100 Surprising Technology Facts That You Didn’t Know

100 surprising technology facts, what more could your inner-geek need?! Technology, ever-changing and growing, brings us the future we have always imagined. But how did it get to where we are now? And where it will go next?

Did you know that you can earn money by finding bugs on Facebook? Do you know the true meaning of “Android”? Or how much of the world’s currency is digital?

Find answers to these technical questions here!

With these 100 tech facts, you’ll find interesting news on everything from computers and the Internet to gaming gadgets and tech giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

So without further ado, here are the top 100 amazing tech facts you (probably) didn’t know!

The Firefox logo isn’t a fox.

There is a common misconception that the name of the browser is Firefox, and the logo must be a fox.

Surprisingly, the cute furry animal in the logo is actually a red panda!

The first Apple logo isn’t what you would think.

Originally, it showed Sir Isaac Newton sitting under a tree, an apple about to fall on his head.

It was designed again in 1976 and had a phrase around the border that read “Newton…a mind forever traveling through strange seas of thought…alone”.

How dark it seems!

Google rents out goats.

You have read that right, instead of mowing their lawn, Google hires goats to eat the grass at their Mountain View headquarters.

A herder will bring in 200 goats that are tended by a border collie named Jane.

The name “robot” has dark origins.

If you look at the etymology of “robot”, it comes from the Czech word “robota” which translates to forced labor or work.

The term was first used to refer to a fictional humanoid in a play in the 1920s.

The first-ever VCR was the size of a piano.

When the first VCR (video camera recorder) was developed in 1956, it was the size of a piano.

Much bigger than I would have guessed!

Samsung is 38 years and 1 month older than Apple.

Samsung was founded by Lee Byung-Chul on March 1, 1938, as a grocery store.

Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer Inc. on April 1, 1976. made

A Petabyte is a lot of data.

We all know 1 GB is equal to 1024 MB, but did you know that 1 petabyte (PB) is equal to 1024 terabytes (TB)? To give an example of how big this is, a 1 PB hard drive can hold 13.3 years of HD-TV video.

A 50 PB hard drive can hold all the written works of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages.

Domain name registration used to be free.

When people didn’t realize how huge the Internet would become, registering a domain name was free until 1995.

When a fee was introduced, it was high! The price was usually $100 for a two-year registration.

Megabytes used to weigh hundreds of pounds.

More specifically, 5 megabytes of data weighs a ton. In 1956, the first computer had something like a hard drive.

At the time, this was a huge leap in storage capacity, but the cabinet containing the hard drive weighed more than 2,200 pounds and could hold 5 MB of data.

The Radio took 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million.

You’d think the invention of the radio would be a big deal, but it took 38 years for the radio to reach 50 million listeners.

Meanwhile, it took just 3 years for the iPod to reach the same milestone!

The first camera needed an incredibly long exposure.

It took 8 hours to publish the first photograph taken in 1826!

The creator of that camera, Louis Daguerre, managed to drastically reduce that time to just 15 minutes in 1839.

Credit card chips have been around for a LONG time.

To many, credit card chips are a relatively new fad. However, chip technology has been around since 1986!

It was first used in France, followed by Germany.

Alexa is always listening to your conversations.

This is probably not new to you. Siri has been doing this forever. Alexa stores your conversation history in its cloud to help improve your Alexa experience.

However, you can review and delete these recordings, either in bulk or individually.

People read faster or slower depending on what they read.

You don’t blink less when you’re at a computer, but reading from a screen slows you down. On average, people read 10% slower on paper than on the screen!

As for the blinking part, did you know that in everyday life, people usually blink at a rate of twenty times per minute?

But put them in front of a computer, and that number drops to seven times per minute!

GPS is free… for some.

Although it is free to use worldwide GPS, it costs $2 million dollars to operate daily.

This money generates from American tax revenue.

There are Amish computers.

There are specially designed computers without internet, video, or music capabilities, just for the Amish.

Features include word processing, drawing, accounting, spreadsheets, and more – but not much else.

Mac computers were named after apple.

It is not a coincidence that “Macintosh” resembles the apple named “Macintosh”.

The name was purposely misspelled to avoid conflict with a manufacturer called “McIntosh Laboratory”.

The first computer mouse wasn’t made from plastic.

In 1964, Doug Engelbert invented the first computer mouse! At that time, it was made of wood. It was rectangular and featured a small button on the top right.

He called it a mouse because the cord sticking out of the back reminded him of a small mouse.

Which came first, Spam mail or Spam meat?

Spam mail in the name of canned meat! In the Monty Python skit, they said that Spam meat was “terrible and ubiquitous and inevitable”. Sounds pretty accurate from the boring junk mail I get!

Also, did you know that, on average, for every spam email, they get only one reply for every twelve million spam emails sent?

Is it even worth it at that point?

The original Xbox had sound snippets of real space missions.

The original Xbox contains edited sound bites from actual transmissions from the Apollo missions.

If you leave the Xbox on the home screen, eventually you’ll hear whispers of dialogue – real chatter from the Apollo missions.

The majority of people plug in their USBs wrong.

86% of people try to plug their USB devices upside down.

It makes me feel so much better about being wrong every time!

Steve Jobs used the sleight of hand in the first iPhone presentation.

The first iPhone presentation took place six months before the iPhone hit the market. At the time, phones were too bulky to use, so Steve Jobs often had to switch phones behind his desk.

Otherwise, it will run out of RAM and crash.

The first alarm clock could only ring at one time.

Literally, once! The first mechanical alarm clock that could only go off at 4 am was invented by Levi Hutchins in 1787.

It wasn’t until 1876 that a wind-up alarm clock was developed that could be set for any time.

Computer Security Day is celebrated on November 30^th.

It was started back in 1988 to help raise awareness of computer-related security issues. Celebrating Computer Security Day is easy, and important – check your privacy settings on Facebook and change your passwords to something stronger.

You can also read up on the latest technology and ensure that your data stored on your phone or in the cloud is secure.

You may also like this infographic on the importance of having a secure password.

The government used PlayStation 3’s… but not for gaming.

In the year 2010, the United States Air Force used 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles to build a supercomputer for the Department of Defense.

They used the PS3 because it was more affordable and “green”.

The first online gaming was before the year 2000.

The Sega Dreamcast was the first 128-bit console to hit the market. Released in 1999, it was the first console to allow real-time online play.

Unfortunately, it was too early for its time, as most internet connections back then were not reliable enough.

The first product scanned was a packet of chewing gum in 1974.

In October 1952 Norman Joseph Woodland invented the barcode and received a patent. When he was hired by IBM 22 years later, the barcode was developed for use in product labeling.

He called it the Universal Product Code (UPC), a system that is still used today.

You’re in good hands if your surgeon was a gamer.

Oddly enough, surgeons who grew up playing video games more than 3 hours a week made 37% fewer errors!

Not only that, they had a 42% faster completion rate for laparoscopic surgery as well as suturing.

iTunes has unusual Terms & Conditions.

By agreeing to iTunes terms, you agree not to use it to develop nuclear weapons.

The clause says, “You agree that you will not use these products for the development, design, manufacture, or production of the nuclear, missile, or chemical or biological weapons.”

Nintendo didn’t start as a video games company.

Founded in the back 1889, Nintendo was around long before computers! So what did they sell? From 1889-1956, Nintendo was a playing card company in Japan.

They still make cards in Japan, and even have a bridge tournament called the “Nintendo Cup”.

Apollo 11 astronauts couldn’t afford insurance.

Life insurance for a space mission costs a fortune because the risks were so high then.

So instead, the Apollo 11 astronauts signed hundreds of covers that their families could sell if something went wrong.

People are still using dial-up.

As of 2017, 2.1 million people still use AOL dial-up service. Predominantly, these customers live in rural America where getting high-speed Internet can be expensive and unreliable.

Meanwhile, dial-up is only $20 per month.

You can spell your email in Morse code.

In 2004, the @ symbol became the first new character to be added to Morse code for the first time in decades.

The letter is called a “commat” and consists of the symbols for A and C with no break in between.

Yahoo’s original name was a mouthful.

Yahoo’s original URL was akebono.stanford.edu. The name Yahoo was chosen because it was derived from Gulliver’s Travels slang, “Yahoo”, a fictional nation in the book.

Bonus fact: Amazon wasn’t always Amazon! Originally called “Cadabra.com”, Cadabra was an online bookstore only.

CEO Jeff Bezos explored other options in the 90s, some of which still redirects to Amazon, such as Relentless.com. Amazon was registered in 1994 and has become a monopoly today.

Bonus fact: When Snapchat first launched in 2011, it was called Picaboo. It wasn’t until 2012 that what we know as Snapchat was renamed.

Everyone uses Google as a spellchecker.

Most everyone, anyway! 97% of people type words into Google to see if they’ve spelled them right.

I know I’m definitely in that 97%!

The first word to ever be auto-corrected was “teh.”

Back in the day, autocorrect was not as effective as it is now.

You need to press the left arrow and F3 to autocorrect “teh” to “the”.

The Nintendo Game Boy went to space.

In 1993, a Soviet astronaut brought his Nintendo Game Boy on the TM-17 space mission.

It is said to have circled the Earth 3,000 times and was later auctioned for $1,220.

PlayStation 1 had Scratch and Sniff discs.

In 1999, Gran Turismo 2, the 2-disc version of the game, smelled of fuel and burning rubber on the blue disc.

When FIFA 2001 was released in 2000, they used scratch and sniff technology on their disc to make them smell like football stadium turf.

“Android” is gender-specific.

The word “Android” literally means a man with a male robot appearance.

The female equivalent of this word is “Gynoid”.

Google searches hit the billions every month.

More than 35 billion Google searches are performed every month.

In May 2019, the top three terms were “Facebook” with 233 million searches, “YouTube” with 194 million searches and “Amazon” with 103 million searches.

There’s a name for when you feel your phone vibrate… but it doesn’t.

This is my favorite technical information on this list! “Phantom vibration syndrome” is the name for when someone thinks their phone is vibrating, but it’s not.

Research suggests that this is because someone is overly involved with their phone.

Smoking will void your Apple warranty.

Apple computers have a “smoking” ban, which means that if you smoke while using an Apple computer, the warranty will be void.

Technology is now influencing baby names.

In the year 2012, at least six girls were named Apple, 49 boys were named Mac, and at least 17 girls were named Siri.

However, the number of children named Alexa in the US dropped from 6,050 in 2015 (the year Amazon’s Alexa became available) to 3,053 in 2018.

Alexa was the 32nd most popular name for girls born in 2015 but dropped to 90th in 2018.

Blind people can use cell phones.

There are special Braille technologies and accessories for blind people to use cell phones.

It uses special pins that move up and down so the user can touch and read the information.

Google’s first tweet was gibberish.

To a common man, Google’s first tweet on Twitter was bullshit! It reads, “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010”.

Translated from binary to English, the tweet says “I’m feeling lucky.”

The first cell phone call was in New York City.

In 1973, Martin Cooper, a Motorola employee, made the first mobile phone call from the streets of New York City.

It wasn’t until 19 years later when Neil Papworth sent the first SMS message, which brought us the next technological information:

The first commercial text message was sent in 1992.

On the day December 3, 1992, a software architect, SEMA Group, used a computer to text “Merry Christmas” to a Vodafone employee who was using an Orbitel 901 handset.

These days, six billion texts are sent every day!

Over 6,000 new computer viruses are created and released every month.

This number has increased greatly since 1990 when there were only 50 known computer viruses.

Nowadays, 90% of emails contain some form of malware and most people don’t know about it.

There are more likes than photos on Facebook.

Every day, more than 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook, with 800 million likes per day.

By contrast, there are only 175 million “love” reactions per day.

iPhones were almost in the shape of an apple.

The original design of an iPhone was in the shape of a literal apple.

It was initially designed as a flip phone with a push keypad. When closed, it looks like the Apple logo.

Comic Sans is the most hated font in the world.

Comic Sans was designed as an unconventional, handwritten style font for use in comic books. While everyone loves to hate this tasteless font (including me!) it’s actually very useful for dyslexic people.

Because of its asymmetrical style, the letters are much easier to identify.

NASA’s internet speed is 91 GB per second.

The average household internet speed is around 25 MB per second. It’s usually fast enough to watch Netflix with no buffering time.

And let’s face it, if there’s any tech company that would actually put their internet speed to good use, it’s NASA.

Nokia is the largest company in Finland.

So much so, that it is seen as a national pride by the Finns! And while we often think of Nokia as just a cell phone company, this famous brand was originally a paper manufacturer in 1865.

Nokia began branching out into technology in the 1980s.

More people have cell phones than toilets.

More than 6 billion of the world’s 7.7 billion people have access to a cell phone.

Meanwhile, only 4.5 billion have access to functional toilets!

The Apple Lisa was the first commercial computer with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and a mouse.

Before the Apple Lisa, all computers were text-based, meaning you had to type commands from a keyboard. The name “LISA” stands for “Logical Integrated Software Architecture”.

Steve Jobs’ daughter was also named Lisa.

Some people are afraid of technology.

People have all kinds of weird fears and phobias, and technology is no exception! Aptly known as technophobia, this fear arose from the Industrial Revolution and workers were afraid that machines would take their jobs.

This applies equally to today’s society, as people fear technology becoming too advanced, such as artificial intelligence technology.

Let’s hope this phobia doesn’t stop them from reading these tech facts!

The most expensive phone number costs millions.

In 2006, Qatar Telecom held a charity auction where they sold the phone number 666-6666.

It was sold for $2.75 million, bought by an anonymous bidder.

Mark Zuckerberg is color blind.

The founder of Facebook deliberately chose a blue color scheme because he has red-green color blindness!

To him, blue is the richest and most prominent color he can see.

40% of American couples meet online.

Online dating is extremely popular these days, and apparently, it seems to work! 40% of couples who met in 2017 met online.

On a larger scale, viewing through friends decreased by 13% from 1995 to 2017.

Music content makes up 5% of YouTube.

Although 5% seems like a low number, it is the most engaged type of video on YouTube.

They account for 20% of YouTube’s total views!

Finding a security bug in Facebook’s code will pay off.

To be precise, Facebook pays $500 to report any vulnerability in its security.

Even better, $500 is the minimum that starts, so you can potentially earn even more!

Kids that are on social media for 1 hour a day have less chance of being happy.

This is probably not much of a surprise, but studies have shown that the more time kids spend on social media, the less likely they are to be happy with their overall life by 14%.

By comparison, this is three times higher than the effects of living in a single-parent household.

MySpace lost all of its content before 2016.

Due to faulty server migration, every photo, song, and video uploaded to this popular social network was accidentally deleted.

That’s 50 million songs from 14 million artists like Lily Allen and Arctic Monkeys. Of course, many of these have backups that are probably still on Spotify by now, but which are now lost forever.

Nearly one-third of divorces are because of Facebook.

33% of divorcing couples said Facebook was a reason for the breakup.

Some of these more specific reasons are inappropriate messages to other people, quarrels between couples, secret social media accounts, and doubts about relationships.

Using a thinner font can save printer ink.

To a typical user, this difference is not enough to care about. But if you use a lighter font with thinner lines, you will use slightly less ink.

It is based on all inkjet printers that use old-style cartridges. Overall, it will save about 10% of your ink by using a lighter font.

The QWERTY keyboard was originally designed to slow you down.

When the typewriter was turned on, typing too fast would jam the keys. Typists using a QWERTY keyboard space out commonly used characters to slow down their speed and prevent jamming.

If you want to learn a more efficient keyboard, Dvorak is built for speed.

While we’re on the subject of keyboards and typing, did you know that on a typical workday, a typist’s fingers will “travel” about 12.6 miles?

The first webpage is still running.

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee was working on creating the World Wide Web. That page is still up and running at info.cern.ch though not much is expected.

No graphics and no background, just plain text and links on how to use the internet!

Some countries skipped the era of landlines.

Nigeria, Ghana, and Bangladesh moved from zero to 100. Due to the lack of resources, it was very expensive to adapt to the use of landlines.

Less than 1% of residents in these countries have a landline, but more than 85% have access to a cell phone.

The passwords for the nuclear missiles were just a string of zeros.

Although the Air Force denies this, Bruce Blair, an Air Force launch officer, says they are lying. And what government would want to admit something so stupid?

For 20 years, the password was eight zeros in a row – and it was written down so no one would forget it.

Over 90% of the world’s currency is digital.

I don’t know about you, but I’m almost out of cash!

Credit cards, debit cards, direct deposits, and online purchases, leave only 8% of global currency as physical money.

Millions of hours of TV and movies are watched every day on Netflix.

Of course, Netflix is ​​a hugely popular company, so this isn’t a surprise. The world streams about 164 million hours of Netflix every day, which equates to 18,812 years worth of TV and movies every 24 hours.

Now my binge-watching habits don’t seem so bad!

If you’ve enjoyed these tech facts so far, you might also like to learn about Netflix and the chill button.

Technical degrees are almost useless by the time you graduate.

A degree looks good on paper, but in reality, technology is advancing faster than ever. The amount of technical information doubles every two years.

So, if you start a four-year degree, half of what you learn will be obsolete by the time you finish.

There’s a term for old people who use the internet.

Seniors over 50 years of age and regular Internet users are rare these days.

So rare in fact, there’s a term for it – Silver Surfers.

Tech companies often test their products in New Zealand.

New Zealand is a diverse country with English-speaking residents, making it an excellent place to test.

But the main reason is that since it’s somewhat isolated, news of a product failure won’t spread very quickly.

There are fake Apple stores in China.

Some fake Apple Stores are so convincing that even employees think they work for Apple. They usually sell genuine Apple products, and employees wear the same shirts that genuine Apple associates wear.

Sometimes the store is closed, but when it happens, more just pop up!

Until 2010, carrier pigeons were faster than the internet.

When comparing upload speeds, a test was conducted to fly a carrier pigeon 50 miles with a USB stick to an Internet provider while running against an Internet upload.

The pigeon made it in just over an hour, while the upload took more than two hours.

The first photo ever uploaded to the internet was a comedy band.

A four-piece all-female parody pop group claims to be in the first photo uploaded to the Internet. The group called “Les Horribles Sernets” were colleagues of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

He asked for some scanned photos of their band so he could publish them online, and history was made!

Every advertisement for iPhones has 9:41 set as the time.

Because, in 2007, Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone. The 41-minute presentation was perfectly planned leading up to the release of the first iPhone.

And the first photo of the iPhone shows at exactly 9:41 am.

A “jiffy” is a real measurement.

If you ever say “I’ll be back in a jiffy,” you’re really saying, “I’ll be back in 10 milliseconds.” A moment is a physical measure of time, indicating the length of one cycle of the computer’s system clock – about 10 milliseconds.

When used in physics, it stands for how long it takes light to travel one centimeter.

An average 21-year-old has spent 5,000 hours playing video games.

These days, by the 21st you’ll have sent 250,000 emails and texts and spent 10,000 hours on a cell phone.

That’s a lot of time!

Most of today’s successful companies started in garages.

That’s right, apart from Apple, other big-name companies started with humble beginnings.

HP, Google, and Microsoft all started in a garage.

Most internet traffic isn’t from real humans.

About 51% of internet traffic is non-human. More than 30% are from hacking programs, spammers, and phishing.

Be careful with your computer security!

CAPTCHA is a long acronym.

It stands for “Completely Automatic Public Turning Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart”.

Although some artificial intelligence can get through CATCHPA, it is still effective at blocking some bots.

The three most common passwords are also the weakest.

The three most commonly used passwords are 123456, password, and 12345.

Be sure not to use any of these the next time you need to change your password!

There wasn’t an app store on the first iPhone.

This is perhaps not surprising, as any technology first has some things to work with. But the apps that were on the first iPhone in 2007 were all Apple apps.

Nowadays, there are more than 1.4 million apps for iPhone.

We only keep 1 out of every 10 apps we try.

It is estimated that about 80-90 percent of the apps we install are deleted in the long run.

It seems users are choosy about what they want to use for their limited storage!

Digital music sales surpassed physical sales in 2014.

Since the advent of mp3 players, digital music sales have been steadily increasing. After Spotify came out in 2008 it seemed like the age of physical music was over.

In 2014, download sales and subscriptions generated $6.85 billion, while actual sales were just under $6.82 billion. Also, did you know that people are listening to music now more than ever?

In 2015, the average American spent about 24 hours per week listening to music. As of 2017, this number has increased to an average of 32 hours per week.

The @ symbol was chosen kind of randomly.

The person writing the email program had to figure out how to identify the user and the machine the user was on.

He chose the symbol because it meant “A” and was not used as many other symbols.

There is a machine that can predict heart attacks.

Researchers “trained” a machine-learning algorithm that was able to predict heart attacks which has very much accuracy.

It can predict a heart attack four hours before it happens – with 80% accuracy.

There is also artificial intelligence that can predict epidemics.

Artificial intelligence was developed (with 87% accuracy) in determining outbreaks of diseases such as dengue fever.

The hope is to use this technology to predict outbreaks of more serious diseases such as Ebola and Zika.

Amazon’s robot workers skyrocketed in less than five years.

In 2013, there were only 1,000 robots working in an Amazon warehouse.

In the year 2017, they had 45,000 robots across 20 warehouses.

Digital tech is good for the environment.

It is estimated that digital technology could reduce global carbon emissions by up to 20% by 2030.

This is equivalent to getting rid of 100% of China’s emissions and an additional 1.5 billion tons!

The average Facebook user has less than 200 friends.

A little over 40% of people have between 0-200 friends on Facebook. A close second watches 38% of Facebook users have 200-500 friends.

Even less, 20% of users have more than 500 friends on Facebook.

Google uses the same amount of energy as 200,000 homes.

No wonder this technology powerhouse needs a lot of power! It accounts for about 0.013% of the entire world’s energy consumption.

And even though not all of their energy comes from wind and solar, they do purchase carbon offsets that leave them with no carbon footprint!

The first computer virus was harmless.

In 1971, the first computer virus was created. The name Creeper was created as an experiment to see how it spreads into computers.

The virus simply displayed the message: “I’m a creeper, catch me if you can!” The first virus released into the wild was called Brain, which was also harmless.

However, it was the first IBM PC virus.

There are only 21 million Bitcoins that can be mined in total.

You would think that since this is a digital currency, the number of bitcoins available would be unlimited.

However, if it does, it will devalue the currency and make it worthless.

Filipinos use social media more than Americans.

Among adult users in the Philippines, 93% use social networking sites, which is significantly higher than the 74% who use them in the United States.

They mostly use it to talk about music and movies, and slightly less to talk about sports.

Most of the purchases in China are done with mobile phones.

The Chinese love shopping online, apparently! About 70% of online purchases are made through mobile phones.

Meanwhile, only 46% of online purchases in the US are made with a cell phone.

Robot laws are being put into place.

The European Union is proposing legislation that implements an emergency kill switch on all robots.

Additionally, they would need to be programmed to never harm a human.

Millions of tons of technology are thrown out each year.

Specifically, 220 million tons of old computers, along with other devices, are discarded each year in the United States alone.

We’re at the end of these 100 tech facts, did you learn something new? We certainly did! If you want to know more information about the technology, you can see more in our technology section.

Do you have any other technical information that blew your mind? What is your favorite technical information on this list? Let us know in the comments!