Amazing Facts archive

• By 2010, electronically stored information was estimated at 1.2 billion terabytes (by IDC)
• If these information were stored on CDs, the stack would reach the moon and back.
• Our digital world grew by 2/3 in 2010 alone
• An estimated 15 per cent of that information would be stored in an internet cloud system

• The world’s first computer virus came from Pakistan. It was called Brain
• A computer virus Struxnet was powerful enough to take down a nuclear facility

• Dell Computers was started by a 19 year old with only $1000
• Dell’s first advertisement was made on the back of a pizza box

If you shut down your computer for 60 seconds, this is what you will miss online:

• 1500+ blog posts
• 98,000 tweets
• 12,000 new ads on Graigslist
• 20,000 new posts on Tumblr
• 600 new videos (25+ hours) on Youtube

• The surface of a hard disk drive is so smooth that if it were the size of a football field, it would not have a bump more than 1/300th of an inch high
• Air rushes over a spinning hard disk at over 80kmh

• Turns out Facebook wasn’t always called Facebook. It originally launched as TheFacebook on thefacebook.com with Zuckerberg claiming he was “Founder, Master and Commander, Enemy of the State”. It didn’t become Facebook.com until 2005 when the fledgling site bought the domain for $200,000 from aboutface.com a web and intranet directory software company
• Over 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States with all those people spending a whopping 5703 years (3 billion minutes) on the site each day.
• The website is built on PHP-MySQL and is the second most-trafficked PHP site in the world
• In April 2006, revenue was rumored to be over $1.5 million per week
• The company already rejected a $975 million offer for the site
• Facebook is valued at 8 billion according to Peter Thiel
• It currently hosts over 1.7 Billion photos
• Facebook is the 5th most valuable US Internet company, yet with only $150 million in annual revenue.
• With this success, Zuckerberg (founder), Moskowitz and Hughes moved out to Palo Alto for the summer and rented a sublet. A few weeks later, Zuckerberg ran into the former cofounder of Napster, Sean Parker. Parker soon moved in to Zuckerberg’s apartment and they began working together. Parker provided the introduction to their first investor, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and managing partner of the Founders Fund. Thiel invested $500,000 into Facebook.

• The creator of the Cabbage Patch Dolls was a former Microsoft programmer who left in 1981

• Bill Gates’ house was designed using a Macintosh computer
• Bill Gate had a SAT score of 1590. The top score for the test is 1600
• Bill Gates earns $250 every second; that’s about $20 million a day and $7.8 billion a year
• By the age of 17, Gates had sold his first computer program, a time-tabling system for his high school, for $4,200

• Tetris has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, since it began in 1982.That provided the creator 800 million in revenues

• David Bradley wrote the code for [Ctr]+[Alt]+[Delete] key sequence
• The QWERTY keyboard layout is 129 years old