Wacky Facts

It means “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. Solving them once helped digitise old books and street numbers.

Founded in 1865 in Finland, Nokia made paper, rubber boots and cables before phones.

On typewriters, pressing Shift raised or lowered the whole typebar basket or carriage so a different character on each bar struck the paper.

“Me at the zoo”, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim on 23 April 2005, shows him in front of the elephants at San Diego Zoo. It has since been viewed hundreds of millions of times.

Motorola’s Martin Cooper called a rival engineer at Bell Labs from a street in New York using a prototype handheld phone that weighed about 1 kg.

Before video games, Nintendo made hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto. It also tried a taxi company and instant rice before becoming a games giant.

IBM’s RAMAC (1956) stored about 5 MB and weighed about a tonne.

On typewriters, “Return” moved the carriage back to the start of the line. On early computer keyboards, “Enter” submitted data. Many keyboards still label them differently.

Early reCAPTCHA showed one known word and one word a scanner could not read. Millions of people solving them transcribed archives including The New York Times.

The name was created by a branding company in 1999 as a catchy alternative to “IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence”. “Wireless fidelity” was a tagline added later.

Its Japanese name was Puck-Man; for the US release it was changed over fears that people would scratch the P into a rude word.

Jeff Bezos launched it from a garage in 1994–95, selling only books at first.

The first iPhone launched in 2007 with only Apple’s built-in apps. The App Store arrived a year later in July 2008 with around 500 apps.

Tim Berners-Lee published the first web page at CERN in 1991. CERN has restored it at its original address, info.cern.ch, where you can still read how the web was supposed to work.

It is called “snail” in Italian, “monkey tail” in Dutch and “elephant’s trunk” in Danish.

Excel inherited the error from Lotus 1-2-3 so spreadsheets would stay compatible; it accepts 29 February 1900, a date that never existed.

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”.

It was launched in 2001 and is written by volunteers.

The 1996 promotional site became a famous time capsule of early web design.

“Brain”, written by two brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, infected the boot sector of floppy disks. It even contained their names and address.

Early hard drives for personal computers held a few megabytes and cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Today a gigabyte costs a tiny fraction of a cent.

A Monty Python sketch in which “Spam” is repeated endlessly gave its name to junk messages.

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.

West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu called Union Minister Sukh Ram on 31 July 1995.

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

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.

Researchers at Cambridge University set up a camera in 1991 so they could check whether the coffee pot was full before walking to it.

It was registered on 15 March 1985.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s 1996 research search engine analysed backlinks to judge a page’s importance, hence “BackRub”. It was renamed Google, a play on “googol” (1 followed by 100 zeros), in 1997.

The technology is named after the 10th-century Danish king Harald Bluetooth, and the logo merges the runes for his initials, H and B.

TIFRAC was developed at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and commissioned in 1960 after design began in the mid-1950s.

Gary Thuerk, a marketer at Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an advertisement for new computers to a few hundred users on ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet. It caused complaints — and reportedly some sales.

Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson united Danish tribes; the logo combines his initials in runes.

An early Google server cabinet at Stanford was built from LEGO bricks in 1996.

The arcade machine could draw fewer aliens faster, so as players destroyed them the remaining invaders sped up. The designer kept the accident as a feature.

IBM’s 3380 drive, introduced in 1980, stored 2.52 GB in a cabinet the size of a fridge and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

It had 2,048 words of erasable memory and about 36,000 words of fixed “rope” memory woven by hand. A basic calculator today has more processing power.

Jeff Bezos reportedly changed the name after a lawyer misheard it as “cadaver”. He chose Amazon because it is the world’s largest river and started with an A.

Wi-Fi is a brand name created by a marketing agency for the Wi-Fi Alliance as a catchier name than “IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence”. The “Wireless Fidelity” expansion was added later by the Alliance and then dropped.