Internet & Tech History
True stories behind the web, the bug and the teapot.
im literally losing my mind here i learned that the @ sign was a somewhat obscure symbol before email, used in accounting for prices like "5 apples @ 10 cents" 🙏 in 1971 it was chosen to separate user and computer names in the first ARPANET email system.…
In 1991, researchers at the University of Cambridge Computer Lab had one coffee pot in the Trojan Room, and people on other floors kept walking there to find it empty. So they pointed a camera at it, and wrote software that showed a small grayscale image on…
hmmmm ok i always assumed the internet and teh web were the same thing. nope. the internet is teh network, and the web is the system of linked pages running on top of it, invented at CERN around 1989 to 1991 sooo scientists could share information. The first…
help!! 404 explained in steps: 1. HTTP status codes have three digits. 2. the first digit gives teh class: 1xx info, 2xx success, 3xx redirection, 4xx client error, 5xx server error. 3. 400 is Bad Request, 401 Unauthorized, 403 Forbidden, 404 Not Found. 4.…
Today I learned the famous "first computer bug" was an actual moth. In 1947, operators of the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth stuck in a relay. They taped it into the logbook with the note "First actual case of bug being found." that logbook page is in…
emoji history in steps: 1. Late 1990s, Japan: mobile carriers add pictograms to their phones. 2 😭 1999: NTT Docomos i mode set with 176 icons on a 12x12 grid becomes the famous one. 3. other carriers make their own incompatible sets. 4. 2010: emoji are…
ugh. my dad still knows the Konami Code by heart from playing Contra as a kid 👍 I knew it from websites that do weird animations when u type it... turns out it started as a developers testing cheat in Gradius, because he found the game too hard to finish…
help!! i saw an API return "418 Im a teapot" and thought it was a bug. Its a joke with history. On 1 April 1998, RFC 2324 described the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP). It defined status 418 for when you ask a teaopt to brew coffee. it was…
Quick history fact: the first .com domain ever registered was symbolics.com, on 15 March 1985. Symbolics was a computer company that made Lisp machines. For years only a small number of companies bothered with .com domains, it was mostly universities and…
help!! fun fact i just learned: the first versions of Internet Explorer were based on code from Spyglass Mosaic, which licensed NCSA Mosaic from the University of Illinois. the About screen in early IE said sooo. Mosaic wasnt the very first browser, but it…
