This Trivia was initially posted in San Diego PC Help
1. It took the radio 38 years and the television only 13, but the internet reached 50 million users in just four years.
2. The computer mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart in 1963. It was made out of wood (weird, huh).
3. In 2009 the average number of Internet transactions per second was 2,000. The total number of goods sold was worth $60 billion.
4. Early hard disks in personal computers held only 20 MB of data and cost around $800. In 2010 you could get a 2 GB flash drive for about $8. This implies that there is a 100-fold reduction in the price and a 100-fold increase in storage capacity.
5. Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, the first female admiral in the US Navy is also known in the computer world for creating the popular programming language COBOL. She also came up with the term ‘debugging’ after removing a moth from a computer.
6. The computing power in today’s cell phones is much higher than the processing power of all the computers in the Apollo 11 Lunar Lander that put 2 men on the moon.
7. The two main components in IT (Information Technology) are hardware and software. But there is also a lesser known ‘grey’ component. This is the software that is stored in hardware and cannot be modified easily. It is known as ‘firmware’.
8. There are over 20 billion web pages on the internet, and that number is rapidly growing every day. Also, there are over 2 billion internet users worldwide at present.
9. RIM (the BlackBerry operating system company) co-CEO and co-founder Mike Lazaridis dropped out of college to start his own company. He did so after reading Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates’, book.
10. The first hard disk drive was created in 1979 by Seagate. Its capacity was a whopping (not) 5 MB.
11. HP, Google, Microsoft, and Apple have one thing in common – apart from the obvious that they are IT companies. They were all started in garages.
12. The 12 engineers at IBM that developed the IBM PC had a code name – “The Dirty Dozen”.
13. The first and still the oldest domain name to be registered is Symbolics.com, it was created on March 15th, 1985.
14. Most Central Processing Units (CPU’s) are sold as a bit slower than they actually run. By over-clocking them you can get them to run faster – for free.
15. The first microprocessor was the 4004, Intel had initially designed it for a calculator, and no one had any idea to what it would lead.
