Did You Know? 35 Surprising Facts About the World of Computing

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.

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

28. 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.

29. 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.

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

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

32. 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.

33. 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.

34. 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.

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