From the moment you wake up to the moment you go back to sleep, Technology is everywhere, and I mean everywhere. Technology is not only rapidly changing, but it’s changing so fast that most of us don’t even recognize these changes. We take most of it for granted, and consider it the norm. Right now, all the pieces are in place to completely change the face of products, technologies, organizations, and entrepreneurship over the next few years. Below is a list of some Incredible Technology Facts that we find absolutely astounding.
also read: Amazing Facts: Lesser known facts about the ‘God’s own country’ Kerala
The word “technology” is a combination of a Greek word for “art, craft” (techne) and the word for “Word, speech” (logos). The first known calculator, the Abacus, was invented in Babylonia in 2400 BC. The 10th Scandinavian King Harald I is what the Bluetooth is named after. The king was known for eating lots of blueberries and subsequently sporting blue teeth, therefore given the nickname “Bluetooth”. His runic initials can be seen in the Bluetooth logo. Hewlett Packard was started in a garage in Palo Alto, California in 1939. Google, Apple and Microsoft were all started in garages as well. IBM created the first hard drive in 1956 called IBM Model 350 Disk File. The storage unit for the first-generation was enormous, and it had a cabinet the size of a cupboard for holding 50 24-inch disks that could hold 5MB of data. The first computer mouse was invented in 1964 by Doug Engelbart and it was made out of wood with two metal wheels. The English word for red panda is ‘Firefox’ which is where the browser gets its name from – this means the Firefox logo is actually a red panda, not a fox! In 1994, the company who had a patent on GIFs tried to charge a fee for using GIFS. The PNG was invented as an alternative, and the company backed down. The very first Apple logo featured Sir Isaac Newton sitting underneath a tree, with an apple about to hit his head. Google rents out goats from a company called California Grazing to help cut down the amount of weeds and brush at Google HQ! The founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, was a college drop out. More than 56 million hours of music is streamed daily. We spend more than 33 million hours playing the game League of Legends The amount of technical information is doubling every 2 years. For students starting a 4-year technical or college degree, this means ½ of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their 3rd year of study. There are currently 7.5 billion people on the planet and in 2050 there will be 10 billion people. In 1900 14% of the population lived in cities. In 2017 54% of the population lives in cities. Every minute 7 babies are born in the US, 32 babies are born in China, and 47 babies are born in India. 25% of the population in China with the highest IQ’s is greater than the population in North America… in India it’s the top 28%. Both China and India have more honor kids than North America has kids. For the first time in history, we have 4 generations working side by side. Traditionalist, Boomer, Gen X, and Millennial. Each are very different in the way they grew up communicating. A new term has been created, “The Silver Surfer” for those seniors +50 who use the internet on a frequent basis. If you were to have your picture taken by the very first camera, you’d need to sit still for 8 hours. A dentist named Alfred Southwick invented the electric chair. The creators of the PNG file format wanted it to be pronounced as ‘ping’. Credit card EMV chip technology has been around since 1986. It was first implemented in France, with Germany following shortly after. Alaska is the only state in America that can be typed on one row of a traditional English QWERTY keyboard. The Apple II had a hard drive of only 5 megabytes when it was launched in June 1977.