You may think you know everything there is to know about technology, but there are always a few facts here and there that even the most diehard tech fans don't know. Following the next few minutes, we're gonna explore some of the most useless but true tech facts. From the origins of common tech terms to the strange things that can happen to your tech, this video has it all.
So, if you want to impress your friends with your useless tech knowledge, or if you're just curious about the weird and wonderful world of tech, be sure to check out this article.
The name for “robot” has dark origins
Have you ever wondered where the word "robot" comes from? If you look into the etymology of “robot", it traces its roots to the Czech word "robotnik", which means "slave", according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. "Robotnik" comes from "rabota" the Old Church Slavonic word for servitude. The word was first used to refer to a fictional humanoid in a play in 1920.
"Google rents out goats"
Yes, you've read it right. Instead of mowing their lawn, Google rents goats to eat the grass. Google is renting the goats from a company called California Grazing. Apparently, every so often a herder will bring about 200 of them to the campus and they'll roam around for a week eating the grass. Not only that, these goats will fertilize the land at the same time.
Domain name registration used to be free
Nobody really knew what the internet was capable of back then and this was a huge opportunity for people to own all kinds of do domain names. It was in 1995 that a company called Network Solutions was granted the rights to charge people for domain names. When a fee was introduced, it was high! Prices were typically $100 for two years of registration. This fee was later reversed in 1997, bringing the charge down to $70 for two years.
Is Alexa always listening to your conversations?
This probably isn’t new to you, but the short answer is yes, Alexa is always listening to you. Or rather the microphone on your Alexa smart speaker is always active and is constantly monitoring voices in your home in order to hear its wake word. Siri has been doing it forever. Alexa stores your dialogue history to its cloud to help improve your Alexa experience. But, you can review and delete these recordings, either in bulk, or individually.
There are Amish computers
When we think of typical Amish trappings, they usually revolve around barns, buggies, and beards. Computers and cell phones certainly have no place in the Amish lifestyle, right? Well... not always. There are computers specially designed without internet, video, or music capabilities, just for the Amish. The features include word processing, drawing, accounting, spreadsheets, and more – but not much more.
The majority of the people plug in their USB wrong
Trying to plug in a USB cord is kind of a nightmare.The USB paradox is one of the most familiar experiences of the digital age. Every time you try to plug in a USB cord, it seems like you always get it wrong on the first try. It doesn't matter how much attention you pay to the plug or the cord or the icons on the cord. It's always wrong. According to some research, 86% of people try to plug in their USB devices upside down.
The first computer mouse wasn’t made from plastic
Back in 1964, Doug Engelbart and Bill English invented the first-ever computer mouse, and it wasn’t made from plastic. Back then, it was made out of wood. It was rectangular and featured a little button on the top right. They called it a mouse because the cord coming out of the back reminded them of the tiny rodents. The primary inventor of the mouse, Doug Engelbart, never received any royalties because the patent was held by the Stanford Research Institute.
Steve Jobs used sleight of hand at the first iPhone presentation
The first iPhone presentation happened six months before the iPhone was set to hit the market. At that time, the phone was so incredibly buggy that it was highly likely to crash during Jobs' one hour and 40 minutes on stage. The engineers came up with a plan, where an iPhone would survive to the end of the demo without crashing, but only if everything was shown off in the right order. Tap the wrong app by mistake and the phone would freeze or switch off completely. Although it looks like Jobs is casually scrolling through the phone's functions, he is carefully demonstrating each for just a few seconds to avoid overworking the handset. Several spare iPhones were also on stage, ready to take over if one crashed and needed to be reset.
Gamers are better surgeons
You’re in good hands if your surgeon was a gamer. Oddly enough, researchers found that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made less mistakes and performed faster than their counterparts who did not play video games. Out of 33 surgeons from Beth Israel Medical Center in New York who participated in the study, nine doctors played video games at least three hours per week. Those nine doctors made 37% fewer errors and performed the task 27 percent faster.
The first online gaming was before the year 2000
Sega Dreamcast was the first 128-bit console to hit the market. Released in 1999, it was the first console that allowed real-time online play. Unfortunately, it was a little too early for its time, as back then, most internet connections were not reliable enough.
“Android” is gender-specific
The word “Android” literally means a human with a male robot appearance. Though the term "android" has been used to refer to robotic humanoids regardless of apparent gender, the Greek prefix "andr-" refers to man in the masculine sense. The female equivalent of this word is a “Gynoid”. A gynoid is anything that resembles or pertains to the female human form.
Nintendo didn’t start as a video games company
Nintendo has been a household name for decades now, and many people wonder exactly where and how the company started out. Nintendo has released over 20 different gaming consoles and sold over 100 million of them. It has also produced hundreds of games for each of these consoles and is still actively producing more. From 1889-1956, Nintendo was the largest card game company in Japan and flourished through the 1940s and 1950s. They still manufacture playing cards in Japan, and even have a bridge tournament called the “Nintendo Cup”.
NASA’s internet speed is 91 GB per second
If there’s any tech company that would actually make good use of them internet speeds, it’s NASA. The internet speed of NASA is exceptionally high thanks to the kinds of data they deal with. Their networks are capable of 91 gigabits per second, as they found out from an experiment they did. But it does not mean that their entire network is that fast. NASA proved through an experiment in 2013 on their own ESNet network that the network was able to reach up to 91Gbps, but the researchers did it in a closed, ideal environment where they could control everything.
Mark Zuckerberg is color blind
According to The New Yorker, Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, which means the color he can see best is blue. That also happens to be the color that dominates the Facebook website and mobile app. "Blue is the richest color for me", he told the magazine.
Nearly one third of divorces are because of Facebook
33% of divorced couples have stated Facebook was a reason for the break up. A British study reports that Facebook played a role in more than 33 percent of divorces every year. A U.K. law firm analyzed 5,000 divorce petitions and found that the most common reason listed for a couples' separation was inappropriate interactions with a member of the opposite sex on Facebook. Some of these more specific reasons are things like inappropriate messages to other people, it causes couples to fight, secret social media accounts, and doubting the relationship.
Most internet traffic isn’t from real humans
The internet is a sprawling and mysterious place. It's a thrumming hive filled with vast amounts of data, knowledge, commerce, and media and an equally vast number of gloriously bizarre arguments, grumpy cats, and adorable sloths. Also, bots. Lots and lots of bots. A report released by Incapsula, a cloud-based web-security service, found that 61.5 percent of all website traffic comes from these non-human visitors. Incapsula based its findings on 1.45 billion bot visits, over a 90-day period, to 20,000 sites on its own network. That network may not be perfectly representative of the entire web, but it offers a sense of who, or what, is out there.
The first computer virus was harmless
In 1971, the first ever computer virus was developed. Named Creeper, it was made as an experiment just to see how it spread between computers. The virus simply displayed the message: “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” The first virus ever released into the wild was called Brain, which also wasn’t harmful. However it was the very first IBM PC virus.
iTunes has unusual Terms & Condition
When agree to the Terms & Conditions for iTunes, you are agreeing to not use it to make nuclear weapons. The clause states, “You also agree that you will not use these products for….the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missile, or chemical or biological weapons.”
