7 Tech Facts That Sound Completely Made Up (But Aren't)
Seven tech facts that sound fake but aren't, from a moth in a computer to a wooden mouse. Plus a few questions at the end, so tell me your own favorites.
7 Tech Facts That Sound Completely Made Up (But Aren't)
Every developer has a moment where they learn something about the tools they use daily and think: "No way. Someone is messing with me."
I went down a rabbit hole collecting the best ones. Here are seven that sound fake and aren't.
1. The first "computer bug" was an actual bug
In 1947, operators working on the Harvard Mark II found a moth stuck in one of its relays. They taped it into the logbook with the note "First actual case of bug being found."
Plot twist: engineers were already calling glitches "bugs" long before that. Thomas Edison used the word in the 1870s. The moth just made it funnier, and it's now the most famous debugging story in history.
2. Git is named after an insult
Linus Torvalds named it "git," which is British slang for an unpleasant person. He joked that he names all his projects after himself, first Linux, then Git. Every time you type
git commit, you're technically calling yourself a bit of a git. Fair.3. Python is named after a comedy troupe, not a snake
Guido van Rossum was reading scripts from Monty Python's Flying Circus while he was creating the language, and he wanted a name that was short, unique, and slightly mysterious. That's also why Python tutorials are full of "spam" and "eggs" instead of the usual "foo" and "bar."
4. The first computer mouse was made of wood
Douglas Engelbart's early prototype in the 1960s had a carved wooden shell. It's the most "artisanal" piece of hardware in the history of computing. Somewhere out there, a hipster is still mad that nobody makes them like that anymore.
5. The Apollo guidance computer had less memory than a modern greeting card
The computer that helped land humans on the Moon had roughly 4 KB of erasable memory and about 72 KB of fixed memory. A single photo from your phone is thousands of times bigger. The software was woven into physical wire memory by hand, and the people who did it were nicknamed "little old ladies."
Meanwhile, your to-do app needs 400 MB to show a checkbox.
6. The first hard drive weighed over a ton
IBM's RAMAC 350, from 1956, stored a few megabytes on a stack of 50 large spinning platters. It was the size of two refrigerators and companies leased it for thousands of dollars a month. Your phone's storage is millions of times bigger and fits in your pocket, and you still get the "storage almost full" popup.
7. The first-ever registered .com domain is still online
Symbolics.com was registered on March 15, 1985, making it the oldest .com domain. When it was registered, only a handful of .com names existed. Nobody knew what to do with them, and now we pay a lot of money for a good domain name.
Bonus: Hello, World came from a C tutorial
The classic "Hello, World!" program became famous through a book by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie in the late 1970s, though Kernighan had used the same idea in an earlier tutorial. Almost every programmer's first program traces back to one tutorial example. If you ever feel like your work doesn't matter, remember that someone's throwaway demo became a global tradition.
Now it's your turn
I'm collecting more of these, so help me out in the comments:
- Which of the seven surprised you the most?
- What's the weirdest origin story of a tool, language, or library you use?
- Settle this once and for all: tabs or spaces? (No wrong answers. Okay, there are wrong answers, but I won't say which.)
- What's the dumbest bug you ever spent hours on? Bonus points if it was a missing semicolon.
Best fact in the comments gets featured in part two.
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