The air in a lightning channel can reach roughly 30,000 °C, while the visible surface of the Sun is about 5,500 °C. The heat lasts only microseconds, but it makes the air expand explosively — that sudden expansion is the thunder you hear.

For years finance teams pulled Essbase data into Excel with the classic Excel Add-in. Oracle Smart View replaced it and now connects Excel to Essbase, Planning and other EPM cloud services.

Floppy disks faded out in the 2000s, but the 3.5-inch disk survives as the universal symbol for saving a file.

IBM’s 3380 disk storage, launched in 1980, stored about 2.5 GB in a cabinet the size of a refrigerator and weighed several hundred kilograms.

The layout comes from Christopher Latham Sholes’ typewriters of the early 1870s and has survived every technology change since.

Teaching at Oxford existed by 1096. Tenochtitlan was founded in 1325.

The Great Pyramid was completed around 2560 BC. Cleopatra died in 30 BC — about 2,500 years later — and the Moon landing was in 1969, about 2,000 years after her.

Iron expands in the heat, so the tower can grow by up to about 15 cm on hot days and shrink again in winter.

Botanically, a berry develops from a single flower with one ovary and has seeds inside. Bananas qualify; strawberries carry their seeds on the outside and come from a flower with many ovaries.

Venus takes about 243 Earth days to spin once on its axis but only about 225 Earth days to orbit the Sun. It also spins backwards compared with most planets.

Honey is very low in water and naturally acidic, and bees add an enzyme that produces hydrogen peroxide. Together these make it extremely hostile to bacteria — sealed honey can last for thousands of years.

The oldest shark fossils are around 450 million years old, while the first true trees appeared roughly 385 million years ago.

Researchers found that the elasticity of the wombat’s intestine varies along its length, which shapes droppings into cubes. Wombats stack them to mark territory — the flat sides stop them rolling away.

Resting otters float together in groups called rafts and often hold paws or wrap themselves in kelp so they don’t drift apart.

Two hearts pump blood through the gills, and a third pumps it around the body. Their blood uses copper-based haemocyanin instead of iron, which turns it blue.

Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email and needed a symbol that would never appear in a person’s name. He picked @ because it read naturally as “user at host”.

IBM engineer David Bradley created it for the original IBM PC so developers could reboot without switching off the power. The keys were chosen so nobody would press them by accident.

Researchers at Cambridge University pointed a camera at the Trojan Room coffee pot in 1991 so they would not walk down for an empty pot. In 1993 it went on the web and became world-famous.

In 1947 operators of the Harvard Mark II found a moth trapped in a relay and taped it into the logbook with the note “first actual case of bug being found”. The logbook is now at the Smithsonian.

Larry Ellison and his co-founders had worked on a CIA-funded database project codenamed “Oracle”. Their company started as Software Development Laboratories in 1977 and later took the project’s name.

Arbor Software built Essbase in the early 1990s to give spreadsheet users a multidimensional database. Arbor merged into Hyperion, which Oracle bought in 2007 — which is why Smart View still feels so at home in Excel.

SAP’s early products processed data immediately instead of in overnight batches, which was unusual at the time. R/2 ran on mainframes; R/3 (1992) brought the idea to client–server systems.

Dietmar Hopp, Hasso Plattner, Claus Wellenreuther, Klaus Tschira and Hans-Werner Hector left IBM to build standard software for real-time business processing. Their first customer site was a chemical company, and they worked on its computers at night.

R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland. The name nods to both of them — and to the S language it was inspired by.

IBM researchers designed “Structured English Query Language” in the 1970s. A trademark clash forced the shorter name SQL — which is why people still argue over “S-Q-L” versus “sequel”.

Brendan Eich built the prototype at Netscape in May 1995 under a tight deadline. Some of its famous quirks date back to that sprint and can never be removed without breaking the web.

James Gosling named it after an oak tree outside his office. The name was already trademarked, so the team renamed it Java — after the coffee.

Guido van Rossum was reading scripts from “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” when he started the language and wanted a short, slightly mysterious name. That is why Python tutorials love “spam” and “eggs” as example variables.

Released in 1979, VisiCalc was so useful that businesses bought Apple II machines just to run it — often called the first “killer app”.

Before VBA, Excel automation used XLM “macro sheets”. Visual Basic for Applications arrived with Excel 5.0 and gradually spread across the Office suite — and it is still running countless business processes today.