10 interesting facts about IT

(1) The first computer weighed more than 27 tons. It was called ENIAC and took up 167 m².

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

(2) Almost 92% of the world’s currency exists only on computers. Only 8% is cash.

https://money.howstuffworks.com/currency.htm

(3) The first mouse was built out of wood by Doug Engelbart in 1964.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse

(4) Ada Lovelace, a writer and mathematician, was the first programmer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

(5) People blink less often when they use computers. Normally, a person blinks 20 times a minute, but at the computer they blink 7 times a minute on average.

https://uihc.org/health-topics/computer-vision-syndrome

(6) Every month, 6,000 new viruses are written that target all operating systems, so it’s essential to know how to defend yourself against viruses and malware.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/interesting-facts-about-computer-viruses/

The figure above is old. Today, the independent institute AV-TEST registers more than 450,000 new malicious programs and potentially unwanted applications every day. An up-to-date antivirus, system updates and backups, for example through Backup as a Service, matter more than ever.

(7) John Lasseter was fired by Disney for championing computer animation. After being fired, Lasseter became Chief Creative Officer at Pixar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lasseter

(8) If there were a computer as powerful as the human brain, it could perform 38 thousand trillion operations per second and would have about 3,584 terabytes of memory.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/news-blog/computers-have-a-lot-to-learn-from-2009-03-10/

Supercomputers have since surpassed this figure. In 2022, Frontier, in the US, became the first supercomputer to pass one exaflop, meaning a billion billion operations per second: more than 25 times the figure above.

(9) The first hard disk over 1 GB appeared in 1980, weighed 250 kg and cost more than $80,000

https://www.pingdom.com/blog/amazing-facts-and-figures-about-the-evolution-of-hard-disk-drives/

For comparison, a 1 TB microSD card, with hundreds of times the capacity, weighs less than a gram.

(10) How many videos do you think have been watched on YouTube today? You can check on Internet Live Stats

https://www.internetlivestats.com

The counters on the site are statistical estimates, not official figures from YouTube.

What other computer curiosities are worth knowing?

Here are five more, from the first “bug” to ChatGPT:

• The first “bug” was a moth. In 1947, the team working on the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth stuck in a relay and taped it into the logbook, with the note “first actual case of bug being found”. That’s how the term still used today for errors in programs became famous.
• The first email sent over a computer network went out in 1971, from Ray Tomlinson. He was also the one who chose the @ sign, to separate the user’s name from the computer’s name. The journey of a modern email is explained in our article on how email works.
• The first virus for IBM PC computers, called Brain, appeared in 1986 and was written by two brothers from Lahore, Pakistan.
• The world’s first website can still be visited today: CERN, the laboratory where Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, keeps it at info.cern.ch.
• ChatGPT reached about 100 million users in roughly two months after its launch in November 2022, according to an estimate by the bank UBS. At the time, it was the fastest growth ever seen for a consumer app.

When we’re not doing IT, we like to follow new trends and technologies. This helps us keep up with what’s happening in the market and stay well informed, so we can offer our clients innovative, personalized solutions.