We live in a world full of facts, some of them are incredulous and others are seriously disturbing and strange. Like where the word Robot comes from…
Let's start with Robots
The word Robot comes from the Czech word Robota which means forced or slave labour and it’s first use in a fictional work was 1920.
Android is a robot with a male appearance, the female equivalent is Gynoid
Domain names used to be free
Before 1995, the Internet was a different world and back then domain names were given away for free.
When I registered domain names in 1995, you had to send an email to mhs-relay.ac.uk and then if there weren’t any objections, your domain would be registered (from a UK university)
As of 1996, Nominet manages all .uk domains. ICANN manages the international domains (.com, .org, etc)
Barcodes were invented in 1952
Barcodes were invented and patented in 1952 by Norman Joseph Woodland but 22 years later when he was employed by IBM that the barcode was used for product labelling and the first item to be scanned was chewing gum.
You can send your email address using Morse
When Samuel Morse developed Morse code to send telegraph messages over vast distances which allowed 26 characters and Arabic numbers to be sent, along with some punctuation.
Each letter in Morse is sent with the space of time of a letter sent between them, excluding prosigns, which are a special sign sent through to denote something. In 2004, AC was added to the list of prosigns for Commat (Commercial at or @) so for the first time, you can send your email address using the Morse key.
In fact, the @ sign was chosen randomly by the man who created the email program to denote the sender from the server.
Original Internet company names
Yahoo! used to be called akebono.stanford.edu but the name was changed to Yahoo because it was the name of the ficticious people in Gulliver’s Travels.
Amazon started as Cadabra and only sold books.
Google was Googol
Most of today's tech companies started in garages
HP, Google, Apple and Microsoft started in garages. As was Amazon and Dell.
Disney, Mattel, Nike and Harley Davidson also started in garages.
Smoking around an Apple product voids the warranty
Apple has a strict anti-smoking policy, so if you smoke near an Apple computer and it breaks, they will not repair the device even if it is in the guarantee period because the guarantee is automatically voided.
There is also a clause in the iTunes contract that says you can’t use iTunes when making nuclear devices.
Tons of tech is disposed every year...
In the US alone, 220 million tons of computers and other devices are discarded every year.
In the UK, we dispose of 1.5 million tonnes and only recycle 17% of that waste.
