Astounding Technology Facts

This special compilation of 500 interesting technology facts is not filled with malice, but with stuff that would make you smile, raise your eyebrows, or, god forbid, make you exchange notes with malicious glee at that next Saturday night party.

Technology, like most aspects of our life that pass us by and we take for granted, has history. Since technological progress has been fast enough to send every one of us into a tizzy, we tend to lose sight of the pioneers, of the technologies that changed our lives. This eBook is meant to bring us closer to reality, closer to our technology history, closer to the people who made it happen.

We learn from history, and from those lessons alone can we shape our future. So sit back, put your feet on the table, let your hair down, and let time pass you by. And yes, tell me if you didn’t get that smile on your face. Happy Reading!

In this eBook you will discover:

• In 1969, computer firm Honey well released the H316 “Kitchen Computer”, the first home computer, priced at $10,600.
• In 1976, the term “personal computer”, (PC) first appeared in print, in the May issue of Byte Magazine.
• The term ‘bug’ was probably coined after Admiral Grace Hopper found a moth in the Mark II computer at the US Naval Surface Warfare Center, causing the machine to malfunction.
• The ENIAC, the first real computer had 20,000 vacuum tubes and 40 racks of equipment, and ran up a daily electric bill of $60, a large amount at the time, the mid 1940s.
• Vinton Cerf is hailed as the Father of the Internet, and earned his nickname when he co-authored, with Dr. Robert Kahn in 1973, a paper that gave the world TCP and IP.
• On 4th July, 1996, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched Hotmail. In 1997, they sold it to Microsoft for an estimated price of $385 million.
• 1975 saw the emergence of the first word processing software, the Electric Pencil.
• In the summer of 1969, UNIX was developed. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, was born the same year.
• Yahoo! derived its name from the word Yahoo coined by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. A Yahoo is a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human!
• The original URL of Yahoo! was http://akebono.stanford.edu/
• Google got its name from the mathematical figure googol, which denotes the number ‘one followed by a hundred zeroes’.

...and many, many more with breathtaking photos.