Tech Trivia Vol. 4

It's the fifth Friday of the month, which means we put down the tutorials and enjoy technology for the strange, wonderful thing it is. Every key you press, every symbol you type, and every sound your computer makes was chosen by a person -- sometimes carefully, sometimes in a hurry, and sometimes by accident. Here's another batch of the stories behind the stuff you use every day. Pull up a chair.

Names & Naming Accidents

JavaScript was written in about ten days. In 1995, Brendan Eich built the first version of the language at Netscape in roughly ten days. It was first called Mocha, then LiveScript, and was renamed JavaScript as a marketing move to ride the popularity of Java. The two languages are about as related as a car and a carpet. The language that now runs on nearly every web page in the world started life as a rushed prototype with a placeholder name.

Google was almost called "BackRub." Larry Page and Sergey Brin's early search engine was named for the way it analyzed the web's backlinks. They later chose "Google," a play on googol -- the number 1 followed by 100 zeros -- to reflect the scale of the information they wanted to organize. Legend has it the name was a typo of "googol" when the domain was registered. Either way, a spelling slip may be the most valuable misspelling in history.

A "byte" is spelled with a "y" on purpose. Engineer Werner Buchholz coined the term in 1956 while working on IBM's Stretch computer. He changed the spelling from "bite" to "byte" so nobody would accidentally confuse it with "bit" in a typo. Eight bits to the byte came later; originally the word just meant "a group of bits," whatever size the machine needed.

CAPTCHA is an acronym with a long name. It stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." One version, reCAPTCHA, put all that squinting to work: the distorted words you typed were pieces of old books and newspapers that scanning software couldn't read, so humans were quietly helping to digitize them.

Firsts

The first text message was "Merry Christmas." On December 3, 1992, engineer Neil Papworth typed those two words on a computer and sent them to a colleague's phone on the Vodafone network. There was no way to reply: phones of the day had no keyboards for composing messages. Today, trillions of texts are sent every year.

The computer mouse was made of wood. Doug Engelbart and his team built the first prototype in the 1960s: a carved wooden shell with one button and two metal wheels. It got the name "mouse" because the cord trailing out the back looked like a tail. Engelbart showed it off to the world in 1968 in a presentation so far ahead of its time that it's now called "The Mother of All Demos," which also showed hyperlinks, video conferencing, and collaborative editing.

Email got its "@" from one engineer's keyboard. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson needed a way to separate the user's name from the computer they were on, so he picked a symbol that almost never appeared in names or in anything else: the "@" sign. He later said it was simply the obvious choice -- it already meant "at." He also sent the first networked email, but he could never remember what it said. He guessed something like "QWERTYUIOP."

The first banner ad had a pushy tagline. In 1994, the website HotWired ran the first web banner ad, for AT&T. It read: "Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will." Click-through rates were reportedly very high, mostly because nobody had ever seen one before.

Computers went to space with Tetris. In 1993, cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov took a Game Boy and a copy of Tetris aboard the Mir space station. It's widely cited as the first time a game was played in space -- and the game of falling blocks has been orbiting in nostalgia ever since.

Sounds, Symbols & Hidden Details

The Windows 95 startup sound was composed on a Mac. Microsoft asked musician Brian Eno to create a sound that was "inspired, universal, anthemic, sentimental, futuristic, nostalgic, emotional" -- and under four seconds. He wrote dozens of pieces, reportedly on an Apple computer. The one that shipped is just over three seconds long.

The most famous ringtone is a classical guitar piece. The Nokia tune that every phone owner heard for a decade is an excerpt from "Gran Vals," a piece for guitar composed by Francisco Tárrega in 1902. Those few notes rang out on hundreds of millions of phones, which makes it one of the most-heard pieces of music ever.

ASCII's "delete" code is all ones for a reason. The DEL character is 1111111 in binary -- every bit set. On paper tape, data was stored as holes punched in the tape, so punching out every hole in a character turned it into a code programs ignored. It was the physical way to erase a mistake. A relic of paper tape still sits at the very end of the ASCII table.

Emoji began as a 12×12 grid. In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita designed the first set of 176 emoji for NTT DoCoMo's mobile internet platform in Japan. Each one was only 12 by 12 pixels. The original set is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"TYPEWRITER" fits on one row. All ten letters of the word typewriter appear on the top row of the QWERTY keyboard. A popular story says the layout was designed to prevent typewriter jams by separating common letters, and a competing story says it was arranged so salesmen could type the word quickly during demos. Historians still argue over how much of either is true -- but the coincidence is real, and so is the layout you're using right now.

Scale & Time

The Unix clock runs out in 2038. Unix time counts the seconds since January 1, 1970. Many older systems store that count as a signed 32-bit integer, which will overflow at 03:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038, rolling the date back to 1901. It's called the Year 2038 problem, and most modern systems have already moved to 64-bit time, which won't overflow for about 292 billion years.

The first website is still online. The world's first web page, published at CERN in 1991, explained what the World Wide Web was and how to build a page. The address, info.cern.ch, still works today (the original content has been restored from later copies). If you want to see where it all began, it's one click away.

One for the Road

Programmers talk to rubber ducks. The practice of "rubber duck debugging" -- explaining your code line by line to a toy duck on your desk -- was popularized by the book The Pragmatic Programmer. The point is that describing the problem out loud forces you to slow down and notice the mistake yourself, which happens far more often than you'd expect. The duck never says a word, and it's still the most helpful member of many teams.

Conclusion: Behind every piece of technology is a person who made a quick decision they never expected anyone to remember: a placeholder name, a spare symbol, a wooden shell with a tail. That's the fun of it. Next time you press the "@" key or hear a three-second startup chime, you're hearing and touching someone's rushed guess that turned out to last. See you next fifth Friday.