Tech
The scrappy, accidental beginnings of the tech you use every day.
The technology we use every day often began as a small, practical answer to an ordinary problem. A camera checked whether coffee was ready. A wooden prototype helped someone point at a screen. An old arrangement of keys carried on into a very different era. These facts follow inventions, computing and communications through their documented beginnings and later changes. They distinguish an early prototype from a commercial launch and an influential example from an absolute first. Behind the polished devices are experiments, constraints and human choices, which usually make a much more interesting story than an invention appearing fully formed.
By the numbers
All tech facts
The first webcam was pointed at a coffee pot.
The first computer mouse was made of wood.
One of the most famous computer bugs was an actual moth.
The first .com domain ever registered was symbolics.com, in 1985.
Email is about 20 years older than the World Wide Web.
The QWERTY keyboard layout dates back to typewriters from the 1870s.
The first video ever uploaded to YouTube was 19 seconds long, at a zoo.
Nokia started out in 1865 as a paper mill.
The first working transistor was built in 1947.
An integrated circuit puts multiple electronic components on one chip.
An early commercial microprocessor contained just 2,300 transistors.
ARPANET’s first attempted login crashed after two letters.
ARPANET switched to TCP/IP on New Year’s Day.
CERN released foundational Web software into the public domain in 1993.
QR codes were invented to label automobile parts.
The first retail UPC scan was a packet of chewing gum.
A GPS receiver normally needs four satellites to solve position and time.
An audio CD stores 44,100 samples per second for each channel.
A standard single-layer DVD holds 4.7 billion bytes, not 4.7 binary gigabytes.
Blu-ray reads discs with a blue-violet laser.
USB was designed to replace a jumble of computer peripheral connections.
Bluetooth takes its name from a medieval Scandinavian king.
Wi-Fi is not formally short for wireless fidelity.
PNG compression can preserve every original pixel value.
Ordinary JPEG compression saves space by discarding image information.
A GIF image palette holds at most 256 colors.
Original ASCII fits into seven bits.
IPv6 has a vastly larger address space than IPv4.
The Internet’s naming system is distributed, not one giant address book.
Punched cards controlled textile patterns long before electronic computers.
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