The world is a wonderful place and in our mind, it's made even better by the technology, gadgetry and modern marvels that surround us.

To celebrate all this wonder we've put together some interesting facts about tech, gadgets and the history of the web that you might not know. You might be surprised and amused by what we've found.

This is the computer that was used to create the web

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Wikipedia

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is the man famously credited with creating the World Wide Web in the late 1980s.

It was this machine, a NeXT computer, that he used as the world's first web server. He also used it while working at CERN to code the world's first web browser known as WorldWideWeb, in 1990.

In a jiffy is more than just an expression

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Andrey Grushnikov/Pexels

The phrase "in a jiffy" is often used as an expression of time, but it's much more than that. It's actually also a unit of time.

It's used in several scientific spheres for measuring time. For example, in computer engineering, a jiffy is the length of one cycle of the computer's system clock (roughly 10 milliseconds). Meanwhile, in the physics world, it represents the amount of time it takes light to travel a distance of one centimetre.

Email is older than the World Wide Web

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Pixabay

Electronic mail was invented by Ray Tomlinson in the 1960s. It wasn't until a couple of decades later that the World Wide Web would begin to take shape in the form we know and love today.

The first spam email was sent in 1978 by Gary Thuerk to several hundred users on ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). Since then, plenty of nefarious companies and individuals have jumped on that bandwagon, plaguing our inboxes with unwanted junk.

According to Statista, 47.3 per cent of e-mail sent in September 2020 was spam. And in 2019, around 293.6 billion spam emails were sent.

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Avantgarde Concept/Unsplash

Research suggests that the average computer user blinks significantly less than normal while at their screen.

It is said that we blink seven times per minute instead of the usual 20. Hence why your eyes dry out more while working in front of a monitor.

Hewlett-Packard's company name was almost Packard-Hewlett

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HP

Bill Hewlett and David Packard graduated from University in 1935. In typical fashion for the industry (that would become much more commonplace in the years to come) the two started their business in a garage.

The company was properly formed in 1939, though the pair could not decide on a name and ended up flipping a coin to determine whose name would come first. Thus HP was born, it could have easily have been PH instead.

The term robot actually means "forced labour"

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Sharp

Robots come in all shapes and sizes and sure we hope one day they might do our bidding and rid us of the most boring, taxing and unwanted jobs of society.

But did you know the term "robot" comes from a Czech word, robota, meaning "forced labour"? We just hope they never discover that to be the case as we're fairly sure that's when the robot uprising will begin.

Most internet traffic isn't even real

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Unsplash

A study in 2012 discovered that most of the traffic on the internet wasn't actually people, but was quite often made up of bots, hackers and malicious programs.

51 per cent of all internet traffic is said to be "non-human" in that regard. This traffic is often attempting to steal data, hijack sites, carry out denial-of-service attacks and more.

Some people are scared of tech

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Unsplash/Aarón Blanco Tejedor

Plenty of people have different fears. People are scared of spiders, some of thunderstorms, others of the taxman. But plenty of people are scared of tech too.

So much so it even has a name - Technophobia. There's also "Nomophobia" - the fear of being without your mobile phone and "Cyberphobia" the fear computers. We generally just suffere from FOMO though, the fear of missing out.

A Rubik's Cube can be solved in 20 moves or less

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Pexels/JTMultimidia

Back in 2010, Google's researchers used supercomputers and an intelligent algorithm to fathom that any Rubik's Cube can be solved in 20 moves or less.

That research also uncovered that a standard Rubik's Cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different potential configurations.

Astronaut's wonderful alternative to life insurance

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NASA

In 1969, Astronauts embarking on the Apollo 11 space mission hit a bit of a snag when they discovered they couldn't get life insurance in case the unthinkable should happen. The men obviously wanted their families to be provided for if they didn't make it back.

They quickly realised that if they did die on the mission, their autographs would probably be in high demand. And thus, these signed envelopes appeared bearing the markings of the significant missions into space that could be sold by their families if need be.

The first television broadcast took place in 1925

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Wikipedia

Scotsman John Logie Baird is seen here, in 1925, using a ventriloquist's dummy to broadcast the first television picture.

It was a done with a greyscale image in a 30-line vertically scanned format, at five pictures per second. Archaic by today's standards, but a marvel of modern technology at the time.

Nintendo was founded as a playing card company in 1889

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Nintendo/Wikipedia

Video gaming giant Nintendo was originally founded as a playing card company way back in the hazy days of 1889.

It wasn't until the 1960s that the company moved into producing toys and then a decade later into video games. This image shows a plaque at the original company headquarters and marks the history of a truly awesome games company.

The first supercomputer weighed over a ton

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IBM

This is an image from 1956 showing IBM's first supercomputer (the 305 RAMAC). This gargantuan thing had a hard drive which was capable of storing 5MB of data and weighed over a ton. It can be seen here with a forklift loading it onto a cargo plane.

In 2018, the world's largest hard drive was revealed, clocking in at 100TB - we've come a long way with much smaller devices!

We spend around 10 years watching TV

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Pexels/rawpixel

Research suggests that on average, we spend around 10 years of our lives watching television.

We wonder how much that it is likely to increase now it's getting easier and easier to binge-watch Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+.

The first photo on the World Wide Web

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CERN

This is the first photo ever posted on the World Wide Web and it's over 20 years old. The image comes from CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, the same organisation that famously discovered the Higgs Boson particle.

It shows an all-girl comedy band that was created from secretaries and partners of the CERN scientists. This image was posted online as a promotional piece and features some fairly shocking Photoshopping, but marks a fantastic piece of history.

Apple's Macintosh advert was directed by Ridley Scott

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Apple

In 1984, the Apple MacIntosh was launched with the help of a TV advert directed by film legend Ridley Scott.

This advert, known as 1984 was just 1 minute long and cost around $1.5 million to create and air during the Superbowl. It's regarded by many as the "greatest TV commercial of all time".

Pluto takes 248 years to orbit the Sun

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NASA

Ok, so this one is not technically a tech fact, but it is a fact revealed by tech.

This is an image of Pluto captured by the New Horizons spacecraft as it flew by in 2015. It was taken at a range of 22,025 miles and yet shows the "true colours" of Pluto.

What interests us though, is the fact that Pluto is so far away that it takes 248 years to orbit the Sun. The distant rock was originally discovered in 1930 and yet it still has not looped around the Sun since then and will not complete a full orbit until 2178.

There's a subreddit run by bots

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Con Karampelas/Unsplash

Reddit is surely a wonderful place and there's a section of the website for every possible whim, passion or hobby.

But did you know there's also a subreddit that's run by bots? r/SubredditSimulator is managed by bots that use markov chains to create posts based on real-world data. Basically, the bots are trying to mimic posts created by real users. It's either convincing or hilarious. Take a look and decide for yourself.

Internet killed the radio star

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Pocket-lint

Technology is surely evolving at an alarming rate. The reach of that technology is also changing as it becomes more accessible and affordable.

A demonstration of that is shown by the fact that it took 38 years for radio to reach an audience of 50 million. Television, on the other hand, took just 13 years. In more modern times, the Apple iPod a measly three years and the internet took four years.

Firefox is actually a red panda

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Mozilla Corporation

You probably are familiar with the web browser Firefox. But did you know the browser's logo isn't a fox at all?

Mozilla explains that:

"A "Firefox" is another name for the red panda."

The browser was also originally called Firebird but had to change its name to avoid confusion with another open source project. Firefox was chosen as it sounded similar to Firebird but also was deemed to be easy to remember.

Nokia once sold toilet paper

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A life without animals is not worth living from Pixabay

Nokia might be most well-known for selling phones (though less so in recent years) but the company hasn't always been that way.

When it was founded in 1865 Nokia was a pulp mill and a century later it was selling all sorts of things including toilet paper and car tyres.

It wasn't until the 1980s that Nokia started getting serious about phones and little else,

A QR code made by drones

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ChaseDragonfury

Drones are used for all sorts of weird and wonderful things nowadays including everything from taking awesome extreme sports videos, providing aerial coverage and even being used for racing competitions.

But in some places they're even being used in place of fireworks displays and other cool things. Like here in Shanghai where drones were used to create a QR code in the sky. Yes, it's an advert but it's still awesome.

YouTube was originally a dating site

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Adam Fejes from Pexels

The YouTube you know and love actually started out with very different intentions. The website was built originally as a dating site.

One of the founders, Jawed Karim, even said they had a slogan back then for it - "Tune in, Hook up". The hope was people would upload videos of themselves looking for the ideal partner. But nobody did and the owners got so desperate that they tried to pay people to do so. That didn't work either.

Soon YouTube just became a place for people to upload all sorts of videos and it's continued that way every since.

QWERTY was to slow people down

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Pocket-lint

The QWERTY keyboard layout that Westerners are familiar with actually came about as a way to slow people down and prevent problems.

The original typewriters had a number of problems which caused them to jam. If the commonly used letters were too close together the keys would get stuck and cause problems. Thus the QWERTY layout was suggested by inventor James Densmore.

The first computer mouse

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SRI International

The computer mouse started life back in 1964.

The first mouse had a wooden shell and certainly looks very different to the mice we use today.

The humble mouse got its name simply because the cable came out of the rear like a tail.

It was invented by Douglas Engelbart when working for Stanford Research Institute in California.

The first computer bug

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NAVAL SURFACE WARFARE CENTER, DAHLGREN, VIRGINIA

The first ever computer bug was reported in 1947 and was an actual real-life bug.

Technology pioneers at Harvard University had found an issue with the Harvard Mark II electromechanical computer where it was delivering consistent errors. Taking the machine apart they discovered there was a moth inside that was interfering with the electronics.

And so the term "computer bug" was born.

The first chip and pin

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663highland

We're all used to chip and pin payment methods with credit and debit cards. But did you know that the idea is far from new?

In fact, two German engineers, Helmut Gröttrup and Jürgen Dethloff came up with the idea of a smart card with an integrated chip in the late 1960s. Smart cards were more prolific in the 1970s and then used as payment cards later on. The first payment cards were used way back in 1986.

An Apple folding phone

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US Patents Office

Back in 1985, a patent was filed for an Apple flip phone that would look like the Apple logo when folded. A chunky beast compared to current foldable and flip phones but times were very different back then.