12 Fascinating Tech Facts You Didn't Know: With Sources

Proteck'd EMF ApparelHealth & EMF Specialists

Published May 18, 2026·12 min read

The first website ever built is still live on the internet. The first computer mouse was carved from wood. And the company that processes 8.5 billion searches daily was named after a typo. Technology's greatest stories aren't just about the machines. They're about the beautifully messy human moments behind them.

What Was the First Website Ever Created, and Is It Still Online?

The very first website ever published is still live. You can visit it right now. Tim Berners-Lee created it in 1991 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. The URL is info.cern.ch, and honestly, it's about as exciting as a blank Word document. But it literally started the World Wide Web.

The page was basically a user guide explaining what the World Wide Web project was. No images. No CSS styling. Just plain hyperlinked text. Berners-Lee also wrote the first web browser, which he casually called "WorldWideWeb" (one word). The whole thing ran on a NeXT computer that Steve Jobs helped design after he left Apple.

Sit with that for a second. Every meme, every streaming service, every online store traces back to one text page on a single computer in Switzerland. If you're curious about the numbers behind how the modern internet actually functions, check out The Most Surprising Facts About How the Internet Works: The Numbers. The scale today versus 1991 is almost impossible to wrap your head around.

How Did Google Get Its Name by Accident?

Google's name is a spelling mistake. That's not a rumor. It's well documented. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University PhD students who founded the company in 1998, originally wanted to call their search engine "Googol." That's the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, meant to represent the massive amount of information they planned to organize.

But when they went to register the domain name, someone (accounts differ on exactly who) typed "google.com" instead of "googol.com." They liked the way it looked. So they kept it. A typo became the most recognizable brand name on the planet.

Here's the thing that gets me. Google now processes over 8.5 billion searches per day, according to Internet Live Stats. That's roughly one search per person on Earth, every single day. The company that started as a misspelling in a Stanford dorm room is now worth over $1.7 trillion. Sometimes the most interesting tech facts just remind us how random success can be.

Why Did the First Computer Mouse Look So Strange?

Douglas Engelbart invented the first computer mouse in 1964 at the Stanford Research Institute. It was made of wood. A hand-carved wooden shell with two perpendicular metal wheels on the bottom that tracked movement. One button on top, a cord trailing out the back. That cord is apparently why someone on Engelbart's team started calling it a "mouse."

Engelbart demonstrated the mouse publicly in 1968 during what's now called "The Mother of All Demos" in San Francisco. That single presentation also introduced hypertext, video conferencing, and collaborative real-time editing. In 1968. Most of those innovations wouldn't go mainstream for another 30 years.

The wild part? Engelbart never made significant money from the mouse. His patent expired in 1987, just before personal computers exploded into the consumer market. Xerox and Apple took the concept and ran with it. Sometimes the people who invent world-changing technology aren't the ones who profit from it.

How Much Did the First Computer Weigh?

Over 27 tons. ENIAC, widely considered the first general-purpose electronic computer, was completed in 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania by engineers J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. The machine filled an entire room, used roughly 18,000 vacuum tubes, and consumed about 150 kilowatts of electricity.

For context, your smartphone has millions of times more computing power than ENIAC. The machine that filled a 1,500-square-foot room and cost nearly $500,000 in 1945 dollars (about $8.5 million today) is outperformed by a device that fits in your pocket and costs a few hundred bucks. If the history of how we harnessed power to run machines like this fascinates you, take a look at 12 Surprising Facts About the History of Electricity: You Won't Believe.

ENIAC was originally built to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army during World War II. But by the time it was finished, the war was over. Its first real task? Calculations for the hydrogen bomb. The history of computing is deeply entangled with military history. That doesn't make for a feel-good story, but it's the truth.

Is Wikipedia Really Run by Bots?

Partially, yes. According to Wikipedia's own bot policy documentation, there are well over 1,500 approved bot accounts operating on the English-language Wikipedia alone. These bots do everything from fixing broken links to reverting vandalism to formatting citations. Some of them make millions of edits per year.

One bot called ClueBot NG is specifically designed to detect and revert obvious vandalism within seconds. A 2014 study published in the journal PLOS ONE found that bot-to-bot edit wars have sometimes raged for years, with automated programs undoing each other's changes thousands of times without any human even noticing ^[1].

But here's what's interesting. Human editors still outnumber bots dramatically. Wikipedia has over 40 million registered accounts, and roughly 120,000 active editors contribute in any given month. The bots handle the tedious maintenance work so humans can focus on actually writing and improving articles. It's kind of a beautiful partnership when you think about it.

How Much Screen Time Does the Average Person Actually Have?

According to DataReportal's Digital 2024 Global Overview Report, the average internet user worldwide spends approximately 6 hours and 40 minutes online each day. That's over 100 days per year staring at a screen. If you live to 80, that works out to roughly 22 years of your life spent online at current rates.

This is where the conversation about how to reduce technology usage gets personal. Digital minimalism, a philosophy popularized by Georgetown professor Cal Newport in his 2019 book, argues that we should be intentional about which technologies we let into our lives rather than accepting all of them by default. It's not about becoming a Luddite. It's about choosing deliberately.

Some practical screen time reduction strategies actually work. Using a phone-free alarm clock (so your phone isn't the first thing you grab), setting app timers, and batching your email checks to two or three times daily can reclaim hours each week. These aren't radical changes. They're small adjustments that compound over time.

And honestly, the less time you spend mindlessly scrolling, the more you start noticing other things. Like the fact that you're surrounded by invisible electromagnetic fields 24/7. If you want to understand what that actually means for your body, Learn About EMF Protection and what options exist.

Do IT Professionals Stress About Technology Too?

You'd think the people who build and manage our tech infrastructure would be unfazed by it. Not even close. A 2023 survey by Yerbo, a mental health platform for tech workers, found that 83% of software engineers and IT professionals reported burnout symptoms. The constant notifications, on-call rotations, and rapid pace of change hit them just as hard as anyone else.

GFI Software conducted a separate survey that found 67% of IT professionals believe their job negatively impacts their personal life, and a significant number said they regularly lose sleep over technology-related concerns. These are the people keeping our systems running. If they're stressed about tech, maybe the rest of us shouldn't feel bad about wanting to step back a little.

This is one of those facts that reframes the whole conversation. We often assume that understanding technology deeply means you're comfortable with it. But familiarity doesn't equal peace of mind. Sometimes knowing exactly how exposed you are, whether to data breaches, system failures, or even electromagnetic radiation, actually makes the anxiety worse.

What Is EMF Radiation and Should You Care About It?

Every electronic device you own emits electromagnetic fields. Your phone, your laptop, your Wi-Fi router, your microwave. EMF is simply the radiation produced by electrically charged particles. It exists on a spectrum from extremely low frequency (like power lines) to extremely high frequency (like X-rays).

The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" (Group 2B) back in 2011 ^[2]. That classification was based partly on an increased risk of glioma, a type of brain cancer, associated with heavy wireless phone use. Not definitive proof of harm. But not a clean bill of health either.

Research from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) through the National Toxicology Program found "clear evidence" that high exposure to radiofrequency radiation caused heart tumors in male rats in a 2018 study [3]. Translating animal studies to humans is always tricky, but the findings were significant enough to spark ongoing debate in the scientific community.

If this kind of tech fact makes you want to take action, that's a reasonable response. Companies like Proteck'd EMF Protection make clothing with silver-infused fabric designed to shield you from everyday EMF exposure. Their Faraday Collection uses woven silver thread to create a barrier between your body and the electromagnetic radiation from your devices. Science meets practical, wearable solutions.

How Much Energy Does the Internet Actually Consume?

The numbers are staggering. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global data centers consumed an estimated 460 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2022. That's roughly 2% of global electricity demand, comparable to the total electricity consumption of France.

A single Google search uses about 0.3 watt-hours of electricity. Sounds tiny until you remember those 8.5 billion daily searches. Training a large AI model like GPT-4 reportedly required energy equivalent to the annual consumption of over 1,000 U.S. households. As AI adoption accelerates, these numbers are climbing fast.

This is one of those tech trivia points that ties directly into environmental conversations. Every time you stream a video, send an email, or ask ChatGPT a question, you're drawing on physical infrastructure that requires massive amounts of electricity and cooling. If the relationship between technology, energy, and our planet interests you, you might enjoy 12 Mind-Blowing Facts About Planet Earth: That Sound Too Strange to Be True.

What Are the Best Ways to Reduce Your Tech Dependence?

Digital minimalism isn't about ditching your phone in a river. It's a structured approach to figuring out which technologies genuinely serve you and which ones are just noise. Cal Newport, who popularized the modern use of the term, recommends a 30-day "digital declutter" where you strip away all optional technologies, then slowly reintroduce only the ones that align with your values.

Some people find that the physical layer of tech interaction matters too. Swapping your phone alarm for a standalone clock. Using a paper notebook for brainstorming instead of an app. Consolidating your charging cables into one USB-C hub so your desk isn't a tangle of wires constantly reminding you of all your gadgets. These small friction reductions add up.

One overlooked strategy for reducing technology's invisible impact on your body is wearing EMF-shielding clothing during high-exposure activities, like working at a desk surrounded by devices all day. It's not paranoia. It's practical risk reduction, the same logic behind wearing sunscreen even on cloudy days. If you're curious about how this technology works, Learn About EMF Protection and how silver-infused fabrics provide measurable shielding.

The broader point is this: reducing tech's hold on your life doesn't require one dramatic gesture. It's a series of small, intentional choices that compound. Unsubscribe from newsletters you don't read. Turn off notifications for apps that aren't urgent. Choose one evening a week where screens are off. You'll be amazed at how much mental space opens up.

Did You Know Tornadoes Can Disrupt Technology Infrastructure?

This fact doesn't get enough attention. Severe weather events, particularly tornadoes, can obliterate cell towers, data centers, and power grids in minutes. A single EF4 or EF5 tornado can cause billions of dollars in infrastructure damage. The 2011 Joplin, Missouri tornado, rated EF5, caused over $2.8 billion in damage and knocked out communications across the region for days.

When cell towers go down, your phone becomes useless for communication. No calls, no texts, no data. During the 2024 tornado season, multiple communities in Oklahoma and Texas reported complete communication blackouts lasting 24 to 48 hours. That's a long time to be cut off from emergency services.

If the intersection of natural forces and our tech-dependent world fascinates you, I'd recommend reading Interesting Facts About Tornadoes and Tornado Alley. It's a good reminder that for all our technological progress, nature still has the upper hand when it wants it.

What's the Most Powerful Supercomputer in the World Right Now?

As of 2024, the most powerful supercomputer on the planet is Frontier, housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Frontier achieved a performance of 1.206 exaflops on the HPL benchmark, making it the world's first true exascale computer. One exaflop means the machine can perform over one quintillion calculations per second.

Try this for perspective. If every person on Earth did one calculation per second, it would take the entire global population over four years to match what Frontier does in a single second. The system uses over 9,400 AMD-powered nodes and consumes about 22.7 megawatts of electricity. That's enough to power roughly 20,000 homes.

Frontier is primarily used for scientific research, including climate modeling, genomics, and nuclear physics simulations. The race for supercomputing dominance is fierce, with China, Japan, and the European Union all investing billions. When we talk about reducing technology facts down to the most interesting highlights, the sheer scale of modern computing always belongs on the list. We've come an unbelievably long way from ENIAC's 27 tons and 5,000 additions per second.

About the Author

Proteck'd EMF Apparel

Health & EMF Specialists

The Proteck'd team covers EMF protection, silver-fiber apparel, and practical ways to reduce everyday radiation exposure. Every piece Proteck'd ships is designed, tested, and worn by the people who build it.