2.4-metre mirror was ground to the wrong shape, blurring its images until a 1993 repair?

Hubble's mirror was polished precisely but to the wrong curve, because one lens in a testing device sat 1.3 millimetres out of place; astronauts fitted corrective optics in December 1993.

Which metal coats the 18 hexagonal mirror segments of the James Webb Space Telescope?

Gold reflects infrared light especially well, so each beryllium segment carries a layer about 100 nanometres thick; the mirror is segmented because a single 6.5-metre one would not fit inside any rocket.

Which keyboard shortcut did IBM engineer David Bradley create to reboot the original PC?

Ctrl+Alt+Del replaced Bradley's first choice, Ctrl+Alt+Esc, which could be hit by accident with one hand; he later joked that he had invented it but Bill Gates made it famous.

What diameter were the first floppy disks IBM made in 1971?

IBM's first floppy, shipped in 1971 to load microcode into System/370 mainframes, was 8 inches across; the 5¼-inch and 3½-inch formats followed.

IBM's 1956 RAMAC was the first computer to ship with which storage device?

A hard disk drive: built for real-time accounting, the unit weighed over a ton and its fifty stacked 24-inch platters held about 5 million characters, yet it fetched any record in under a second.

A crystal that glowed when current passed through it, noted by Henry Round in 1907, foreshadowed which device?

The LED traces back to Round's note that carborundum crystals glowed yellow, green or blue under voltage; practical visible-light versions arrived only in 1962, from Nick Holonyak at General Electric.

Theodore Maiman built the first working example of which device in 1960, using a ruby rod?

A laser: working at Hughes in California, Maiman beat rival groups led by Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow, using a synthetic ruby that other researchers had judged unworkable.

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

Texas Instruments had only just hired Kilby, so he had no summer holiday due and spent those weeks on the problem; his germanium chip worked in front of managers that September.

Robert Metcalfe adapted the collision-and-retry scheme of Hawaii's ALOHAnet radio network in 1973 to create which networking technology?

Ethernet kept ALOHAnet's trick of resending after a random wait when two messages collided, and added a rule that each machine first listen for a clear line; David Boggs helped build the first one.

Kevlar was developed in 1965 by Stephanie Kwolek at which company?

Stephanie Kwolek discovered the fibre at DuPont in 1965 while seeking a lightweight replacement for steel in tyres; DuPont launched it as Kevlar in the 1970s.

George de Mestral got the idea for Velcro from which plant sticking to his dog?

Burdock burrs clung to de Mestral's clothes and his dog after a hunting trip in the Alps; under a microscope he saw tiny hooks catching on loops, and spent ten years turning the idea into a fastener.

Which company sold the first commercial lithium-ion battery in 1991?

Sony put the first lithium-ion cells on sale in 1991, using a design Akira Yoshino built at Asahi Kasei in 1985 that swapped reactive lithium metal for carbon, making the battery safe enough to sell.

Steven Sasson's 1975 digital camera prototype for Kodak had a resolution of how many megapixels?

At 0.01 megapixels, or 100 by 100 pixels, the prototype took 23 seconds to save each monochrome image to cassette tape; Kodak's managers doubted anyone would want to look at photos on a screen.

The JPEG image format takes its name from what?

Its committee, the Joint Photographic Experts Group, published the standard in 1992; the intended successor, JPEG 2000, never managed to displace the original.

PDF has its roots in a 1991 Adobe initiative named after what?

Camelot was the code name of the 1991 project in which Adobe co-founder John Warnock set out to make any document viewable and printable on any computer; it reached the public as PDF in 1993.

Firefox was created in 2002 under which codename?

Phoenix 0.1 appeared in September 2002 as a lean browser split from the Mozilla suite; name clashes with a BIOS maker and then a database project forced renames to Firebird in 2003 and Firefox in 2004.

Google Chrome's 'no internet' error page hides an endless-runner game starring which animal?

A dinosaur: the pixel T. rex was added in 2014 as a joke about being sent back to the 'prehistoric age' when the connection drops, and its designers code-named it Project Bolan after the singer of the band T. Rex.

Which website did college roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian launch in 2005 after their food-ordering idea was turned down?

Reddit was their second pitch: Y Combinator passed on MyMobileMenu, a way to order food by text message, then invited the University of Virginia pair back to build something else.

GitHub's mascot Mona is a cat crossed with which sea creature?

An octopus: the 'Octocat' began as stock clip art by Simon Oxley, the designer behind Twitter's first bird logo, and GitHub bought the rights because the stock licence barred using it as a logo.

Which company did Microsoft buy for $26.2 billion in 2016, then its largest acquisition?

LinkedIn kept its own brand and chief executive under the all-cash deal, which stayed Microsoft's biggest purchase until its takeover of the games publisher Activision Blizzard, completed in 2023.

Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson originally wrote the game in which language?

Java was Notch's language for the original PC game, later named the Java Edition; the phone version was rewritten in C++ because iOS could not run Java, and that code grew into the Bedrock Edition.

Twitter's board initially resisted Elon Musk's 2022 takeover bid using what strategy?

A poison pill, adopted on 15 April 2022, would have let other shareholders buy extra stock if anyone attempted a hostile takeover; ten days later the board accepted Musk's $44 billion offer anyway.

In 2025 Microsoft announced that Windows' 'blue screen of death' would switch to which colour?

Black replaced blue in Windows 11 as part of a resilience push after the 2024 CrowdStrike outage left millions of PCs stuck on the crash screen; the redesign also dropped the frowning face and QR code.

The Y2K problem arose because programs stored years using how many digits?

Storing years as two digits, such as '99', made 2000 indistinguishable from 1900 to affected software, prompting a worldwide repair effort before 1 January 2000.

Wi-Fi is based on which family of IEEE standards?

802.11 amendments carry letter codes such as 802.11n and 802.11ac; to give buyers something easier to follow, the Wi-Fi Alliance began numbering generations in 2018, as Wi-Fi 4, 5 and 6.

Which 1994 IBM device is retrospectively called the first true smartphone?

The IBM Simon paired a phone with a touchscreen, email and fax when BellSouth launched it in August 1994, but a high price and a battery that lasted about an hour held sales to roughly 50,000.

What is the title of the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, in April 2005?

'Me at the zoo' shows co-founder Jawed Karim in front of the elephants at San Diego Zoo for 19 seconds; he has since edited its description to protest against changes at YouTube.

GoPro was founded in 2002 by whom?

Nick Woodman founded the company as Woodman Labs after a 2002 surfing trip to Australia, where he wanted close-up action shots of himself; its first product was a 35mm film camera on a wrist strap.

Which crowdfunding site did Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler launch in April 2009?

Kickstarter took Chen eight years to get from idea to launch; under its rule, backers are charged only if a project reaches its funding goal by the deadline.

Which website began in 1995 as emails about San Francisco events sent to a few friends?

Craigslist is named for Craig Newmark, who sent the emails; readers soon posted job openings too, more categories followed on request, and the list became a website in 1996.

Which media mogul's company bought Myspace for $580 million in 2005?

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation sold Myspace in 2011 for about $35 million, a fraction of the price it had paid; he told shareholders the purchase had been a 'huge mistake'.

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 with what legal structure?

OpenAI launched in December 2015 as a nonprofit research company with $1 billion pledged, co-chaired by Elon Musk and Sam Altman; a capped-profit arm was added in 2019.

Which former chess prodigy co-founded the AI lab DeepMind?

Demis Hassabis was a chess master at 13 and lead programmer of the hit video game Theme Park in his teens before turning to AI; he shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for DeepMind's protein-structure work.

The chess computer Deep Thought took its name from a machine imagined by which author?

Douglas Adams invented Deep Thought for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; when its builders joined IBM, the chess machine was renamed Deep Blue, a play on the company's nickname Big Blue.

Ada Lovelace is best known for her work on which proposed machine?

Her 1843 notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine included an algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers, and she saw the machine had uses beyond calculation, so she is often called the first programmer.

On which machine did the future Rear Admiral Hopper start programming in 1944?

Hopper reached the Harvard Mark I as a new Navy lieutenant in 1944, having first been turned down for service as too old at 34 and too light; she went on to write the machine's 561-page manual.

Which company developed the Go programming language, announced in 2009?

Google announced Go in November 2009; it was designed by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Unix co-creator Ken Thompson, and reached version 1.0 in 2012.

Vint Cerf shares the title 'father of the Internet' with which TCP/IP co-developer?

Robert Kahn wanted one protocol that could link packet radio and satellite networks; he brought in Vint Cerf in spring 1973 and together they designed TCP/IP.

Bill Gates befriended Paul Allen at which private Seattle institution?

Lakeside School's Teletype terminals, hooked up to time-sharing computers, were where Gates and Allen taught themselves to program; they later formed the Lakeside Programmers Club to earn money from their skills.

Which award did Google's founders receive in 2004 for PageRank?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin received the 2004 Marconi Prize, named for Guglielmo Marconi and given for advances in communications, for PageRank and Google search.

Which founder did Forbes name the world's youngest self-made billionaire in 2008?

Mark Zuckerberg was 23 and had started Facebook four years earlier; months before, Microsoft had paid $240 million for a 1.6% stake that valued the company at $15 billion.

Which payments company did Jack Dorsey co-found in 2009 after a friend could not take a customer's credit card?

Square began when glass artist Jim McKelvey lost a sale of his work because he could not accept cards; he and Dorsey built a small reader for phones, and its square shape named the company.

Nvidia marketed its 1999 GeForce 256 chip as the world's first what?

Graphics processing unit, or GPU, was Nvidia's own label for a chip that took 3D geometry work off the main processor; the same kind of chip later powered the boom in artificial intelligence.

The world's first webcam was set up at Cambridge University in 1991 to keep watch on what?

A coffee pot in the Trojan Room was the target, so researchers could check from their desks whether a walk down the corridor was worth it. The camera stayed switched on until 2001.

YouTube's first video, a 19-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim, was filmed where?

San Diego Zoo's elephant enclosure is the backdrop, and Karim's entire commentary is that the animals have really long trunks. He uploaded the clip in April 2005.

Nearly all data crossing the world's oceans, from emails to video calls, travels by which route?

Undersea cables carry about 99% of data traffic across the oceans, inside lines only about as thick as a garden hose. Satellites handle a sliver, because they are slower and more expensive.

Which electronics giant started out as a Korean trading company selling dried fish and noodles?

Samsung, whose name means 'three stars', had forty employees when Lee Byung-chul founded it in 1938. It only entered the electronics industry in the late 1960s.

Apple's very first company logo was an ornate drawing of which scientist?

Isaac Newton sits under an apple tree in the ornate drawing, which was replaced in 1977 by the rainbow-striped apple with a bite taken out of it.

Until 2019, major versions of the Android phone software took their public codenames from what?

Desserts supplied every name from Cupcake and Donut through KitKat to Pie, before plain numbers took over with Android 10.

The 'wiki' in Wikipedia comes from a word meaning 'quick' in which language?

Hawaiian supplied the word when programmer Ward Cunningham recalled the Wiki Wiki Shuttle bus at Honolulu airport and used it to name the first user-editable website in 1995.

Which animal is Tux, the Linux mascot chosen after one nipped the system's creator in Australia?

A penguin nibbled the Linux creator on a 1993 visit to Canberra, and he joked that he had caught 'penguinitis'. Artist Larry Ewing drew the plump mascot for a logo contest.

Thomas Edison tested his newly built phonograph by reciting which nursery rhyme into its mouthpiece?

Mary Had a Little Lamb became the first recorded verse in 1877, captured on a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a grooved cylinder. That original recording has not survived.

Which kind of computer memory forgets everything it holds the moment the power is switched off?

RAM is volatile: it keeps open apps and files ready for instant use, but its contents are lost when power is removed. That is why unsaved work vanishes in a blackout.

Which chemical element, purified from sand, is the base material of nearly every computer chip?

Silicon is the base material of the chip industry, which is how California's Santa Clara Valley earned its famous nickname. Chips need the element in highly purified form.

A web address is formally a URL, which stands for Uniform Resource what?

Locator completes the name, because a URL says where a resource lives on the web. Tim Berners-Lee later said the two slashes at the front of every address were unnecessary.

The extra 's' in a web address that begins 'https' tells you the connection is what?

Secure is the word: HTTPS encrypts everything passing between your browser and the site, which protects passwords and card numbers against eavesdropping and tampering.

The 'Cc' line of an email is named after which pre-digital way of duplicating typed letters?

Carbon copy is the origin: typists slipped a sheet of carbon paper between pages so each keystroke printed twice. 'Courtesy copy' is a later reinterpretation of the same two letters.

Which block-based coding language, developed at the MIT Media Lab, is aimed at children?

Scratch takes its name from the turntable technique of disc jockeys, who manipulate vinyl records to create new sounds. Its blocks of code are dragged into place instead of typed.

In computing, which playful name is given to four bits, exactly half of a byte?

A nibble is the name, a pun on byte sounding like 'bite', and it is sometimes spelled nybble to match. One of them can be written as a single hexadecimal digit.

Chris Messina's 2007 tweet proposed that Twitter users tag topics with which keyboard symbol?

The hash sign, also called the pound sign, was borrowed from IRC chat channels. Messina never patented the hashtag, saying such things were 'born of the internet, and owned by no one'.

Which online scam, documented on AOL in 1995, uses fake messages to coax passwords from victims?

Phishing borrows the 'ph' of phone 'phreaking', an older hacker pastime. A 1994 tool called AOHell let users pose as AOL staff and message victims asking for their passwords.

Which emoji did Oxford Dictionaries choose as its Word of the Year for 2015?

Face with Tears of Joy was found to be the most used emoji in the world that year, and Oxford said it best reflected the 'ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015'.

Which web portal began in 1994 as 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web'?

Yahoo was the new name Jerry Yang and David Filo gave their hand-built list of links after two months. They later explained it as 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle'.

Which company, begun in a California garage, picked the order of its founders' names by coin toss?

Hewlett-Packard could as easily have been Packard-Hewlett: the two founders settled the order with a coin toss in 1939. The garage where the pair began with $538 was made a California Historical Landmark in 1987.

Edwin Land invented which camera after his daughter asked why she couldn't see a photo at once?

Polaroid put Land's answer on sale in 1948: a camera that developed a picture in a minute or less. He had the idea within an hour of her question, on a family holiday in Santa Fe.

Which home videotape format went on sale before VHS yet lost the famous 'format war' against it?

Betamax had the whole market to itself in 1975, but buyers came to prefer the longer recording times of VHS tapes, and cheaper VHS machines sealed the result.

Which music-streaming service was founded in Stockholm in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon?

Spotify was conceived as a legal alternative to music piracy. It launched in several European markets in 2008 and reached the United States in 2011.

Which short-video app, the international twin of China's Douyin, absorbed the app Musical.ly?

TikTok kept its own name when the two apps merged in August 2018, and by that October it was the most downloaded app in the United States.

Vincent Connare designed which typeface after seeing cartoon characters 'speak' in Times New Roman?

Comic Sans draws on comic book lettering, because Connare felt Times New Roman made the word balloons of a cartoon-filled program look overly formal. It was released in 1994.

Since a 1978 textbook on the C language, a beginner's first program has printed which greeting?

Hello, world became a programmer's rite of passage after Brian Kernighan used it as an example in The C Programming Language. His earliest known version dates from a 1972 tutorial.

Margaret Hamilton, credited with coining 'software engineering', led flight software for which NASA program?

Apollo's on-board code was written under Hamilton at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, at a time when programmers learned on the job. Barack Obama awarded her the Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Colossus, a computer built to break the Lorenz cipher, was put to work at which British site?

Bletchley Park's Colossus was designed by Tommy Flowers, a telephone engineer from the General Post Office. The machines' existence was kept secret until the mid-1970s.

On election night 1952, the UNIVAC I computer stunned CBS by predicting whose landslide win?

Dwight Eisenhower's landslide was called from a sample of just 5.5% of the vote, at odds of 100 to 1. The CBS crew thought the machine had malfunctioned and aired a much closer forecast instead.

Which 1804 weaving invention ran on chains of punched cards, later borrowed by computer pioneers?

The Jacquard loom wove complex patterns by reading a chain of cards laced together, so swapping the cards changed the design. Charles Babbage took the idea for his planned mechanical computer.

Which 1972 machine, designed by Ralph Baer, was the first commercial home video game console?

The Magnavox Odyssey could only draw moving dots, so players placed plastic overlays on the TV screen for scenery. Its ping-pong game inspired Atari's arcade hit Pong.

Chuck Hull got the idea for which technology while hardening tabletop coatings with UV light?

3D printing began with Hull's stereolithography, which builds an object layer by layer as light hardens liquid resin. He also helped devise the STL file format widely used by such printers.

Which blockchain platform, conceived by Vitalik Buterin, brought smart contracts to cryptocurrency?

Ethereum grew from Buterin's argument that blockchains could run applications, not just move money. He was already a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine when he wrote its white paper.

The Stuxnet computer worm made nuclear centrifuges tear themselves apart in which country?

Iran reportedly lost almost one-fifth of its nuclear centrifuges to the worm, which reached the Natanz plant on infected computers and took over its industrial controllers.

TSMC, founded by Morris Chang as the world's first dedicated chip foundry, is headquartered where?

Taiwan recruited Chang with what was described as a blank cheque to build a chip industry. A dedicated foundry manufactures chips that other firms design, instead of selling its own.

The 'lorem ipsum' placeholder text used by designers is a scrambled passage from which Roman writer?

Cicero wrote the original in the 1st century BC, in a treatise on good and evil called De finibus. The opening 'lorem' is simply the Latin word 'dolorem' with its first two letters cut off.

The compact disc's 74-minute capacity was reportedly chosen to fit which complete symphony?

Beethoven's Ninth had to fit whole on one disc, on the instruction of executive Norio Ohga, in the format's official history. Engineers then lowered the data density to keep that playing time.

The word 'algorithm' comes from the Latinised name of which 9th-century Persian mathematician?

Al-Khwarizmi wrote a guide to calculating with Indian numerals around 825, and its Latin translation opened with 'Dixit Algoritmi', meaning 'Thus spoke Al-Khwarizmi'.

The 1956 summer workshop seen as the founding event of artificial intelligence met at which college?

Dartmouth hosted the project after John McCarthy picked the name 'Artificial Intelligence' for the new field, partly for its neutrality beside rival labels such as cybernetics.

The 'traitorous eight' engineers who quit William Shockley's lab founded which chip company?

Fairchild Semiconductor was born because the eight found Shockley's management authoritarian, and their demand that he be replaced was rebuffed. Shockley himself was a Nobel laureate in physics.

Which programming language did John Backus's team at IBM create as an alternative to assembly code?

Fortran, short for Formula Translating System, grew from Backus's proposal for a more practical way to program the IBM 704 mainframe. He later said much of his work came from being lazy.

Which family of chip designs, born at Britain's Acorn Computers, became the world's most used?

ARM designs use so little power and give off so little heat that they suit battery-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets. Acorn's earlier success was the BBC Micro.

Which 1982 British home computer from Clive Sinclair's team was known for its rubber keyboard?

The ZX Spectrum was designed in Cambridge and manufactured in Dundee by Timex, and its rainbow-striped case was the work of Rick Dickinson.

Brain, considered the first virus for the IBM PC, was written by two brothers in which country?

Pakistan's Alvi brothers, working in Lahore, said they wrote it to protect their medical software from illegal copying. The code even carried their address and phone numbers.

In the name ChatGPT, the 'T' stands for which type of neural network design, introduced in 2017?

Transformer is the design behind the 'T', first described in the 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need'. GPT models are pre-trained to predict the next token in a sequence.

A computer mouse's smallest detectable movement is which unit, named after a cartoon character?

The mickey, named after Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, is one resolvable step of motion. A mouse reports its movement to the computer as a count of horizontal and vertical mickeys.

Which ancient Greek device, found in a shipwreck in 1901, is the oldest known analogue computer?

The Antikythera mechanism was a hand-powered model of the Solar System that could predict eclipses decades in advance. It is named after the Greek island where the wreck lay.

Which mathematician's 1854 book The Laws of Thought set out the algebra behind computer logic?

George Boole's algebra gained its practical use decades later, when Claude Shannon applied it to relay circuits and so to digital computers. Boole taught at Queen's College, Cork.

Which engineer's improvements to the steam engine led to the SI unit of power being named after him?

James Watt added a separate condenser that stopped engines wasting energy, and he also developed the concept of horsepower. The tale that a boiling kettle inspired him may be apocryphal.