It is impossible to imagine modern life without a computer. Let's take a little look back and look at some interesting facts about computers that you might not know.

The simplest games known to everyone pre-installed in Windows were not designed for entertainment at all. Their appearance in the operating system was associated with a new device - a computer mouse. Microsoft believed that these games were supposed to teach users how to properly use an unusual input device.

Symbol "@"

The “@” symbol, which is well known to users, also called “dog”, has been around for more than 500 years. Initially, it denoted a unit of measurement of volume, then migrated to the banking sector, and from there to computers.

Emoticons

When corresponding, we no longer hesitate to use various emoticons. Did you know that the idea to use a closing parenthesis as a smile appeared in 1969 from the writer Vladimir Nabokov. The emoticon in its familiar form – “:)” was created in 1982 by American professor Scott Fahlman.

"Computer"

The word “computer” itself did not previously mean electronic computers. At the beginning of the last century in the United States, this term was used to describe people working on adding machines (impressive-sized mechanical calculators).

"Missionary Church of Copism"

An organization with such a strange name really exists; moreover, it is officially recognized as a religion in Sweden. Its members believe that the copying of information can under no circumstances be restricted. They chose “Ctrl-C” and “Ctrl-V” as their religious symbols.

Piracy

Information piracy appeared even before the Internet spread. In the 70s, there were several precedents in the United States - record companies sued cassette recorder manufacturers, believing that the ability to record music from the radio violated their rights and business credit. By the way, the court did not satisfy their demands.

First hard drive

The history of the hard drive goes back more than 60 years - it was released in 1956. The device at that time became a real technological breakthrough - it weighed more than a ton, took up a lot of space and contained 5 MB of data.

Floppy disks

The US Army still uses floppy disks. Most of the computers that support the life of nuclear facilities are IBM manufactured in 1976. Updating the system requires enormous financial costs, but the military plans to do this in 2018.

4.7 (93.53%) 337 votes

I was sitting at the computer one day, working quietly, and then suddenly the thought struck me, where did it all start and what was the very first computer in the world? Of course, I decided to find the answer to this question, it really hooked me. And the answer was found! Naturally, it became the topic of the next blog post about all the most interesting things in the world that do not leave you indifferent. As always, determining the championship was not easy, but you can already get used to it...

The very first computer in the world was created and built in the USA by Harvard University mathematician Howard Aixn back in 1941. Together with four specialists from IBM, which ordered it for him, they created a computer based on the ideas of Charles Babbage. After all the tests, it was launched on August 7, 1944. It received the name “Mark 1” from its creators, and it was put to work at Harvard.

At that time, this computer cost five hundred thousand dollars, a fabulous sum at that time. It was assembled in a special case, which was made of glass and steel that is resistant to corrosion. The body itself was at least seventeen meters long, the height was more than 2.5 m. Its mass was about 5 tons and it occupied a space of several tens of cubic meters.
"Mark 1" consisted of many switches and other mechanisms, the total number of which was 765 thousand.
Its wires had a total length of about eight hundred kilometers!

The capabilities of the very first computer in the world now seem ridiculous to us, but at that time there was no more powerful computing device on the planet.

The machine could:

• operate with seventy-two numbers, which in turn consisted of twenty-three decimal places
• the computer could subtract and add, and each operation took three seconds.
• In addition, he also multiplied and divided, spending six and fifteen seconds on these operations.

To enter information into this device, which was essentially just a faster adding machine, a special perforated paper tape was used. It was the first computer that did not require human intervention for its computing processes.

Back in 1942, the development of John Mauchly served as the impetus for the creation of the first computer, but at that moment few people paid attention to it. After military engineers of the American Army took a closer look at it in 1943, attempts were made to create a device that then received the name “ENIAC”. The military was in charge of the finances and allocated about five hundred thousand dollars for this project, as they wanted to design new types of weapons.
"ENIAC" consumed so much energy that during its operation, the nearby city constantly experienced a shortage of electricity and people sat without electricity, sometimes for several hours.

Eniac technical specifications

Look at some very interesting characteristics of the very first computer in the world, according to the second version. Impressive isn't it?

• It weighed 27 tons.
• It contained 18,000 lamps and other parts.
• The memory was 4 KB.
• Occupied an area of ​​135 square meters. m. and was all entangled in many wires.

It was programmed by hand, and the operators just changed hundreds of switches, and they had to turn it off and on every time because it didn't have a hard drive. There was no keyboard and no monitor either. There were a number of dozens of cabinets with lamps, the machine often broke down as it often overheated. Then it was also used to design hydrogen atomic weapons. This machine worked for more than ten years, and in 1950, when the transistor was created, computers became smaller in size.

Where and when was the very first PC sold?

In two decades, little has changed in the concept of computers. Thanks to the introduction of the microprocessor, the creation of the computer itself proceeded at a faster pace. Back in 1974, IBM wanted to launch the first computer on the market, but there were almost no sales. The IBM5100 used cassettes where information was stored, and at that time it was very expensive - ten thousand dollars. Therefore, few people could afford to buy such a device then.
He could himself execute programs that were written in the BASIC and APL languages, created in the depths of IBM. The monitor could display sixteen lines of sixty-four characters each, and its memory was sixty-four KB. The cassettes themselves were very similar to regular audio cassettes. There were almost no sales due to the high price and poorly thought out interface. But still, there were people who purchased it and who began a new era in the history of world markets - computer trading

Have you thought what they will be like in ten years?

Not long ago, IBM showed the press the Roadrunner supercomputer with 1 quadrillion operations. It was collected for the US Department of Energy. It includes 6,480 dual-core processors, and 12,960 Cell 8i processors. It consists of 278 cabinets, 88 kilometers of cable. Weighs 226 tons. Located on an area of ​​1100 m², this one costs $133,000,000.

As you can see, supercomputer cabinets are still in fashion, it’s all about the design...

Watch about the very first computer in the world in video format:

This is how computer history turned out. Was it interesting or not - write in the comments!

The computer has become so familiar in our lives that we perceive it as a workhorse and little think about how many interesting things are connected with our PC. We decided to fix this. So, interesting facts about computers:

1) A modern personal computer has ten times more power than it once took to launch and land a man on the moon.

2) The CD capacity is enough for 72 minutes of music. This is exactly the duration of Beethoven's ninth symphony, which the creators of the new product were guided by.

3) A split second is enough for us to evaluate the quality of the site we have visited.

4) Chinese gamers are prohibited from playing games that promote murder, such as GTA or Postal. Hackers are also not welcome in the Celestial Empire: they face serious prison sentences, and in 1998 a couple of hackers were even sentenced to capital punishment.

5) Hackers, of course, are not worth protecting - criminals of the information space. But also don’t forget about your loved ones. Some accounts, email addresses and other personal pages on the Internet are just asking to be broken! The most popular passwords are numbers in ascending or descending order, as well as date, month and year of birth. Many users are so careless that they even enter the same set of characters in the “login” and “password” windows.

6) If you often sit at a computer for a long time, then you blink at least seven times a minute. This is how our eyes try to prevent “office vision” syndrome.

7) Bill Gates' official email receives millions of emails every day. Need I say that the vast majority of them remain unanswered?

8) There is a lot of debate about whether a computer can catch up and surpass us in abilities. But he was already recognized as “person of the year”: in 1982, this was done by the employees of Time magazine.

9) People who are afraid of computers and everything connected with them are called cyberphobes.

10) 2/3 of Americans surf the Internet at least three hours a day. We think our compatriots are not much less...

Computer related services are considered a very profitable business. At least three out of six rich people made their fortunes in the IT sector.

11) The sysadmin holiday is celebrated in many countries. But only in the States is it called “System Administrator Appreciation Day.”

12) Contrary to popular belief, computers most often break down not from problems in the electrical network or from malicious viruses. They should “say thank you” to their owners who spill tea, coffee, soda and other drinks on the keyboard.

13) if we take all email messages transmitted in the world as 100%, then 94% of them are spam.

14) The first e-mail was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, the author of a program for exchanging messages between computers. He also suggested using the @ icon to separate the username and computer name.

15) The creators of the Google search engine wanted to name their brainchild Googol (10 to the hundredth power - that’s how many pages they were going to index), but the domain with that name was already taken.

16) The first dot matrix printer was developed in 1964. It was used in Seiko brand watches to permanently print the exact time.

17) The Internet and computer games are considered the most devastating threat to employee productivity. The amount of time workers in the average American office spend on the Internet is still unknown, but they spend about half a billion hours a year playing computer games.

18) The famous combination - the three-finger program - Ctrl-Alt-Del - was created and implemented by one of the IBM PC developers, David Bradley.

19) The first personal computers had a very limited amount of memory - only about 16 kilobytes.

20) A computer scientist is still not a woman’s profession. The world's largest IT corporation, Microsoft, employs 75% men and only 25% women.

Computers and various computer equipment have long become an important part of our lives. Many people cannot imagine their life without a smartphone, tablet and multifunctional PC. Today I will tell you about 20 interesting facts about computers that you most likely did not know.

1. First electronic computer ENIAC weighed more than 27 tons and occupied approximately 167 square meters.
2. Only about 10 percent of the world's currency exists in physical form, the rest is just a collection of zeros and ones. This percentage is steadily declining due to the widespread use of online payments and plastic cards.
3. TYPEWRITER (typewriter) - the longest word you can write using only one row of the keyboard
4. Doug Engelbart invented the first computer mouse in 1964 and it was made of wood
5. More than 5,000 computer viruses appear every month
6. About half of all vandalism on Wikipedia (deleting articles, spam, etc.) is carried out by just one computer program without human help
7. If there was a computer that was similar to the human brain, it could perform 38 thousand trillion operations per second and could hold 3580 terabytes of memory
8. For 8 years, the password for the US nuclear missile guidance system was 8 zeros.
9. About 70 percent of virus creators work for large organized crime groups
10. HP, Microsoft and Apple have one thing in common - they were all created in someone's garage
11. The average person blinks about 20 times per minute, but when using a computer, they only blink 7 times per minute.
12. The house where Bill Gates lives was designed on a Macintosh computer.
13. The first hard drive was created in 1980 and could only hold 5 megabytes.
14. The first 1 GB hard drive appeared in 1980, weighed 250 kilograms and cost $40,000
15. More than 80 percent of emails sent daily are spam
16. The IBM PC was developed by a team of 12 engineers. The group was called “The Dirty Dozen” (“Dirty Dozen”)
17. The original name for Windows was "Interface Manager".
18. The first microprocessor was created by Intel and bore the modest name 4004. It was designed for a calculator and then no one imagined how powerful processors would become in the future.
19. IBM The 5120, which was created in 1980, remains the heaviest personal computer to this day. It weighed almost 48 kilograms - and that's not counting the external floppy drive. The drive weighed another 59 kilograms.
20. The "Genesis Effect" footage from Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan was the first in cinema history to be entirely computer generated. Later, the studio that handled these special effects became Pixar.

I hope you liked the interesting facts about computers that I told you about. Don't forget history, strive for achievements!)

It is impossible to imagine the modern world without computers. It has become indispensable for humanity in many areas of human activity. Let's take a closer look at this important and irreplaceable thing. And the first place to start is with computer games. Everyone knows the simplest computer games, like “kerchief” And "sapper", which are included by default in every operating system Windows.

1. It is known that the company Microsoft initially included these games in its system not only for entertainment. These games appeared in “winde” when the computer mouse first appeared.

According to the developers, these games were supposed to help people learn how to move the cursor correctly, as well as use both mouse buttons, since before this computer users used only the keyboard and mouse to control them, which was something unusual for everyone.

2. Symbol @ (this) called "dog" only in the countries of the former Soviet Union, in most other languages ​​this symbol is called "snail" or "monkey" .

By the way, this symbol is already more than 500 years. In ancient times it was used mainly to denote measures of weight. It was then used by banks to write checks and bills, and from there it entered the world of computers and programming, where it now has many functions.

3. Most people now use emoticons when writing something to someone. It is also known that the first person who thought of using the parenthesis “)” as a smile, there was a Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov . This happened in 1969.

But the evolution with the smiley face did not end there. And a professor at Carnegie University in the USA Scott Fahlman in 1982, it was proposed to use a colon, a hyphen and a parenthesis in electronic correspondence as an image of a smiling human face. This symbol quickly became popular among people who use computers.

4. The word computer appeared even before the invention of electronic computers. At the beginning 20 century in the United States, computers were workers who performed mathematical calculations using adding machines, which were large mechanical calculators.

They performed statistical data processing tasks, financial calculations and anything that involved a lot of numbers.

5. There is an organization called the Missionary Church of Copism. This organization appeared in Sweden in 2010 and is officially recognized as a religion there. Members of this church believe that copying information is a sacred act, which in no case should be limited by any copyright.

They advocate the free dissemination of information through the World Wide Web, which, by the way, they also consider sacred. And members of the sect consider the key combinations Ctrl - C and Ctrl - V to be the most important sacred symbols.

6. Another interesting fact is that information piracy arose even before the advent of the Internet. At the end 70s years in the United States, many people had cassette recorders and these tape recorders were able to record songs that were played on the radio onto cassettes.

So, in those days, many record companies even sued the manufacturers of tape recorders, demanding a complete ban on them, arguing that such music piracy caused enormous damage to their business, but fortunately they did not succeed.

7. The world's first hard drive was invented in 1956 year and was called .

It weighed more than a ton, took up the space of an entire closet and contained entire 5 megabytes of information , which for those times was a real technological breakthrough.

8. In the summer of 2016, a rumor surfaced that the United States Department of Defense was still using floppy disks to store data in the nuclear missile control system. This story caused a big stir in the USA and it turned out to be true.

The American military actually uses floppy disks, this is due to the fact that most nuclear facilities have computers installed IBM 1976 year of production. The entire infrastructure of these facilities was developed specifically for these computers. And in order to update the system, it will be necessary to completely redo the entire infrastructure, and this, in turn, costs a huge amount of money. However, the US military has promised that it will do this by the end of 2018.

9. It is known that only 10 percent Of all the money in the world exists in the form of physical banknotes.

Rest 90 percent are virtual money in bank accounts and stored on computers.

10. Computer viruses appeared before the advent of the Internet. In those days, viruses spread through various removable media , mainly via floppy disks.

When there was no Internet yet, computer users constantly exchanged floppy disks containing various information with each other. It was through such infected floppy disks that viruses spread throughout the world, infecting more and more computers.