Technology Trivia: 20 Facts About the Digital World

Technology is one of the fastest-moving quiz categories, but a solid base of facts never goes out of date. The origins of computing, the birth of the internet and the stories behind famous brands come up again and again. Here are 20 facts to power up your next tech round — with the background that makes them memorable.

Computing Origins

1. Ada Lovelace is often called the first computer programmer. In the 1840s she wrote what is considered the first published algorithm for Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine — a machine that was never completed.
2. ENIAC, finished in 1945, weighed around 27 tonnes and filled a large room. It used about 18,000 vacuum tubes. Today's phones are millions of times more powerful.
3. The computer "bug" story is only half true. In 1947, engineers working on the Harvard Mark II found a moth trapped in a relay and taped it into the logbook as the "first actual case of bug being found". The joke worked because engineers — including Thomas Edison decades earlier — already used "bug" for a technical fault.
4. A byte is eight bits. A bit is a single 0 or 1; eight of them can represent 256 different values, enough for a letter or number.
5. Moore's Law comes from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who observed in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip was doubling at a regular pace — later settled at about every two years.
6. The first computer mouse was made of wood. Douglas Engelbart demonstrated it in the 1960s, along with early versions of windows, hypertext and video conferencing.

The Internet Age

7. The first message over ARPANET crashed the system. On 29 October 1969, researchers tried to send "LOGIN" between two computers in California. The system crashed after "LO".
8. Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email in 1971 and chose the @ symbol to separate the user's name from the computer's name.
9. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN in Switzerland. The first website went online in 1991 and explained what the web was.
10. The internet and the web are not the same thing. The internet is the global network of computers; the web is one service that runs on it, alongside email and many others.
11. The first webcam watched a coffee pot. Researchers at the University of Cambridge set it up so they could check whether the coffee was ready without walking down the corridor.
12. "Spam" comes from Monty Python. A sketch in which a group of Vikings sing "Spam" over and over inspired the name for unwanted, repetitive messages.
13. More than half of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices. Many people in the world have never used a desktop computer at all.

Gadgets and Brands

14. The first handheld mobile phone call was made in 1973 by Motorola engineer Martin Cooper. Early phones weighed around a kilogram and were nicknamed "bricks".
15. QWERTY keyboards date from the 1870s. The layout was designed for early typewriters by Christopher Latham Sholes, and it has survived ever since.
16. Google began life as "BackRub". Larry Page and Sergey Brin later renamed it after "googol" — the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
17. Apple had a third co-founder. Ronald Wayne founded the company with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976, but sold his share within days for $800.
18. The first YouTube video, "Me at the zoo", was uploaded in April 2005 by co-founder Jawed Karim. It is 19 seconds long.
19. Bluetooth is named after a Viking king. Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson united parts of Denmark and Norway in the 10th century; the logo combines his initials in runes.
20. "Wi-Fi" does not stand for anything. It was a marketing name chosen because it was catchy; "wireless fidelity" was added afterwards.

Bonus: Acronyms Quiz Writers Love

• CAPTCHA — Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
• HTTP — HyperText Transfer Protocol, the language web browsers and servers use to talk.
• URL — Uniform Resource Locator, a web address.
• GIF — Graphics Interchange Format. Its creator says it is pronounced with a soft "g", like "jif"; many people disagree.

How to Keep Up

Tech questions come in two kinds: history, which never changes, and current events, which change every year. Focus on the history first — the pioneers, the firsts and the stories behind famous names. It is the foundation that most quiz questions are built on, and it makes the newer facts easier to place.

Learn a handful of these and the technology round becomes easy points. Ready to test yourself? Jump into the free Technology quiz and see how high you can score.