Tech Tips – May 2015

If you know that you don’t know what you don’t know, you are probably pretty self aware. As such, you might realize there are many things you don’t know about technology and how it works.    What follows may do little more than serve you well should you ever find yourself on Jeopardy!, but it should make you, the thoughtful one, consider how little we really know about how the world works.

(1) Only 8% of the world’s money is physical.  The rest is electronic transactions.

(2) In 1936, the Russians made a computer that ran on water and was used to solve non-homogenous differential equations.

(3) Banks process checks and debits using a computer program that selects the biggest amounts to charge first against your account. The result is that you are more likely to get an overdraft fee than if they were processed in the order in which received.

(4) The TRS-80 computer generated so much radio interference that designers created games so that an AM radio placed next to the computer could play the sounds.

(5) The USA chose 00000000 as the password for the computers controlling some of its nuclear weapons stockpile.  For 8 years.

(6) The term computer “bug” comes from a dead moth found in a Harvard Mark II computer in 1947.

(7) You could fit the entire internet on only 200 million Blu-ray discs.

(8) The human race sends 250 billion emails every day.  Over 80% of them are spam.

(9) The first domain name ever registered was symbolics.com

(10) Doug Engelbart made the first computer mouse out of wood in 1964.

There you go.  Be amazed!  And become a Jeopardy! champion.