35 Computer Facts From Early Machines to Modern Tech

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1Oldest analog computer

Oldest analog computer

Divers in 1900 discovered an ancient Greek shipwreck with an odd-looking bronze device on board. The device was later determined to be the world's oldest analog computer (Antikythera mechanism), dating back to the 1st century B.C.E., thousands of years before similar technologies would be re-discovered.


2. During IBM Watson's Jeopardy Game, it stored all 15 terabytes of its knowledge in RAM, including every page of Wikipedia in existence.


3. There is a video game, called "Lose/Lose" that deletes a random file on your computer every time you kill an enemy.


4. Mortal Kombat II was so popular when it hit the arcades that several of the machines were later installed with deadlock security panels on the back to prevent thieves from ripping the game's motherboard straight out of the machine and taking it home.


5. One of the first instances of a stored computer program was in 1801 when Joseph Marie Jacquard demonstrated a loom that wove fabrics based on hole-punched cards that were fed into the machine.


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6Floppy disks

Floppy disks

The US Federal Register is still using floppy disks sent by courier because a secure e-mail system is "too expensive".


7. It took Pixar 29 hours to render a single frame from Monster's University. If done on a single CPU it would have taken 10,000 years to finish.


8. Apple's first computer, the Apple I, went on sale in 1976 for $666.66 because Steve Wozniak liked repeating digits and found them easier to type. He said he was unaware of any Satanic connotations with the number.


9. The Space Shuttle never flew on new year's day or eve because its computers couldn't handle a year rollover.


10. IBM has stated that the Scroll Lock key on your keyboard does nothing. When PC Magazine asked an executive of keyboard manufacturer Key Tronic about the key's purpose he replied, "I don't know, but we put it on ours too."


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11Hard drive

Hard drive

In just 37 years, the average price per Gigabyte of Hard drive storage has fallen from over $400,000 to $0.019.


12. In 2009, computer scientists created a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch, pulling photos from the internet: Sketch2Photo.


13. An Apple laptop stinks. One 2001 iBook model used a glue that, after 12-18 months, may begin to smell like human body odor. It is so strong that repairs are difficult because the smell makes people nauseous.


14. In 2012, the founder of McAfee Antivirus, John McAfee was asked if he personally uses McAfee anti-virus, he replied by saying "I take it off," and that "It's too annoying."


15. Only 2 out of the top 500 supercomputers run on Windows, and 485 are Linux.


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16TempleOS

TempleOS

A programmer developed an operating system called TempleOS in 2003. Hospitalized for mental health problems, he believes that TempleOS is literally the Third Temple as biblically prophesied. Per God's "instructions," the OS uses a 640x480, 16 color display, and uses the language HolyC.


17. There was a time when AMD and Intel CPUs used the same socket (Socket 7) and could run on the same motherboard.


18. In order to prevent Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht from deleting or encrypting his hard drive during his arrest at a public library, agents pretended to be quarreling lovers to distract him, at which point a USB drive was inserted that cloned his hard drive.


19. In the game Myth II: Soulblighter, due to a bug in the installer, if the game wasn't installed into the default directory and instead into a different one, when attempting to uninstall it, the uninstaller would delete the computer's entire hard drive.


20. Steve Jobs wanted to hide a man wearing a fedora on the first Mac. Dubbed "Mr. Macintosh," the character would appear after opening the menu bar several thousand times then quickly disappear, leaving users to question their sanity. The idea was scrapped due to Mac's paltry 128KB of RAM.


21Hard drive

Hard drive

In 1980, the first 1 GB hard drive cost $40,000 and weighed over 500 pounds.


22. No human has won a tournament standard chess game against a high spec computer since 2005.


23. There have been computers (Setun) programmed in "ternary" instead of the conventional binary. One such computer, built by the Soviets in 1958, had distinct advantages over binary computers such as increased power efficiency, cheaper parts and easier implementation of certain operations.


24. CPU manufacturing is so unpredictable that every chip must be tested since the majority of finished chips are defective. Those that survive are assigned a model number and price reflecting their maximum safe performance.


25. American entrepreneur Thomas Peterffy was told by NASDAQ that his algorithmic trading was illegal because it lacked a keyboard so he created a robot with fingers to type all trades on the keyboard which made it legal - "the robot typed so fast it sounded like a machine gun."

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