Thu, 20 Apr 2023

10 Amazing Facts About the World of Computers

The first video game ever was invented by a physicist named William Higinbotham in 1958. The game, called ‘Tennis for Two’, was played on an oscilloscope and consisted of a dot representing a tennis ball and two lines representing tennis rackets.

The first emoticon [:-)] was invented by computer scientist Scott Fahlman in 1982. It quickly became popular as a means of conveying tone and emotion in text-based communication.

The first computer to defeat a human in a game of chess was the deep blue computer–IBM supercomputer, which defeated Garry Kasporov, the world’s best chess player (at the time), in 1997.

The first computer bug is a real bug. In 1947, a moth got stuck in a relay of the Harvard Mark II computer, causing it to malfunction. It was Grace Murray Hopper who found the moth and coined the term ‘bug’.

The first computer virus to have infected millions of computers in 2000, causing widespread damage is ‘ILOVEYOU’. It was created to steal Internet access passwords by a man named Onel de Guzman from Hong Kong who couldn't afford one.

Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, created the first algorithm designed to be processed by a machine. She collaborated with Charles Babbage on his proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine.

The first successful search engine, called Archie, was created in 1990 by a postgraduate student named Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. It paved the way for modern search engines like Google.

The first computer-generated music was created in 1957 by Max Mathews, a researcher at Bell Labs. He used an IBM 704 computer to generate a 17-second piece of music called ‘The Bicycle Built for Two’.