140 Fun Facts About Tech

Which Apple co-founder unveiled the first iPhone at Macworld in January 2007?

Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone at Macworld on 9 January 2007, calling it a phone, an iPod and an internet communicator in one; it went on sale that June.

The short-range wireless standard Bluetooth is named after what?

Intel's Jim Kardach proposed the codename in 1997 after reading about Harald Bluetooth, the tenth-century king who united Denmark.

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

The Wi-Fi Alliance, then called WECA, hired the brand consultancy Interbrand in 1999 to name its wireless networking certification; Interbrand also designed the yin-yang style logo.

The QR code was invented in 1994 by a subsidiary of which car maker, to label auto parts?

Denso Wave, part of the Toyota group, created the QR code in 1994 to track car parts; engineer Masahiro Hara took the square pattern idea from the board game Go.

The first network email, which introduced the @ sign in addresses, was sent in which year?

Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email over ARPANET in 1971, choosing the @ sign to separate the user's name from the host machine.

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

Berners-Lee wrote his Web proposal in March 1989 at CERN, the particle-physics laboratory near Geneva; CERN put the Web software into the public domain in April 1993.

The Nokia 3310, launched in 2000, sold about how many units?

The Nokia 3310 sold about 126 million units, making it one of the best-selling phones ever; it shipped with Snake II and earned an 'indestructible' reputation online.

The Motorola DynaTAC, unveiled in 1983, holds what distinction?

The DynaTAC 8000X was the earliest commercial handheld cellphone, priced near $4,000; Martin Cooper had made the first public handheld mobile call on a DynaTAC prototype in April 1973.

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

Apple's tagline was '1,000 songs in your pocket': the 5 GB hard drive held roughly that many tracks, and the first iPod worked only with Macs.

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

Sony and Philips jointly developed the compact disc, publishing the Red Book standard in 1980; the first players and discs went on sale in Japan in 1982.

ENIAC, the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer, was completed in which year?

ENIAC was completed in 1945 and publicly dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania in February 1946, when the press called it a 'Giant Brain'; its first programmers were six women.

The transistor was invented in 1947 at which research laboratory?

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?

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that transistor counts were doubling yearly and in 1975 revised the rate to every two years, the form now known as Moore's law.

Which Rolling Stones song did Microsoft license for the Windows 95 launch, a nod to the new taskbar button?

Microsoft licensed 'Start Me Up' for the August 1995 Windows 95 campaign, playing on the new Start button; reported fees ranged from about $3 million to $14 million.

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

Ridley Scott, fresh from Blade Runner, directed the '1984' commercial; it aired nationally once, during Super Bowl XVIII on 22 January 1984, and the Macintosh went on sale two days later.

The name Google is a misspelling of which mathematical term?

Googol is the number written as 1 followed by 100 zeros; Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the google.com domain in September 1997.

Amazon began in 1994 as an online store for what?

Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore, run from his garage in Bellevue, Washington; the site opened in July 1995 and later branded itself 'The Everything Store'.

Facebook was launched in 2004 at which Ivy League university?

Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com from his Harvard dorm in February 2004; it was open only to Harvard students at first, then spread to other universities.

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

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim all worked at PayPal before founding YouTube in February 2005; Google bought the site for $1.65 billion in November 2006.

Netflix was founded in 1997 as what kind of business?

Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded Netflix in Scotts Valley, California in 1997 as a DVD-by-mail rental service; streaming did not arrive 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?

It began as a side project to Nupedia, an expert-written encyclopedia that never took off.

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

The message read 'Merry Christmas': engineer Neil Papworth typed it on a computer and sent it over Vodafone's network on 3 December 1992 to Richard Jarvis at a party in Newbury.

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

The Department of Defense launched the Navstar GPS project in 1973; the 24-satellite constellation became operational in 1993, and deliberate civilian degradation ended in 2000.

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 hit 100,000,000 monthly users how long after its November 2022 launch?

ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022 and analysts estimated it passed 100 million monthly users in January 2023, about two months later, a record pace for a consumer app at the time.

The Roomba robot vacuum, introduced in 2002, is made by which company?

iRobot, founded in 1990 by three MIT roboticists, built military PackBot robots before launching the Roomba in 2002.

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

Lithium-ion batteries: since the first commercial cells were sold in 1991, their energy density has tripled and their cost has fallen tenfold.

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

Douglas Engelbart of SRI gave the 9 December 1968 demo in San Francisco, showing the mouse alongside hypertext, video conferencing and windows decades before they were common.

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

E. Remington and Sons, the gunmaker, put the Sholes and Glidden typewriter on sale in 1874; QWERTY is simply the first six letters of its top row.

CAPTCHA is a contrived acronym whose letters stand for a 'Completely Automated Public' what?

The term was coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon; the full phrase is 'Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'.

The music-sharing service Napster, launched in June 1999, was founded by Sean Parker and whom?

Shawn Fanning, then a Northeastern University student, wrote Napster and launched it with Sean Parker in June 1999; lawsuits from the record labels and Metallica shut it down in July 2001.

The MP3 audio format was developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in which country?

Karlheinz Brandenburg led the work at the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen, Germany; MP3 was standardised as MPEG-1 Audio Layer III in 1993.

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

Bandai released the Tamagotchi in Japan in November 1996 and worldwide in 1997; the egg-shaped toy's three buttons let owners feed and raise a pet through its life stages.

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

Tetris widened the Game Boy's appeal far beyond traditional gamers after its 1989 launch.

The Bitcoin white paper was published in 2008 under which pseudonym?

Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity was never confirmed, posted the white paper on 31 October 2008; the network went live in January 2009 with supply capped at 21 million coins.

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?

Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov 3.5-2.5 in New York in May 1997, winning two games, losing one and drawing three, the first defeat of a reigning champion under regular time controls.

In 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGo beat which top professional at the board game Go?

AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol 4-1 in Seoul in March 2016, the first time a computer beat a 9-dan professional without a handicap; Lee's game-four win was the only human victory.

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

Watson won the three-day Jeopardy! exhibition in February 2011 against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter; its data was held in RAM because disks were too slow to keep up with human buzzers.

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

Turing called it the imitation game in 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', published in the journal Mind in 1950 while he worked at the University of Manchester.

Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, was launched by the Soviet Union in which year?

On 4 October 1957 the polished 58-centimetre sphere went up and broadcast radio pulses for 22 days until its batteries ran out.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, became the first spacecraft to do what in August 2012?

Voyager 1 entered interstellar space on 25 August 2012 when it crossed the heliopause, the edge of the Sun's solar-wind bubble, the first spacecraft ever to do so.

A moth found jammed in a relay computer at a Massachusetts university in 1947 popularised which computing term?

Technicians taped the moth into the logbook of the Harvard Mark II relay computer as the 'first actual case of bug being found', popularising 'bug' and 'debugging'; the page survives at the Smithsonian.

Hedy Lamarr's World War II frequency-hopping radio system was originally meant to guide what?

Lamarr and composer George Antheil patented their 'Secret Communication System' in 1942 to steer radio-guided torpedoes without jamming; the frequency-hopping idea underlies Bluetooth and early Wi-Fi.

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

Philo Farnsworth transmitted the first all-electronic television image in 1927 and was granted his 'Television System' patent in 1930; he also invented the image dissector camera tube.

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

A candy bar melted in Spencer's pocket while he stood near a magnetron at Raytheon in 1945; the first Radarange went on sale in 1947 and Amana's countertop model followed in 1967.

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

The scan took place at Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, near the factory making the scanning equipment.

The world's first cash machine was installed in June 1967 at a branch of which bank?

Barclays opened the machine at its Enfield, London branch on 27 June 1967; built by De La Rue, it beat a Swedish rival by nine days, and actor Reg Varney made the first withdrawal.

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?

Ernő Rubik was teaching architecture and design at a Budapest college when he built the 'Magic Cube' in 1974; Ideal Toy Corp launched it worldwide as the Rubik's Cube in 1980.

The Linux kernel was first released in 1991 by which Finnish programmer?

Linus Torvalds, then a Helsinki student, announced Linux in August 1991 as 'just a hobby'; he later said he might never have written it had the GNU kernel or 386BSD been ready.

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

Bill Gates and Paul Allen started the company in Albuquerque, near the Altair's maker, before moving to Washington state.

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

Ronald Wayne, who drew the first Apple logo, took a 10% stake on 1 April 1976 and sold it back for $800 within twelve days; the company was formed to sell Wozniak's Apple I.

Forced out of Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs founded NeXT and bought which animation studio in 1986?

Pixar: Jobs bought Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for about $5 million in 1986 and remained its majority owner until Disney acquired it in 2006; he had returned to Apple as CEO in 1997.

Guido van Rossum created Python as a successor to which programming language?

Van Rossum had helped build the teaching language ABC at CWI in Amsterdam and designed Python in 1989 to fix its shortcomings; Python 0.9.0 was released in February 1991.

Java was designed by James Gosling at which company?

It was released in May 1995 as a core part of Sun's Java platform.

Dennis Ritchie created the C language in 1972 as a successor to which language?

Ritchie built C on Ken Thompson's typeless B language, adding data types; it was first used for Unix utilities, and the Unix kernel was rewritten in C in 1973.

Who created JavaScript in 1995?

Brendan Eich wrote the first version of JavaScript at Netscape in about ten days in May 1995; despite the name and C-like syntax it is unrelated to Java.

COBOL was partly based on FLOW-MATIC, a language designed by whom?

Grace Hopper designed FLOW-MATIC at Remington Rand in the mid-1950s, the first English-like business language; the CODASYL committee drew on it when it began COBOL in 1959.

Intel's 4004 microprocessor grew out of a 1969 commission from which calculator company?

Japanese calculator maker Busicom commissioned a chipset from Intel in 1969; Ted Hoff's design became the 4-bit 4004, released on 15 November 1971 as Intel's first microprocessor.

The original IBM PC was designed by a team based in which Florida city?

Don Estridge's team in Boca Raton built the IBM PC, model 5150, in about a year; it was released on 12 August 1981 and set the PC-compatible standard.

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

VisiCalc, written by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston and released in 1979, was the first spreadsheet program and the 'killer app' that sold Apple IIs to businesses.

Which computer does Guinness list as the best-selling desktop model of all time?

The Commodore 64, launched at $595 in 1982, sold an estimated 12.5 to 17 million units, which Guinness World Records credited as the most for a single desktop model.

Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in which year?

Taylor, head of ARPA's computing office, won funding for the network in February 1966 and hired Larry Roberts to run it; the first ARPANET link was made in 1969.

Mosaic, released in 1993, was the first browser to do what?

It was developed at NCSA at the University of Illinois; earlier browsers included WorldWideWeb and ViolaWWW.

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

Susan Wojcicki, later YouTube's CEO, rented her Menlo Park garage to Page and Brin in September 1998; Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim had written them a $100,000 cheque that August.

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

Jeff Bezos invested about $250,000 in Google in 1998; entrepreneur Ram Shriram and Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim also backed the start-up that year.

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 November 1985, could not do what with its windows?

Overlap them: windows were tiled instead, and it ran as a 16-bit shell on MS-DOS.

Which two men incorporated Tesla Motors in July 2003?

Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning incorporated Tesla Motors on 1 July 2003; Elon Musk led the first funding round in 2004, became chairman and took over as CEO in 2008.

Which Tesla model went into production first, in 2008?

The Roadster sports car came first; the Model S followed in 2012, Model X in 2015 and Model 3 in 2017.

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

Falcon 1 reached orbit on its fourth flight, on 28 September 2008, making SpaceX the first private company to put a liquid-fuelled rocket into orbit.

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

Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra in July 1994, but a lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver'; he registered the amazon.com domain that November and renamed the business after the river.

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.

PayPal became a subsidiary of eBay in 2002 at what valuation?

eBay bought PayPal for about $1.5 billion in stock in October 2002; the company had begun as Fieldlink, then Confinity, in 1998, and was spun off again in 2015.

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

Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem planned the company over breakfasts at a Denny's diner in East San Jose before founding Nvidia on 5 April 1993.

Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make what?

Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo in Kyoto in 1889 to hand-make hanafuda, the Japanese flower playing cards; video games did not arrive until the 1970s.

Atari's Pong was created by Allan Alcorn as what?

Nolan Bushnell gave new hire Allan Alcorn Pong as a training exercise, pretending it was a contract for General Electric; the result was good enough for Atari to release it in 1972.

Which 1970s PARC computer pioneered the GUI, mouse and Ethernet networking together?

The Xerox Alto, built at PARC in 1973, combined a bitmapped graphical display, a mouse and Ethernet networking; Steve Jobs saw it on a 1979 visit and borrowed ideas for the Macintosh.

USB was introduced in which year to standardise peripheral connections?

The USB 1.0 specification was released in January 1996 by a group led by Intel's Ajay Bhatt; it went on to replace serial, parallel and game ports and the Apple Desktop Bus.

Which Amazon subsidiary developed the Kindle hardware platform?

Lab126, Amazon's Silicon Valley hardware unit founded in 2004, built the first Kindle, released in November 2007; its name plays on the letters A (1) and Z (26).

On what date did Steve Jobs unveil the first-generation iPad on stage?

Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad at a San Francisco event on January 27, 2010; the Wi-Fi model went on sale in the United States on 3 April that year.

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

Teaching computer science in schools was the aim, but its low cost and flexibility made it popular far beyond the classroom.

The Arduino platform takes its name from what?

The founders named it after the Bar di Re Arduino in Ivrea, Italy, where they met; the project began in 2005 as a tool for students at the town's Interaction Design Institute.

Photoshop was created in 1987 by which pair of brothers?

Thomas Knoll began the program on a Macintosh Plus in 1987 and his brother John, an Industrial Light & Magic effects artist, helped sell it; Adobe licensed Photoshop in 1988.

Google's 2005 purchase of Android Inc. cost at least how much?

Google paid at least $50 million for Android Inc. in 2005, bringing Andy Rubin with it; Google's David Lawee later called it the company's best deal ever.

Instagram began development under what name, as a mobile check-in app?

Kevin Systrom's prototype was Burbn, a check-in app named after bourbon; he and Mike Krieger stripped it down to photos and launched Instagram for iOS in October 2010.

Roughly how much did Facebook pay for WhatsApp in February 2014?

Founders Brian Acton and Jan Koum were former Yahoo employees.

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

The code was written in Tallinn by Estonian developers Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn and Toivo Annus; Skype launched on 29 August 2003 and eBay bought it in 2005.

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

Eric Yuan, a Cisco vice-president who had come with its WebEx acquisition, left in 2011 with about 40 engineers; the start-up was first named Saasbee before becoming Zoom.

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

Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown developed the app as Stanford students in 2011; Brown brought the disappearing-pictures idea and was later bought out after a lawsuit.

Uber's idea came after its founders spent how much hiring a private driver on New Year's Eve?

Garrett Camp and friends spent $800 on a private driver one New Year's Eve, and he had struggled to find a taxi on a snowy night in Paris; UberCab launched in San Francisco in 2010.

Airbnb's founders raised $30,000 in 2008 by selling what?

Boxes named after Obama and McCain funded them until Y Combinator took them on in 2009.

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

DOCTOR mimicked a Rogerian psychotherapist by turning users' statements back into questions; Joseph Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA at MIT between 1964 and 1967.

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

Siri debuted built into the iPhone 4s in October 2011; Apple had bought Siri Inc., an SRI International spin-off whose App Store app launched in February 2010, that April.

Amazon's Alexa was largely developed from Evi and which Polish speech synthesizer?

Amazon bought the British question-answering app Evi in 2012 and the Polish text-to-speech company Ivona in January 2013; their technology became Alexa, launched in the Echo speaker in 2014.

How wide is the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror?

Hubble's primary mirror is 2.4 metres across; a flaw in its shape blurred early images until astronauts fitted corrective optics in 1993.

The James Webb Space Telescope's primary mirror is made of how many hexagonal segments?

Webb's 18 gold-coated beryllium hexagons form a 6.5-metre mirror that folded to fit inside its Ariane 5 rocket; it launched on 25 December 2021.

David Bradley's soft-reboot shortcut for the IBM PC originally used which key combination?

Bradley first wired the reboot to Ctrl+Alt+Esc, but it could be hit with one hand by accident, so he moved it to Ctrl+Alt+Del, which needs both hands.

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.

Which 1956 IBM system was the first commercial computer to use a moving-head hard disk drive?

The IBM 305 RAMAC's 350 disk unit stored about 5 MB on fifty 24-inch platters; the first RAMAC in the US auto industry went to Chrysler's MOPAR division in 1957.

Electroluminescence from a solid-state diode was first reported in 1907 by whom?

Henry Joseph Round of Marconi Labs reported in 1907 that carborundum crystals glowed yellow, green, orange or blue when current passed through a contact.

Who built the first working laser in 1960?

Theodore Maiman fired the first working laser, a flash-lamp-pumped ruby rod, at Hughes Research Laboratories on 16 May 1960, building on theory by Townes and Schawlow.

Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit on 12 September 1958 at which company?

Kilby had joined Texas Instruments that May and sketched the idea in his notebook in July; his germanium chip worked on 12 September 1958, and he shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs adapted which network's approach to create Ethernet at Xerox PARC?

Metcalfe borrowed the random-access, retry-on-collision scheme of Hawaii's ALOHAnet radio network; the 1973 coaxial Ethernet at PARC linked Alto computers to a prototype laser printer.

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 trousers and dog after a 1941 Alpine hunting trip; under a microscope their tiny hooks inspired his hook-and-loop fastener, patented in 1955.

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

Sony, working with Asahi Kasei, commercialised the lithium-ion battery in 1991 for its camcorders, building on Akira Yoshino's 1985 prototype cell.

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

The 8-pound prototype used a 100-by-100-pixel Fairchild CCD, about 0.01 megapixels, and took 23 seconds to record a black-and-white image to cassette tape.

The JPEG image standard was introduced in which year?

The Joint Photographic Experts Group's standard was approved in 1992 as ITU-T T.81; by 2015 several billion JPEG images were being produced every day.

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

Adobe co-founder John Warnock's 1991 paper launched the Camelot project to make documents viewable on any machine; it became PDF in 1993, standardised as ISO 32000 in 2008.

Firefox was created in 2002 under which codename?

Phoenix 0.1 appeared in September 2002 as a lean standalone browser split from the Mozilla Application Suite; trademark clashes forced renames to Firebird in 2003 and Firefox in 2004.

Google Chrome launched in September 2008 for which operating system?

It was built with components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla Firefox before Google forked WebKit into Blink.

Reddit's founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian were college roommates where?

Huffman and Ohanian were roommates at the University of Virginia, graduating in 2005 just before launching Reddit that June; Condé Nast bought the site in October 2006.

Which company bought the code-hosting site GitHub in 2018?

Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 in a stock deal worth about $7.5 billion; the site had launched in April 2008 and ran as a Microsoft subsidiary under its own CEO.

How much did LinkedIn sell for in December 2016?

Microsoft completed its $26.2 billion purchase of LinkedIn in December 2016, its largest acquisition to that point; LinkedIn had launched on 5 May 2003.

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

Microsoft bought Mojang and the Minecraft IP for $2.5 billion in November 2014.

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

Twitter's board adopted a poison pill on 15 April 2022 to dilute any stake above 15%, then accepted Musk's $44 billion offer on 25 April; the deal closed on 27 October.

Starting with which release did the blue screen of death turn black?

Microsoft switched the crash screen from blue to black in Windows 11 version 24H2 in 2025, part of resiliency changes made after the 2024 CrowdStrike outage; the redesign also shortened the error text.

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?

Wi-Fi products implement the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standards, first published in 1997; the Wi-Fi Alliance certifies that devices from different makers interoperate.

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

The IBM Simon Personal Communicator, sold by BellSouth from August 1994, combined a phone with a 4.5-inch touchscreen, email and fax; about 50,000 were sold.

Which company sued Apple in 2015 over the trademark 'iWatch'?

Probendi, a Dublin software firm holding an EU 'iWatch' trademark, sued Apple in Milan in 2015 over search ads that sent 'iWatch' queries to the Apple Watch.

GoPro was founded in 2002 by whom?

Nick Woodman founded the company as Woodman Labs in 2002 after a surfing trip, selling a wrist-strap 35mm film camera in 2004 before the digital Hero line.

Kickstarter launched on April 28, 2009, with which trio of founders?

Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler launched Kickstarter on 28 April 2009 in New York; it opened to UK-based projects in October 2012.

Craigslist began in 1995 as what?

Craig Newmark was influenced by early online communities like the WELL and Usenet.

News Corporation bought Myspace in July 2005 for how much?

News Corporation paid $580 million for Myspace's parent Intermix Media in July 2005; by mid-2006 Myspace was the most visited website in the United States.

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.

Google acquired the British AI lab DeepMind in which year?

Google bought DeepMind in January 2014 for a reported $400 million or more; the lab merged with Google Brain to form Google DeepMind in April 2023.

Development of the chess computer Deep Blue began in 1985 at Carnegie Mellon under what name?

Feng-hsiung Hsu's ChipTest project began at Carnegie Mellon in 1985 and grew into Deep Thought there in 1988; the team moved to IBM in 1989, where the machine became Deep 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 joined Howard Aiken's team on the Harvard Mark I, an electromechanical calculator, in 1944 as a Navy lieutenant; she later pioneered compilers and machine-independent languages.

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 of DARPA and Vint Cerf, then at Stanford, designed TCP/IP in 1973-74 and described it in a 1974 paper; both later received the Turing Award for the work.

Bill Gates befriended Paul Allen at which private Seattle institution?

Gates enrolled at 13 and later dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to lead Microsoft.

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.

Mark Zuckerberg became the world's youngest self-made billionaire in 2008 at what age?

Forbes listed Zuckerberg in March 2008 at age 23, worth about $1.5 billion, making him the youngest self-made billionaire; he turned 24 that May.

Jack Dorsey came up with the idea that became Twitter while studying where?

Dorsey sketched the idea while a student at New York University around 2000; he and Biz Stone built a prototype at Odeo in about two weeks in 2006 after settling on SMS.

Jensen Huang founded Nvidia at what age?

Huang, born in February 1963, co-founded Nvidia in April 1993 at 30, shortly after a master's in electrical engineering at Stanford, and became its first chief executive.