18 Computing Facts You Can Tell at Any Dinner Party

Eighteen computing facts, and the first few stop a table cold. The code that enabled US nuclear missiles was 00000000 for years, the first computer mouse was built from wood, and the first message ever sent over ARPANET died on its third letter. You can tell any of them at dinner. Know which ones are true before you open your mouth.

That warning matters, because there are two kinds of computing trivia: the ones that happened and the ones repeated so often that nobody checks them any more. This list carries both, and every time something is closer to myth than to fact I say so and hand you the source. Passing on a false fact is fun for about a minute. Then somebody at the table pulls out a phone.

Computing is a young discipline, and its anecdotes show it. Almost all of them fit into one conversation, and almost all of them have a specific person behind them, somebody who tried the odd thing before everyone else did. Here are 18, ready to drop wherever you need them.

The 18 facts, one by one

1. The code that enabled US nuclear missiles was 00000000 for years. The story comes from Bruce Blair, who pulled Minuteman launch duty in the 1970s. Strategic Air Command set the enable codes to all zeros so that no safeguard would slow a launch, and crews were told to check that nobody had changed the digits. Eight zeros, guarding the most destructive weapons ever built. The Air Force denied it to Congress. The system did not change until 1977, when a real code arrived.
2. The first mouse was built in 1964 and it was made of wood. Douglas Engelbart designed it at the Stanford Research Institute, a wooden shell with two perpendicular metal wheels. The ball inside came later. The name came from the cord trailing behind it like a tail. Picture the box under your palm, two wheels and a cable running out the back. The patent arrived in 1970, and it took almost two decades for the thing to feel normal in your hand.
3. Google’s data centres draw more than 24 TWh a year. That is the figure in its 2024 environmental report, over 24 terawatt-hours in 2023, somewhere between 7% and 10% of all data-centre electricity worldwide. All of that to index a tiny fraction of what sits on the web, and search still looks weightless from your chair. In 2024 the number grew by another 27%.
4. The word «bug» was popularised by a moth. On 9 September 1947 one was found stuck to relay 70 in panel F of the Harvard Mark II, a machine built for the US Navy. The engineers taped it into the logbook with the note «first actual case of bug being found», and that page, moth included, survives today at the Smithsonian. Mind you, «bug» had been engineering slang long before. The anecdote is what made it immortal, and the Computer History Museum entry has the details.
5. More than 450,000 new malware samples are logged every day. That is the average published by AV-TEST, the independent lab that classifies them, a different order of magnitude from the «thousands of viruses a month» you still hear from people who read that figure a decade ago. The lab has counted them for years and the number keeps climbing. Most of the samples never cause a serious incident. The race does not slow down.
6. The internet now holds more than 360 million registered domains. Verisign’s quarterly report put the figure at 364.3 million at the end of 2024, two million of them added in that quarter alone. Good short names are gone, and the long ones are the price you pay now.
7. You blink less than normal when you are online. In front of a screen your blink rate drops by about half, and on demanding tasks some studies put it near a third of normal. That is where a good chunk of the eye strain comes from. The light contributes, and so do the minutes you spend not blinking.
8. The person who rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin ended up as YouTube’s CEO. Her name is Susan Wojcicki. She rented them the garage of her Menlo Park house in 1998, joined Google as employee number 16 and ran YouTube from 2014 to 2023. She stood in the right place at the right time, and she also recognised what was being built in her own garage.
9. CAPTCHA stands for «Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart», an automatic test to tell machines from humans. The acronym was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn and Manuel Blum at Carnegie Mellon. That test now sits on ticket queues, comment forms and checkout pages across the web. Given how things are going, with today’s AI it has its years numbered.
10. The first electronic general-purpose computer was ENIAC, finished in 1945. It was shown to the public in 1946, occupied 167 square metres and weighed 27 tonnes, more than 17,000 vacuum tubes and enough draw to light a village. It filled a space the size of a small apartment. Six women programmed it, Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman, rewiring the machine by hand. No, it does not fit in your living room.
11. The «@» reached email for two reasons. One: it was a rarely used symbol that bothered nobody. Two: in English it reads «at», so the address reads as «user at provider.com». Ray Tomlinson chose it in 1971, when he adapted a local messaging program to send mail between different ARPANET machines. A symbol almost nobody used became the one you cannot escape. Years later he admitted other rare symbols would have done just as well.
12. In 1969, sending the word «LOGIN» over the network was an odyssey. On 29 October that year, Charley Kline at UCLA tried to connect to the computer at the Stanford Research Institute. He typed the «L», the «O», and on the «G» the system crashed. Two letters out of five, and the network went down. Only «LO» got through. The first ARPANET transmission was, literally, half a message.
13. We have not always been able to cut and paste. Larry Tesler popularised the gesture in 1981 from Xerox PARC, on the Xerox Star. Before that, moving a block of text meant memorising commands or retyping the whole thing. The command you press every day had to be invented first. Tesler spent half his life fighting to make the machine adapt to people.
14. The most used passwords in the world are still 123456, 123456789 and 12345. NordPass’s annual ranking barely moves. The list shifts by a few names each year and the top looks the same. Almost half of the most repeated ones are simple keyboard patterns, first names or runs of numbers. Years of awareness campaigns to end up in the same place.
15. Until 1995, registering a domain was free. That year the National Science Foundation let Network Solutions start charging: $100 for the first two years of a new domain and $50 a year to renew, effective 14 September. At the time there were around 118,000 domains in the whole world. Plenty of good short names were claimed while the price was zero. People say every past decade was cheaper. That decade, they were right.
16. The first computer virus was Creeper, in 1971. Strictly speaking it was a worm. Bob Thomas wrote it at BBN Technologies to test programs that moved across ARPANET on their own, and all it did was copy itself from machine to machine while displaying «I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!». It destroyed nothing. It was an experiment, and the grandfather of everything that came after.
17. NASA’s and the Pentagon’s computers were hacked by the same person. He was Markus Hess, a German hacker who through the 1980s sold what he stole to the KGB. He was caught in 1986 by Clifford Stoll, an astronomer turned sysadmin who started pulling on a 75-cent accounting discrepancy. One sysadmin and one small number that did not add up. When it all came out, computer security was never told the same way again.
18. Bill Gates’ house was not designed entirely on a Mac. The myth is amusing, Microsoft’s founder showing off Apple to draw his own home. The reality, as Architosh reconstructed in 1999, is that the project was almost entirely hand-drawn. The architecture firm did work on Macintosh, and only the garage was modelled in a Mac program. So the legend is half right. The firm used Apple. The house was not designed on it.

Frequently asked questions

Where does the word «bug» come from?

From a real moth. On 9 September 1947 it got trapped in relay 70 of panel F of the Harvard Mark II and the engineers taped it into the logbook with the note «first actual case of bug being found». The word was already engineering slang, but the anecdote made it immortal.

What was the first computer virus?

Creeper, in 1971. It moved around ARPANET, copied itself from one machine to another and did no harm. It was an experiment by Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies. Strictly speaking, it was a worm. The first virus that actually caused problems came later.

What is the most used password in the world?

«123456», followed by «123456789» and «12345». An uncomfortable reminder that the security of many systems is not broken by hackers. It is left open by the users themselves.

The bottom line

Pick two of these and use them this week. The moth works at any table, and the Creeper story is the one that gets people asking what a worm actually is. Both put a face on a machine that most of us never stop to think about. Tell them one at a time, and keep the source ready for the sceptic at the end of the table.

And if the list left you wanting more, here are the real milestones in order: the history of computing. If you would rather understand what runs when you switch the computer on, start with what RAM is and what a computer virus is. And to see who sits on the other side, what a hacker is.