6 weird but true facts about technology

6 weird but true facts about technology!!

You can't argue with the relentless march of technology but you can marvel at some of the absurdities from the past few decades.So without wasting time lets go directly into it

Changing fonts can save printer ink.

That's right, fonts are not created equal. People create different kinds of fonts for all kinds of reasons: to convey a message, for decoration, embellishment or as iconography.

The theory is, if you use a 'lighter' font (with a lighter stroke), you'll use slightly less ink per page. Based on the assumption that you're only printing with inkjet printers that use the old style cartridges (not ink tanks, and not tonerbased laser printers), you'll likely save about 10 per cent ink by switching to one of the lighter fonts.

Email existed before the world wide web

You probably don't even think before composing a one-line email message and sending it. But it wasn't always so easy. There's an interesting clip on YouTube: "How to send an Email – Database – 1984". This was from a tech TV show called Database and the presenters demonstrated what it took to actually send an email back in those days.

QWERTY was designed to slow you down

There are actually two theories to this. The first one starts to make sense when you look at manual typewriters. If someone typed too fast, the keys would jam. QWERTY placed common alphabets at a distance from each other and slowed typists down.

Another theory is that telegraph operators designed the QWERTY layout because it was easier (and faster) to decipher Morse code.

92 per cent of the world's currency is digital

This means that most of the money you earn, transact with, use to buy goods/services and so on exists only on computers and hard drives. Only an estimated 8 per cent of currency globally is physical money.

In 1956, 5 megabytes (5MB) of data weighed a ton

It was 1956 when IBM launched RAMAC, the first computer with something like a hard drive that we use today.

By hard drive, we mean something that used magnetic disks - a moving head was used to access and write that data. At the time, it was considered a massive leap in massstorage technology because it signified a shift: from punch cards and magnetic tape (which stored data sequentially) to randomly accessible hard drives.

Russia built a computer that ran on water: in 1936

Before the miniaturisation of transistors, computers had a much more visible system of counting: things like gears, pivots, beads and levers were often used and they needed some sort of power source to function.

Vladimir Lukyanov built something like this in 1936 but he used water to create a computer that solved partial differential equations. In images of the Lukyanov computer, you'll see a complex system of interconnected tubes filled with water.

Adjusting taps and plugs altered the flow of water (and changed variables) while the end result was seen by measuring the level of water in certain tubes. It was also called a Water Integrator and was originally designed to solve the problem of cracking in concrete. It's now found in Moscow's Polytechnic Museum.

Remember that this place called the internet is always growing and evolving. Being a great coder means a lifetime of learning and growing.

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