5 Surprising Facts About Technology

Would you believe me if I told you that emails existed before the Internet? Or that you could register any domain you wanted for free until 1995? Shocking, right?

Today, we’re surrounded by technology from every direction. Be it asking our smart assistants to set up an alarm before going to bed, or waking up to a hot coffee prepared by a smart coffee maker, we heavily rely on technology.

However, it’s a fact that technology plays a huge role in our lives, yet we know very little about it. And if you’re a technological geek, you’re in for a treat. 

Because in this article, I’ll present some truly mind-blowing facts about technology I bet you didn’t know. So, shall we start?

A Russian Computer That Ran on Water

Charles Babbage came up with the idea of the computer by introducing a device that could perform calculations with a mechanical and analytical engine. However, in 1942, Dr. Vincent Atanasoff and his student, Clifford Berry, introduced the world’s first electronic computer.

But even before the world’s first electronic computer, a Russian painter and architect, Vladimir Sergeevich Lukyanov, introduced a computer in 1936 that ran on water. 

As an architect, Lukyanov wanted to explore why cracks appeared in buildings during winter. And, as adventurous as he was, he created a computer to plot and visualize graphs to understand the thermal process in the winter season.

That said, Lukyanov’s marvel did not get much recognition globally and was completely sidelined once electronic computers were introduced.

NASA’s Internet is Mind-Bogglingly Fast

Undoubtedly, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) is one of the biggest space agencies in the world. Understandably, NASA engineers need high-speed internet to perform all the calculations, assess asteroids’ trajectory, and more.

But do you know how much speed NASA’s internet actually provides? In 2013 and 2014, NASA tested out its internet speeds by sending data between its Denver and Maryland offices on a wired connection.

The internet speed maxed out at 91Gbps, but it isn’t the regular speed NASA engineers usually get in their offices. In comparison to fiber internet, which is popular for offering symmetrical speeds up to 8 Gbps, imagine what you could achieve with NASA’s internet speeds.

The World’s First Website Is Still Functional

Do you know how many websites are there on the World Wide Web? Around a whopping 1.1 billion! 

Out of them, only 200 million websites are active and regularly maintained, and around 252,000 new websites are launched on the world wide web every day.

The surprising fact is that the world’s first website created by Tim-Berners Lee is still running. In 1991, Tim was working on the first world wide web when he created his website and hosted it on a NeXT system at CERN.

Jeff Bezos’s Confusion about Amazon.com

The world’s largest e-commerce platform, Amazon, was created in 1994 by Jeff Bezos. However, “Amazon” wasn’t the first name Bezos came up with. He named it Cadabra Inc., but soon changed it to Relentless. Then again, he changed it to what we know today as Amazon.

Besides the company name, Bezos was also confused about registering his company’s domain as he first used aard.com, awake.com, browse.com, bookmall.com, and relentless.com, and then he finally chose amazon.com as his company’s domain.

Wikipedia Has Thousands of Bot Employees

Wikipedia is one of the largest repositories of information on the internet. Even though the authenticity of information on Wikipedia may be questionable, it is still a pretty useful platform.

However, what is astonishing about Wikipedia is that it has employed bots to take care of the platform. From creating new information pages or fixing the contextual errors, Wikipedia has hired bots to get the work done.

As the website is “Wiki”, any internet user can add anything to the existing information on Wikipedia. However, these bots stay active and correct those changes in case the information is wrong. As of now, there are around 1,941 bots currently authorized to work on Wikipedia.

Before I wind up, I have mentioned a few more mind-blowing technological facts below:

• The world’s first-ever social media platform was “Six Degrees”, and it was launched in 1997. People could create their profiles and add friends on the platform.
• Morton Heilig created the world’s first virtual-reality (VR) headset, the “Sensorama,” in 1962.
• Osborne-1 was the world’s first laptop computer. It was introduced in 1981 and weighed 24 pounds.
• GRiDPad was the world’s first touch-screen tablet computer, and it was introduced in 1989.
• Edward E. Zajac created the world’s first computer animation called “Hummingbird” in 1962.