51 facts, each with a source

Tech facts

Tech facts about the machines you use every day. Your colour printer hides its serial number on every page, the close-door button in most lifts does nothing, and Bluetooth is named after a Viking king. Sourced, short and a little unsettling.

AI

The programmer who wrote the first chatbot watched his own secretary ask him to leave the room so she could talk to it privately.
Every captcha you solved was unpaid labour.

Computing History

Ctrl-Alt-Delete was never meant for you.
The Apollo guidance computer's program was stored by threading wire through or around tiny magnetic rings — a one or a zero per pass.
The first computer program was written for a machine that was never built.
Grace Hopper handed out 30 cm lengths of wire to explain why satellite calls lag.
The first documented computer bug was a literal moth.
The first computer mouse was carved out of wood.
IBM's first gigabyte hard drive shipped in 1980.

Internet

Wi-Fi came out of a failed hunt for exploding black holes.
The first webcam was invented to watch a coffee pot.
The first video uploaded to YouTube is 19 seconds at a zoo.
The first web page is still online.
The entire internet weighs about as much as a strawberry.
Email is older than the World Wide Web.
The @ in every email address was chosen in 1971 for one reason: it was the only symbol on the keyboard that could not appear in anyone's name.
Almost all intercontinental internet traffic runs through cables on the seabed, not satellites.
Wi-Fi does not stand for anything.
The first mass email advertisement went out over ARPANET in 1978 to a few hundred recipients.

Gadgets

The close-door button in most lifts does nothing.
The default Nokia ringtone is a 19th-century guitar solo.
Bluetooth is named after a Viking king.
The fax machine is older than the telephone.
A phone charger has more computing power than the Apollo moon lander.
The first mobile phone call was made to gloat at a rival.
The first text message said Merry Christmas.

Robotics

The word robot comes from a 1920 Czech play and means forced labour.
The first industrial robot went to work in a New Jersey die-casting plant in 1961, stacking red-hot metal.

Cybersecurity

Your colour printer hides its serial number on every page.
The malware that wrecked Iran's uranium centrifuges also recorded normal sensor readings and played them back to the control room, so operators watched a calm screen while the machines tore themselves apart.
The first computer worm politely announced itself.
The 1988 worm that took down a tenth of the internet was meant to be harmless.
The most common password in the world is still 123456.
Bitcoin's first block contains the text of a newspaper headline from 3 January 2009.

Software

A Belgian candidate picked up 4,096 votes that did not exist in 2003.
Toy Story 2 was almost deleted by a single command.
The most famous cheat code exists because a developer could not win.
One music video broke YouTube's counter.
Regulators once ordered airlines to reboot the Boeing 787 at least every 248 days.
The most-viewed photograph ever is an unedited picture of a hill.
A radiation therapy machine in the 1980s could deliver a massive overdose if the operator typed the treatment settings quickly enough.
Ariane 5 destroyed itself 39 seconds after launch in 1996.
The save icon is an object most users have never held.
A great deal of software counts seconds from 1 January 1970 in a 32-bit number.

More tech facts

Satellite navigation is the same problem solved the same way.
GPS was deliberately made worse until the year 2000.
Those packing houses ran carcasses past stationary workers on overhead rails, each man making one cut.
Your maps would drift 7 miles off course daily without Einstein.
A self-taught Yorkshire carpenter spent forty years on it, bonding two metals into a strip that bent with temperature to cancel out its own expansion.
So the prize came down to building a clock that could hold London time on a rolling deck.
The trade only worked because of sawdust.