Wacky Facts

symbolics.com, owned by computer maker Symbolics, was registered on 15 March 1985, the first .com name ever.

Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email between two computers side by side. He said the message was something like “QWERTYUIOP” and he did not save it.

reCAPTCHA showed people words from scanned old books and newspapers that computers could not read, so every solved test helped digitise text.

VSNL launched public internet access on 15 August 1995. Dial-up plans started at thousands of rupees a year.

Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon proposed 🙂 and 🙁 on 19 September 1982 so readers could tell jokes from serious posts.

Ray Tomlinson chose @ in 1971 because it meant “at” and almost never appeared in names, so it could not confuse the system.

UPI, launched in 2016 by NPCI, became India’s most used digital payment system, handling billions of transactions every month.

Satellites carry only a tiny share. Over 95% of intercontinental data travels through cables on the sea floor, some thinner than a garden hose.

“Me at the zoo”, 19 seconds long, was uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim on 23 April 2005 at San Diego Zoo.

The word comes from a Monty Python sketch in which “Spam” is repeated until it drowns out everything else.

A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros. The founders wanted to suggest huge amounts of information; googol was misspelled and the name stuck.