30 Tech Bytes
1. The Firefox logo isn't a fox
It's actually a red panda.
It’s a common misbelief that the Firefox logo is a fox (I mean… it is in the name), but it is actually a red panda!
2. Nintendo made playing cards
long before they made video games.
Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card company. They didn’t make their first video game until 1978.
4. There are approx. 3.5 billion Google Searches per day.
7.2 percent of this traffic comes from people searching the term ‘Google’.
5. Google's First Tweet was in binary.
Google’s first tweet was in 2009, and it was gibberish to most. Translated from binary to English, it reads, “I’m feeling lucky”.
6. Motorola produced the first handheld mobile phone
and their first phone call was to their rival.
On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment, placing a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs (AT&T), his rival.
7. Apple were originally designing an apple shaped flip phone
before the first iPhone.
Before the original design for an iPhone, Apple patented a phone design in the shape of an actual apple. It was a flip phone that, when closed, would look like the Apple logo.
8. Nokia used to sell toilet paper.
Before Nokia sold mobile phones, they manufactured a range of other items, such as; toilet paper, tires, computers, and other electronics.
9. More people have mobile phones than toilets.
Out of the 7.7 billion people in the world, more than 6 billion people have access to a mobile phone. Compared to only 4.5 billion people who have access to a working toilet.
11. Over 90% of the world's currency is digital.
Between credit cards, debit cards, online purchases, and cryptocurrency, only 8% of global currency is physical money.
12. Every iPhone advertisement has the time set to 9:41.
Every advertisement for an Apple iPhone, the time will be set as 9:41. This is the time that Steve Jobs announced the very first iPhone in 2007.
14. The QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow you down.
When typewriters were introduced, typing too quickly would jam the keys. To prevent this from happening, QWERTY was introduced which placed common alphabets at a distance from each other and slowed typists down.
FUN FACT
‘Typewriter’ is the longest word you can type on a QWERTY keyboard, using only one of the rows on your keyboard.
15. The average computer user blinks just 7 times a minute.
It is said we blink seven times per minute instead of the usual 20 when using a computer. Which is why your eyes dry out more while working in front of a monitor.
16. The first television broadcast took place in 1925.
The first television broadcast was done in 1925 with a greyscale image in a 30-line vertically scanned format, at five pictures per second.
19. The name Google was created accidentally.
The name Google was created accidentally, it was originally supposed to be named ‘Googol’. (Googol is the digit 1 followed by 100 zeroes).
The founders checked to see if that domain name was taken, but accidentally searched for ‘google.com’ instead of ‘googol.com’. They liked that name even better and registered the domain name on September 15, 1997.
20. Over 500 hours of YouTube are uploaded every minute.
As of May 2019, more than 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. This equates to approximately 30,000 hours of newly uploaded content per hour.
21. Google rents out goats to replace lawnmowers.
Every so often, Google will rent about 200 goats and let them roam around their campus for a week to eat the grass. Google claims the goats will cost about the same as lawn mowers would.
23. 1 out of 12 million spam emails receive a reply.
It is estimated that for every 12.5 million spam emails sent out, only one person responds. That might not sound like much – until you consider that over 14 billion spam messages are sent on a daily basis.
24. A woman once accidentally cut off two countries from the internet.
In 2011, a 75-year old woman in Georgia was scavenging for copper when she accidentally sliced a cable running to Armenia. Georgia and Armenia saw large portions of outages.
25. You are always living in the past.
Everything you’re experiencing right now actually happened 80 milliseconds ago.
A study conducted by Dr. David Eagleman at the Baylor College of Medicine found that our consciousness lags 80 milliseconds behind actual events.
26. Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind
Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, which means the color he can see best is blue. This is why the color blue dominates the Facebook website and mobile app.
27. Facebook will pay $500 if you find a bug in their code
as part of their Bug Bounty program.
If you find a security bug in Facebook’s code, they are willing to pay from $500 for you to tell them about it! The largest bounty ever reported to Facebook received $50,000.
28. Twitter, Wikipedia and Google all crashed at 3:15pm when Michael Jackson died.
Google initially believed that the millions of search requests meant their search engine was under cyberattack, and blocked searches related to Michael Jackson for 30 minutes. Twitter reported a crash, as did Wikipedia at 3:15pm.
29. Samsung started off as a grocery store.
The popular smartphone and electronics giant started as a grocery store in March 1938. In the 1960s, Samsung entered the electronics industry.
30. Spam Mail was named after the canned meat, SPAM meat.