Call yourself tech savvy? But did you know..

In a world where our day starts and ends with technology, ranging from getting up to an alarm on your phone to going to sleep after listening to some music and everything else throughout the day in between, technology is now deeply intertwined with our daily life routines. It is nearly impossible to think about a world without technology and how easy it has made our day-to-day tasks. While we mindlessly reap the benefits of the amazing technological advancements we have today, here are few unknown and interesting facts about the technology.

1. Russia built a computer that ran on water in 1936:

   In 1936 Vladimir Lukyanov used water to create a computer that solved partial differential equations. In images of the Lukyanov computer, a complex system of interconnected tubes filled with water is visible. In this computer, adjusting taps and plugs altered the flow of water, thus changing the variables. The end result was calculated by measuring the level of water in certain tubes. It was also known as a ‘Water Integrator’ and was originally designed to solve the problem of cracking in concrete. It's now found in Moscow's Polytechnic Museum.

2. The QWERTY keyboard was explicitly designed to decrease typing speed:

   Originally, QWERTY’s slow typing speed, one of its highly mentioned inefficiencies, is actually not an inefficiency since the main purpose of this keyboard is itself to slow down typers. At a certain point in time, mechanical typewriters used to get jammed if typists were too quick. QWERTY cut down on this problem. Today, we continue to use QWERTY because we’re accustomed to it, but many experts strongly favour alternate typing approaches.

3. Let’s not forget our roots. In today’s world of sophisticated and highly design-oriented websites created for specific purposes, there was a time when text display was the only use possible for a web page. It’s still possible to visit the world’s first web page. The original web page went live in 1991 and ran on a NeXT computer at CERN - the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. This useful page was entirely dedicated to informing the public about the World Wide Web. Today, it primarily serves as a historical archive.

4. Considering how the internet today is so intrinsically intertwined with our lives, it is almost impossible to imagine a world without it. Furthermore, the thought that even most of our parents didn’t have access to the internet till their late 20s or 30s seems so bizarre, right? At https://howoldistheinter.net, you can determine how many days the internet has existed and how old the internet was when you were born (or even how many days after someone was born, was the internet launched).

By Khushi Arora