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Once I was sitting at the computer, working calmly for myself, and then, suddenly, the thought came to me, how did it all start and what was the very first computer in the world? Of course, I decided to find the answer to this question, it really hooked me. And the answer was found! Naturally, he became the topic of the next blog post about all the most interesting things in the world that does not leave you indifferent. As always, with the definition of superiority, everything turned out to be not easy, but you can already get used to it ...

The very first computer in the world was created and built in the USA by Harvard University mathematician Howard Aiksn back in 1941. Together with four specialists from the company IBM, which ordered it to him, they created a computer based on the ideas of Charles Babbage. After all the tests, it was launched on August 7, 1944. It received the name "Mark 1" from its creators, and he was put to work at Harvard.

Then this computer cost five hundred thousand dollars, a fabulous amount for those times. It was assembled in a special case, which was made of glass and steel, not susceptible to corrosion. The body itself was at least seventeen meters long, more than 2.5 m high. Its mass was about 5 tons and it occupied a space of several tens of cubic meters.
"Mark 1" consisted of many switches and other mechanisms, the total number of which was 765 thousand.
His wires were a total length of about eight hundred kilometers!

The capabilities of the very first computer in the world now seem ridiculous to us, but at that time there was not a single computing device on the planet more powerful.

The machine could:

• operate with seventy-two numbers, which in turn consisted of twenty-three decimal places
• the computer could subtract, add, and each of the operations took him three seconds.
• in addition, he also multiplied and divided, spending six and fifteen seconds on these operations.

To enter information into this apparatus, which was essentially just a faster adding machine, a special perforated paper tape was used. It was the first computer that did not need human intervention for its computing processes.

Back in 1942, the development of John Mauchli served as an impetus for the creation of the first computer, but at that moment few people paid attention to it. After the military engineers of the American army looked at it in 1943, attempts were made to create an apparatus that then received the name "ENIAC". The military was in charge of the finances and she allocated about five hundred thousand dollars for this project, as they wanted to design new types of weapons.
ENIAC consumed so much energy that during its operation, the nearby city experienced a shortage of electricity all the time and people sat without electricity, sometimes for several hours.

Specifications

Look at some very interesting characteristics of the very first computer in the world, according to the second version. Impressive isn't it?

• He weighed 27 tons.
• It contained 18,000 lamps and other details.
• The memory was 4 KB.
• Occupied an area of ​​135 sq. m. and the whole was entangled with many wires.

It was programmed by hand, and the operators just changed hundreds of switches, and had to turn it off and on every time because it did not have a hard drive. There was no keyboard and no monitor either. There were a number of dozens of cabinets with lamps, the machine often broke down, as it often overheated. Then it was used for the design of hydrogen atomic weapons. This machine worked for more than ten years, and in 1950, when the transistor was created, computers became smaller in size.

Where and when was the very first PC sold?

Little has changed in the concept of computers in two decades. Due to the fact that the microprocessor was introduced, the very creation of the computer went at a faster pace. Back in 1974, IBM wanted to bring the first computer to market, but there were almost no sales. The IBM5100 used cassettes where information was stored, and at that time it was very expensive - ten thousand dollars. Therefore, few people could afford to buy such a device then.
He could himself execute programs that were written in BASIC and APL, created in the bowels of IBM. The monitor could display sixteen lines of sixty-four characters, its memory was sixty-four KB. The cassettes themselves were very much like regular audio cassettes. There were almost no sales because of the high price and because of the ill-conceived interface. But still, there were people who bought it and who started a new era in the history of world markets - computer trading

What did you think they would be like in ten years?

Not so long ago, IBM showed the press the "Roadrunner" supercomputer with 1 quadrillion operations. It was collected for the US Department of Energy. It includes 6480 dual-core processors, and 12,960 Cell 8i processors. It consists of 278 cabinets, 88 kilometers of cable. It weighs 226 tons. It is located on an area of ​​1100 m² and costs $133,000,000.

As you can see, supercomputer cabinets are still in vogue, it's all about the design...

Watch about the very first computer in the world in video format:

This is how computer history turned out. Whether it was interesting or not - write in the comments!

Computers are widely used both in production and at home. Here are some interesting facts about computers:

1. At the initiative of Ted Kekatos, a system administrator, a new professional holiday began to be celebrated in the United States - System Administrator Appreciation Day. As conceived by the author of the idea, at least once a year, system administrators should feel appreciation from users.

2. Few people know that there are local networks consisting of a large number of interconnected computers. An example of such a system is a network of 6,000 PCs serving the Hadron Collider.

3. Mentioning interesting facts about computers, it should be recalled that the first program written by Bill Gates turned out to be too large for the memory of a personal computer of that time. The PC had only 16 KB of RAM, the Gates program required 34 KB.

4. IBV Roadrunner is the leader among the most powerful computers in the world. This "superbrain" works in the US Department of Energy. According to official data, it is used in various scientific and physical research.

5. It is interesting to note that a standard computer rarely boots to full capacity. More than half the time he works at half his capacity.

6. The father of the emoticon - a funny icon, is considered to be Scott Folman, who used such symbols on September 19, 1982 when communicating on the computer network of Carnegie Mellon University.

7. It is important for computer users to use a password to protect computers and files. According to surveys, most users use the simplest combinations of numbers as a password - 12345, 77777, 11111 or 55555. A little more than 4% use the login itself as a password.

8. The most popular reasons for computer breakdowns include: liquid getting on the keyboard, as well as unstable voltage in the mains.

9. After the invention of the CD information storage device, the developers faced the question of its volume. It was decided that the volume of the CD should contain Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the duration of which is 72 minutes.

10. According to statistics, more than 20 virus attacks occur daily on a standard computer network.

11. Nowadays, many people use e-mail, and often it is necessary to delete spam. Over the past year, more than 22 billion spam emails with a total volume of 86.7 terabytes have been detected. This represents 94% of the total emails.

12. Calculated - if Bill Gates pays $ 1 for each "freeze" of "Windows", then Microsoft will go bankrupt in 3 years.

13. Surveys show that employees spend more than half a billion hours playing computer games during the working day, causing a loss of 10 billion dollars in productivity. And this is without taking into account the time spent on the Internet for personal purposes!

14. Among the exploits in the computer field include the work of Michel Santelia, who blindly typed on a PC more than 64 books containing 3 million words. Note that the texts of these books were written in different languages.

15. It is symbolic for our time that in 1982, the “Computer” was recognized as the Person of the Year according to Time magazine.

An interesting video on how to assemble a computer yourself:

Computers and a variety of computer equipment have long become an important part of our lives. Many cannot imagine their life without a smartphone, tablet and multifunctional PC. Today I will tell you about 20 interesting facts about computers that you most likely did not know.

1. First electronic computer ENIAC weighed over 27 tons and occupied about 167 square meters.
2. Only about 10 percent of the world's currency exists in physical form, the rest is just a set of zeros and ones. This percentage is steadily declining due to the ubiquity of online payments and plastic cards.
3. TYPEWRITER (typewriter) - the longest word you can write using only one row of the keyboard
4. Doug Engelbart invented the first computer mouse in 1964 and it was made from wood.
5. More than 5,000 computer viruses appear every month
6. About half of all vandalism on Wikipedia (deletion of articles, spam, etc.) is done by just one computer program without human help
7. If there was a computer that was similar to the human brain, it could perform 38 thousand trillion operations per second and could hold 3580 terabytes of memory
8. The password for the US nuclear missile guidance system was 8 zeros for 8 years.
9. About 70 percent of virus creators work for large organized crime groups
10. HP, Microsoft, and Apple have one historical detail in common - they were all created in someone's garage.
11. On average, a person blinks about 20 times per minute, but when using a computer, he blinks only 7 times per minute.
12. The house where Bill Gates lives was designed on a Macintosh computer.
13. The first hard drive was created in 1980 and could only hold 5 megabytes.
14. The first 1 GB hard drive appeared in 1980, weighed 250 kilograms and cost $40,000.
15. Over 80 percent of emails sent daily are spam
16. The IBM PC was developed by a group of 12 engineers. The group was called "The Dirty Dozen" ("Dirty Dozen")
17. The original name of Windows was "Interface Manager" ("Interface Manager")
18. The first microprocessor was created by Intel and had a modest name 4004. It was designed for a calculator and then no one imagined how powerful processors would become in the future.
19. IBM The 5120, which was created in 1980, remains the heaviest personal computer to this day. It weighed almost 48 kilograms - and that's not counting the external floppy drive. The drive weighed another 59 kilograms.
20. The "Genesis Effect" footage from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was the first in film history to be entirely computer generated. Later, the studio behind these special effects became Pixar.

I hope you enjoyed the interesting facts about computers that I told you about. Do not forget the history, strive for accomplishments!)

How were computer games and programs downloaded from paper magazines and radio broadcasts?

In the 1980s and early 1990s, ZX Spectrum computers were very popular in Europe, and then in the countries of the former USSR. Their cheapness was due to the use of a conventional TV as a screen, and a household tape recorder as an external drive. Audio cassettes with recorded games and programs were inserted into it, the sound of which the computer interpreted as a sequence of bits and loaded into memory. Often the programs could be "downloaded" in special radio broadcasts by recording them on cassette tape. Also, small programs were printed in magazines dedicated to the Spectrum in the form of source code - it had to be typed on the keyboard, run and again saved to audio media.

Why is a hard drive called a hard drive?

In 1973, IBM released the Model 3340 hard drive, which was designed with two 30 MB modules. Although the memory was increased to 70 MB in the final version, the association of the 30/30 numbers with the popular hunting cartridge .30-30 Winchester gave the drive the code name "Winchester". This name has become a household name for all hard drives, and in English it has already fallen into disuse, and in Russian it is actively used.

What function, besides entertainment, was assigned to "Kosynka" and "Sapper"?

The well-known standard Windows games - Klondike, FreeCell and Minesweeper - were included in the operating system for a reason. In addition to the entertainment function, they, according to the developers, were supposed to help users master the mouse and adapt to the graphical interface after the command line interface. In the solitaire games mentioned, the drag "n" drop skill was honed, and Minesweeper taught the exact positioning of clicks and the correct use of both mouse buttons.

Where is the theater located, in which the payment for the performance depends on the number of smiles of the audience?

The comedy theater "Teatreneu" in Barcelona has introduced a new system of payment for laughter. In the backs of the seats in the auditorium, there are tablets with an installed program for recognizing facial expressions. Each fixed smile costs 30 euro cents, and the maximum cost of the performance is set at 24 €, that is, after the 80th smile, you can laugh for free. The system pleased both the audience, whose number increased, and the theater administration, whose income increased.

What is the HTTP error number indicating that access is restricted due to censorship?

Of all HTTP protocol errors, users most often encounter a 404 Not Found status, when the server cannot find information on the request generated by the client. You can often see the 403 Forbidden status, which means that the server has information, but cannot give it to the client due to limited access rights. Among many other error messages, one can single out status 451, which indicates a ban on access to data at the request of government agencies or copyright holders. His number is a direct reference to Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451.

Why did billionaire Peterffy need a robot in the 1980s that could type on a keyboard?

Billionaire Thomas Peterffy was the first stock market player who, back in the 1970s, thought about using computers to optimize transactions. At that time, brokers did all the transactions manually in the common room, so Peterffy engineers developed tablets, but they were too slow and did not bring any effect. In the late 1980s, when the NASDAQ exchange players were already entering all the commands through the computer, his team illegally connected the exchange terminal to their machine with the automatic trading program according to the given algorithms. After the prohibition of such an innovation, Peterffy instructed engineers to make a robot capable of typing the necessary commands on the terminal's keyboard.

What feature did all the leading programmers of the first ENIAC computer have?

Before the invention of electronic computers, computers in the United States were workers who manually calculated complex tasks on arithmometers - for example, calculated shooting tables. Most of the computers were women, and there were even more of them during the war. Many of them then successfully retrained as programmers. So, among the six leading programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, there was not a single man.

How do toy ducks help programmers debug code?

Some programmers use the duckling method to debug code. To do this, you need to put a toy duck on your desktop (or imagine it) and explain in detail line by line what the program should do. By resorting to this method, the programmer often encounters the desired error, which he did not notice when viewing the code in the development environment.

Why is updating a computer program called a patch?

An update of a computer program that eliminates identified errors is called a patch, which literally means “patch” in English. This term arose when the main carrier of information in computer systems was still punched cards and punched tapes - paper coils with holes punched in the right places, which were read and converted into machine code. The developer of the program sent the corrected section of the punched tape to the users, and they themselves cut out the erroneous fragment and pasted the “patch”.

What development bug led to the concept of Grand Theft Auto?

In 1995, the DMA Design studio developed a racing game "Race" n "Chase", in which the player could choose the role of a criminal or a policeman and complete various missions, moving both by car and on foot. The creation process was hard, and the testers did not feel involved in the game, but everything changed after a "bug" in one of the updates, which allowed computer-controlled police cars to drive more recklessly and pursue the intruder without regard to speed and rules. The testers really liked it, they began to play only as criminals and ignore the missions, just enjoying the reckless chases. Seeing such a reaction, the developers changed the concept of the project and renamed it "Grand Theft Auto".

Why is the curiosity of automatic spelling correction called the "Cupertino effect"?

In the dictionaries of early versions of spell checkers for text editors, the English word for "cooperation" was contained only in the version with a hyphen - "co-operation". If a person typed it all together, the correction algorithm offered to replace it with "Cupertino" (a city in California), and sometimes changed it automatically. Because of this, a considerable number of official documents have been preserved, including organizations such as the UN, NATO and the European Union, where you can find phrases like: "Cupertino with our Italian comrades was very fruitful." The "Cupertino effect" is now called any such curiosity of automatic correction.

What services does a Danish company provide, where 75% of its employees are autistic?

The Danish company Specialisterne provides software testing, quality control and documentation verification services. The specifics of the company is that 75% of its employees are autistic and people with other autism spectrum disorders. Specialisterne was founded by Torkil Sonne, whose son is also autistic. Having worked for a long time in public organizations, Torquil realized that the characteristics of autistic people, such as increased attention to detail and the ability to quickly find inconsistencies in large data sets, could be used to advantage. The company's services are used by many corporations, including Microsoft and Oracle.

Why are the keys on the keyboard arranged in the QWERTY sequence?

On the first American typewriters, the keys were usually arranged alphabetically. Due to the imperfection of the design, pressing adjacent keys often led to pinching and typing errors, which, moreover, remained unnoticed by the operator until the carriage was moved to the next line. Therefore, designers began to experiment with spacing frequently occurring combinations of letters into different parts of the keyboard in order to increase the productivity of operators. In 1878, the QWERTY layout finally took shape, placed on the Remington No. 2 machine, and has survived to this day in an almost unchanged form.

Why is the mouse cursor arrow tilted instead of pointing vertically up?

The inventor of the computer mouse, Douglas Engelbart, depicted the screen cursor as an arrow pointing vertically upwards in explanatory drawings. This selection option seemed the most logical, but when it came to implementing a cursor in the Xerox operating system GUI, it turned out that due to the low resolution of monitors, it was impossible to draw a good-looking little upward arrow from pixels. The engineers decided to tilt the cursor so that one face is vertical and the other is at a 45° angle to it. In this form, the cursor entered all other operating systems, even after the advent of higher resolution monitors.

How did Bill Gates benefit from writing a school timetable program?

At the age of 15, Bill Gates received from the administration of the school where he studied, the task to write a program for the distribution of students into classes. Gates not only completed the task, but also derived some benefit for himself: the program formed such a schedule for him that there were a disproportionate number of interesting girls in his classes.

Which brand logo encrypts the combination of analog and digital technologies?

In the logo for VAIO, Sony's personal computer brand, the letters V and A form a sinusoidal waveform, while the letters I and O form a binary code, one, and zero. Thus, the logo reflects the combination of analog and digital technologies in one whole.

Who published a book that encrypted itself after the first reading?

Cyberpunk founder William Gibson, in collaboration with artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr., released the concept work Agrippa (Book of the Dead) in 1992. It consisted of an art album, which included a floppy disk with a poem dedicated to human memory and the gradual blurring of the fragments stored in it. The peculiarity was that the poem could be read only once, since at the first reading the program on the floppy disk encrypted the text. Likewise, the album's artwork and lettering were printed with photosensitive ink, which began to fade when exposed to light.

What is the connection between the airport with the SQL code and the nearby headquarters of Oracle?

According to the international classification, the airport of the town of San Carlos in California has an SQL code. Some IT professionals believe that this has something to do with the headquarters of the Oracle Corporation, located in the nearby city of Redwood City, known for the production of software for working with databases (SQL is the most famous database query language). However, the airport had this code long before the formation of Oracle, so this circumstance is due to a mere coincidence.

What could the 1912 automaton, considered the world's first computer game, do?

In 1912, long before the advent of the prototypes of modern computers, the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres y Quevedo designed the El Ajedrecista electromechanical machine, which is considered the first computer game in history. The device was a chessboard with a king and a rook moved by a machine with the help of electromagnets, as well as a king of a different color, which was moved by a person. The automaton, albeit not in the minimum number of moves, was guaranteed to complete this chess endgame with checkmate to the opponent.

How do Internet users, without knowing it, help to digitize old books?

On many sites, to confirm that you are a real person and not a robot, you need to solve the so-called "captcha" - for example, to recognize deformed letters in the picture. Among the options for implementing these systems, reCAPTCHA stands out, where the user is prompted to enter two words that are taken from scanned books. One word is easy to read, and it is on it that the check is made, and the second word is much more difficult, and its correctness is not analyzed, since it is not recognized by the automatic scanning system. These words are offered to different people, and then the system accepts the option that is entered most often - in this way, millions of Internet users help computers in digitizing old books.

Which hyphen has been named the most expensive hyphen in history?

In 1962, the Americans launched the first spacecraft to study Venus, Mariner 1, which crashed a few minutes after launch. First, the antenna on the device failed, which received a signal from the guidance system from the Earth, after which the on-board computer took control. He, too, could not correct the deviation from the course, since the program loaded into it contained a single error - when transferring instructions to the code for punched cards in one of the equations, a dash was omitted above the letter, the absence of which radically changed the mathematical meaning of the equation. Journalists soon dubbed this line "the most expensive hyphen in history" (in terms of today, the cost of the lost device is $ 135,000,000).

Who was featured on the first Apple logo?

The very first Apple logo depicted Sir Isaac Newton and an apple tree from which an apple was about to fall on his head. This emblem was not on the case of the Apple I computer, only in the instructions for it. The overall composition of the logo was heavily overloaded with details, so a year later it was replaced by our usual bitten fruit.

What destructive action do zip bombs perform?

One of the classes of malicious computer programs are the so-called zip-bombs. These are archive files of the .zip format, which, when unpacked, increase many times in size. For example, one of the most famous zip bombs called 42.zip has a size of only 42 KB, while inside the archive there are 5 layers of nested archives with 16 files per level. The size of each file at the last level is 4.3 GB, and the entire archive when unpacked takes 4.5 Petabytes. The malicious effect of such archives is to overflow system resources when antiviruses or other system programs try to scan them, although at present all decent antiviruses recognize bombs in advance and do not try to open them completely.

How many bits can be in a byte?

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was no single standard regarding the number of bits in a byte. In different computer systems, a byte contained from 6 to 9 bits. It wasn't until the early 1970s that most architectures began to use 8-bit bytes, and gradually this became the standard. To eliminate ambiguity in computer literature, sometimes the term "octet" is used instead of the term "byte" to accurately indicate the sequence of 8 bits.

When and for what was the bank computer fined, having seized the permanent and random access memory?

An American couple went through bankruptcy in 1992, but the bank again sent a reminder of the debt. The bank apologized, attributing the error to an automatic computer program, but after the apology, the sending of reminders did not stop. After considering the complaint of the spouses, the bankruptcy judge ruled to fine the computer, seizing 50 MB of permanent memory and 10 MB of RAM. In the same decision, it was said that the fine could be canceled as soon as the computer stopped issuing new reminders.

In which country is free file sharing officially recognized as a religion?

In Sweden, the Missionary Church of Kopimism community is officially recognized as a religion, for members of which the sacred acts are copying information, sharing knowledge and file sharing networks. The sacred symbols of this new religion are the key combinations Ctrl+C (copy operation) and Ctrl+V (paste). On April 28, 2012, the first wedding took place, conducted by a Kopimist priest, whose face was covered with a Guy Fawkes mask, and his voice was distorted by a modulator.

How can I find out the printer's serial number, date and time of printing from the printed sheets of paper?

A significant part of modern color printers prints on each sheet of paper its serial number, as well as the date and time of printing in encoded yellow dots, barely visible to the naked eye. These data were published by the human rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2005, after which printer manufacturers admitted that such a measure was introduced by agreement between them, major banks and the US government to combat counterfeiting. Of the major manufacturers, only Samsung printers do not print yellow dots.

What shuttle components did NASA buy on eBay in 2002?

The Space Shuttle was developed by NASA in the late 1970s and equipped with cutting-edge microprocessor technology at the time, including the Intel 8086 processor. shuttles, but Intel no longer produced such processors. So NASA, along with obsolete motherboards and 8-inch floppy drives, had to buy them online, mostly through an eBay auction.

How is the Apple logo related to the death of Alan Turing?

When, in 1952, the British police discovered that the brilliant mathematician and one of the creators of computer science, Alan Turing, was a homosexual, he was sentenced according to the laws in force at that time and offered either to go to jail or to inject the hormone estrogen. Turing chose the latter, and two years later he was found dead, the cause of which was a bitten apple with cyanide. There are three versions explaining this death: suicide, the machinations of ill-wishers, or banal negligence. There is an opinion that it is this case that underlies the appearance of the Apple logo. However, its creator, Rob Janoff, denied this rumor, saying that the apple on the emblem does not contain any allusions, and it is drawn when bitten in order not to be confused with a tomato.

Where and why are prisoners in prisons forced to play computer games?

There is a multi-million dollar industry selling in-game money and items in online multiplayer games for real money. The virtual currency is earned by the so-called “gold farmers”, for whom such games are a regular daily job. The vast majority of farmers are employed in China - back in 2005, their total number was estimated at more than 100,000 people. In addition, in many Chinese prisons, wardens and guards force inmates to play online games, earning illegal income from this.

How do punched cards affect the operation of modern mail programs?

Punched cards, which were used as input and output media on the earliest computers, were designed to be 80 columns wide. To make it easier to transfer programs, the first displays were also designed for a line width of 80 characters. When e-mail appeared, the first protocols for it again operated with 80-character strings. Although monitors have evolved a lot since then, almost all popular mail systems still break lines at 80 characters to ensure compatibility with older programs. Even binary files are converted using MIME base64 to strings of letters and numbers with a maximum length of 80 characters. We can say that the programs change the video files we send to be compatible with punched cards.

By what accident did Linux actually come about?

Linus Torvalds used the Minix operating system, but was dissatisfied with many of the limitations in it and decided to write his own system. At a certain point, a more or less stable version was released, Torvalds' interest in the project faded, and he was ready to abandon it. But in the same period, he accidentally corrupted the partition on the hard drive where Minix stood, and instead of reinstalling it, Torvalds decided to finish what he had begun. So, by chance, the Linux kernel and later the GNU/Linux OS were born.

When did the world find itself on the brink of a nuclear war due to technical errors?

During the Cold War, there were many cases when the world was on the verge of a nuclear war due to incorrect readings of missile launch detection systems. For example, in 1979, an alarm was raised in the United States due to the fact that a training program for a massive nuclear strike was mistakenly loaded on one of the computers. However, the satellites did not detect missile launches, and the alarm was cancelled. And in 1983, the Soviet satellite detection system failed, transmitting a signal about the launch of several American missiles. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, sitting on the console, took it upon himself to not pass information on to the country's top leadership, deciding that the United States was unlikely to launch a first strike with such a small force. In 2006, the UN awarded Petrov as "the man who prevented a nuclear war."

How many times larger is a standard Japanese keyboard than a European one?

In Japanese, in addition to the kanji hieroglyphic script borrowed from China, there are also two syllabary alphabets - hiragana and katakana - in which one character corresponds not to a word, but to a separate syllable. Traditionally, they are used to write words for which there are no kanji: katakana for borrowed terms from European languages, and hiragana for individual Japanese particles and suffixes, or when the reader may not know some kanji. It is 47 hiragana characters that are located on the keyboards, so Japanese keyboards are no different from what we are used to. In addition, special software can track character input and automatically suggest replacing several characters with the corresponding character.

How many founders did Apple have?

Apple is known to have been founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. However, there was also a third founder named Ronald Wayne who owned a 10% stake but sold it to the Steves for $800.

Which world famous corporation got its name from a spelling mistake?

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with the name of the new search engine, they wanted to express in it the huge amount of information that the system is capable of processing. Their colleague suggested the word "googol" - this is the name in mathematics for a number of one followed by a hundred zeros. He immediately checked the domain name for employment and, finding that it was free, registered it. Moreover, he made a mistake in writing the word: instead of the correct 'googol.com' he entered 'google.com', but Larry liked the newly invented word and established itself as a name.

Personal computers and laptops have long entered the daily life of ordinary people. It would seem that everything is already known about these devices, however, every day new details are discovered that make you look at computer technology from a completely different perspective.

Below are the 10 most interesting facts about modern computers and everything that is directly related to them.

The inconvenience of QWERTY

The QWERTY keyboard is one of the most uncomfortable. This layout is inferior to its counterparts in efficiency of about 70%. So why then is it used on almost all modern PCs?

The explanation is to be sought in the wilds of past centuries. At the end of the 19th century, the speed of typing by typists reached incredible levels and typewriters could no longer cope with it. To prevent possible damage to valuable devices, their developers introduced the QWERTY layout, which significantly reduced the typing speed.

Since then, its use has been a kind of tribute to tradition.

Recognition at the highest level

As you know, the British Time magazine annually chooses the winner in the nomination "Person of the Year". Famous politicians, musical performers, athletes, etc. are fighting for victory in it.

However, in 1982, the editors of the magazine could not choose a worthy contender, so they gave victory in this nomination to a personal computer.

Unexpected reboot

David Bradley is one of the preeminent computer geniuses of his time, who was part of the group of engineers who developed the first personal computer. To quickly reboot the device, he suggested using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl, Alt and Esc.

However, it soon became clear that users quite often press this combination quite by accident with the fingers of one hand. That is why a combination of Ctrl, Alt and Delete is now used for these purposes.

Computer - milking machine

Programmers from Denmark have developed a special computer that, using the analysis of sensors, can increase milk yield by 15%. Now such a novelty costs within 250 thousand dollars.

Drinking coffee at the computer is harmful

According to statistics, most often laptops fail due to liquid spilled on the keyboard (often coffee or tea).

Also, quite often, breakdowns occur due to power surges or using a laptop on a heat-retaining surface.

Birth of viruses

The first computer virus was developed back in 1982. His main task was to disable Apple equipment.

Invalid names

Users of modern computers will never be able to give the created folder the name "con".

The reason is simple - this name is reserved for output and input devices.

Microwave weight, smartphone display

One of the first computers, which was assembled at the end of 1981, weighed approximately 12 kilograms.

At the same time, the diagonal of its screen did not exceed 5 inches and was inferior in size to the displays of many modern smartphones.

Hidden reserves of power

Most users use their personal computers for extremely limited purposes. For this reason, PCs and laptops tend to use only half of their maximum power.

Boiler for the lake

In Switzerland, not far from a mountain lake, there is a data center equipped with a large number of servers.

Recently, it has been used to heat this reservoir.