You don’t have to run a computer service in Toms River NJ to impress your friends with your hi-tech knowledge. Just memorize a few of this whiz bang bits of computer trivia and you’ll have even your techie friends wondering how you know what you know.
And don’t worry, we won’t give away your secret!
- Those little memory sticks can be more powerful than you thought, depending on what’s on them. The most serious computer breach in US military history happened when someone picked up a memory stick in a parking lot. The drive had been infected by a foreign intelligence agency. It promptly ran a program that attacked the United States Central Command.
- One of the biggest trademark suits in history was computer-related – and Beatles related! Apple Corps, the company that controls all things Beatles, sued Apple Computers for trademark infringement. They came to an agreement, provided Apple Corp never entered the computer market and Apple Computers never entered the music market.
- Tron, the 1982 science fiction film about going inside a computer, was not nominated for a special effects Academy Award because the Academy thought the filmmakers “cheated” by using computers. How times have changed!
- The first woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science in the U.S. was a nun named Mary Kenneth Keller. She helped develop several early computing languages.
- Disney once fired John Lasseter, the CEO of Pixar, for promoting computer animation. It’s safe to say that years later, they learned from their mistake!
- Calculators by Texas Instruments now have full keyboards, but you’ll notice that they have ABC keyboards rather than the QWERTY keyboards common on most devices. Why? Because if they have QWERTY keyboards they would be considered computers, not calculators, and therefore could not be used for standardized tests.
- If you are thinking about vandalizing Wikipedia, don’t bother. Over half of all vandalism on Wikipedia is caught by a single computer program, and that program boasts an excellent 90 percent accuracy rate.
- People are REALLY serious about their video games! A player on the online game World of Warcraft named Bradster had 36 accounts and would play on 11 computers simultaneously. No word on how many Cheetos he ate per session.
- There are computer worms that will cause something to pop up on your display saying the FBI has detected child pornography on your computer. These warnings are fake. Jay Matthew Riley didn’t know this, though, so the Washington resident went and turned himself into police. We’re not shedding any tears for him.
- At one time, computer data was often stored on cassette tapes exactly like the ones you used in your Walkman. This was so popular in part of Europe that in the 1970s, some radio stations would broadcast the crazy sounds those tapes made when played as audio, allowing listeners to record them and “download” the data onto their own cassettes.
Got all that? Interesting stuff, isn’t it? Next time you’re at a Computer service in Toms River NJ, drop one of those facts into your conversation to impress your tech!