50 Fascinating and Surprising Facts about Computers

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.

27. 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.

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

29. 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.

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

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."

32. 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.

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

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

35. 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."

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

37. 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.

38. 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.

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

40. 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.

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.

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

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

44. 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.

45. The worst breach of U.S. military computers in history happened when someone picked up a memory stick they found in the parking lot and plugged it into their computer, which was attached to United States Central Command.

While on duty at a Soviet nuclear attack warning station in 1983, Stanislav Petrov's computer indicated the US had fired several missiles. He decided his computer was faulty and urged against a launch. He was right, averting nuclear war, but was not rewarded and was reprimanded by his superiors.

47. Windows 95 was the second most installed piece of software on computers in 1995, video game DOOM was first.

48. IBM was so powerful in 1983 that people feared that its PCjr home computer would destroy Apple, Commodore, and all other competitors. The PCjr became "one of the biggest flops in the history of computing".

49. HDMI charges its licensed manufacturers $10,000 per year plus $0.15 per cable, reduced to $0.05 if the HDMI logo is on the socket.

50. The original Halo was 3rd person and designed for Mac. In 2000 Microsoft bought Bungie and made it an exclusive for the original Xbox.