FACT 01The first computer 'bug' was a real moth found in Harvard Mark II on 9 Sept 1947 — Grace Hopper taped it into the logbook. 'Debugging' comes from that.
FACT 02ENIAC weighed 27 tonnes; your phone is 140,000 times lighter and millions of times faster.
FACT 03The word 'computer' first appeared in 1613 to describe a PERSON who computes.
FACT 04The first computer mouse (1964) was made of wood and had one button.
FACT 05QWERTY was designed in 1873 to slow typists down so typewriter arms would not jam.
FACT 06The first 1 GB hard disk (IBM 3380, 1980) weighed 250 kg and cost $40,000. Today 1 GB costs about ₹1.
FACT 07About 90% of the world's data was created in the last two years — around 400 million TB every day.
FACT 08The first webcam (Cambridge, 1991) watched a coffee pot so researchers would not walk to an empty pot.
FACT 09The first website is still online: info.cern.ch.
FACT 10'www.' is slower to say (9 syllables) than 'World Wide Web' (3 syllables).
FACT 11The @ symbol in e-mail was chosen by Ray Tomlinson in 1971 because it was unlikely to appear in names.
FACT 12The first spam e-mail was sent in 1978 to 400 ARPANET users. About 45% of e-mail today is spam.
FACT 13The first domain name registered was symbolics.com (15 March 1985).
FACT 14Google's name is a misspelling of 'googol' = 1 followed by 100 zeros.
FACT 15Every day Google handles ~8.5 billion searches; 15% of them have never been asked before.
FACT 16The first YouTube video, 'Me at the zoo', was uploaded on 23 April 2005 and is 19 seconds long.
FACT 17The Apollo 11 guidance computer had 4 KB of RAM — a modern USB-C charger has more computing power.
FACT 18A CAPTCHA stands for 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'.
FACT 19Wi-Fi does not stand for anything — it was a marketing name chosen in 1999 (not 'Wireless Fidelity').
FACT 20Bluetooth is named after King Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson of Denmark (10th century); its logo joins the runes for H and B.
FACT 21The Firefox logo is a red panda ('firefox' is a nickname for it), not a fox.
FACT 22Linux runs all 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers, 96% of the top web servers, and every Android phone.
FACT 23Windows was almost called 'Interface Manager'.
FACT 24The Recycle Bin was called 'Trash' on Mac first; Apple patented it, so Microsoft chose 'Recycle Bin'.
FACT 25Ctrl + Alt + Delete was created by IBM engineer David Bradley in 1981 as a developer shortcut; Bill Gates called it a mistake that it became public.
FACT 26The first computer virus for PCs, 'Brain' (1986), was written by two brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, and included their phone number.
FACT 27The first computer game is believed to be 'Spacewar!' (1962) on a PDP-1 at MIT.
FACT 28The Nintendo Game Boy (1989) had a 4.19 MHz CPU and 8 KB RAM and sold 118 million units.
FACT 29A modern CPU has about 20–100 billion transistors; a single transistor can switch on/off 5 billion times a second.
FACT 30The hottest place in your laptop (the CPU die) can reach 100 °C — hotter than boiling water — and is cooled by a fan the size of a biscuit.
FACT 31Transistors made so far: more than 10 sextillion (10²²) — more than all grains of sand on Earth.
FACT 32A typical smartphone has ~15 sensors: accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer, proximity, ambient light, fingerprint, GPS, lidar…
FACT 33The first text message, 'Merry Christmas', was sent on 3 Dec 1992.
FACT 34The first mobile phone call was made by Martin Cooper (Motorola) in 1973 on a 1.1 kg 'brick' with 30 minutes of talk time.
FACT 35India's first computer was HEC-2M, installed at ISI Kolkata in 1955; the first Indian-built computer was TIFRAC (1956).
FACT 36India's first e-mail and internet came via ERNET (1986) for education; public internet started 15 Aug 1995 (VSNL).
FACT 37Aadhaar is the world's largest biometric database (1.38 billion). UPI handles 18–20 billion transactions a month — more than Visa worldwide.
FACT 38India has the second-largest number of internet users (950+ million) and the cheapest mobile data in the world (~₹8 per GB).
FACT 39Indian-origin CEOs lead Microsoft, Google, IBM, Adobe, Micron, Palo Alto Networks and (formerly) Twitter.
FACT 40The ₹ symbol (2010, by D. Udaya Kumar) was added to Unicode as U+20B9 — you can type it with Ctrl + Alt + 4 on an Indian keyboard.
FACT 41Supercomputer El Capitan does in one second what would take every human on Earth doing one calculation per second ~7 years.
FACT 42The Internet weighs about 50 grams — the mass of all the electrons in motion carrying its data (a physicist's estimate).
FACT 43Undersea cables carry 99% of international internet traffic — about 1.4 million km of cable, enough to wrap the Earth 35 times.
FACT 44Google's first storage (1996) was built from LEGO bricks holding ten 4 GB drives.
FACT 45An SSD has no moving parts and can survive a 1.5 m drop; an HDD head floats 3 nanometres above the platter — a hair is 25,000× thicker.
FACT 46Deleting a file does not erase it — only the pointer is removed; the data stays until overwritten (which is how recovery tools work).
FACT 47The most common password is still '123456'. A 12-character random password would take centuries to brute-force; '123456' takes less than a second.
FACT 48The first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, was the daughter of poet Lord Byron.
FACT 49The term 'computer science' was first used in 1959; the first CS department was at Purdue University in 1962.
FACT 50The average person touches their phone 2,600 times a day.
FACT 51Each Google search uses roughly 0.3 Wh of energy; an AI chatbot answer uses about 10× more.
FACT 52Nvidia, which made gaming graphics cards in 1999, became the world's most valuable company in 2024–25 (over $4 trillion) because its GPUs train AI.
FACT 53There are about 1.1 billion websites, but only ~17% are active.
FACT 54The first emoji set (176 icons) was created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita in Japan; today there are 3,800+.
FACT 55A single Boeing 787 generates ~500 GB of data per flight; a self-driving car ~4 TB per day.
FACT 56The oldest computer still working for its original job is a 1980s DEC PDP-11 controlling some nuclear-plant systems; NASA's Voyager probes (1977) still run on 69 KB of memory 24 billion km away.
FACT 57Bitcoin's network uses more electricity than many countries (~150 TWh/year) — about as much as Poland.
FACT 58'Hello, World!' as the first program comes from Brian Kernighan's 1972 tutorial for the B language, then the C book (1978).
FACT 59You can type a whole alphabet on the Win + . emoji keyboard, but the longest word you can type with only the left hand on QWERTY is 'stewardesses'.
FACT 60Computer Literacy Day is celebrated on 2 December; World Computer Literacy Day was started in India by NIIT in 2001.
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