Tech Trivia

October 23, 2001 : “A Thousand Songs In Your Pocket” Around this time 22 years ago on October 23 2001, Steve Jobs promised to give people “A Thousand Songs In Their Pocket”. His timing couldn’t have been better because at the time, Apple was primarily known for its computers and was struggling financially. Arriving eight […]

A severe browser security flaw, tacked as CVE-2023-4863 and then CVE-2023-5129, has led to emergency updates in Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla’s Firefox, and Apple’s Safari browsers.The vulnerability, in the libwebp image format, which was made by Google to provide better image compression than e.g., JPEG or PNG, leaves any program using it, such as

Falcon 1 Launched : 28th September 2008 Rocket Man! This week on September 28 2008 SpaceX managed to finally get the Falcon 1 rocket into space. Founder Elon Musk was obviously thrilled, although curiously he wasn’t hungry – even though he’d skipped breakfast earlier that day. It was because he’d had such a big launch.

FORTRAN Developed : 20th September Q. Why Do Python Programmers Wear Specs? A – Because they don’t see sharp! That’s a programming humour for you. And talking of programming, there’s currently an explosion of code being auto-generated by AI and before long, human-coders may go the way of the early switchboard operators. Hmm, possibly! Yet

25 Years Of Google This Month! Did you know that Google was incorporated 25 years ago, in September 1998?Or that it was originally made from Lego? (sort of) Google began as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were students at Stanford in 1996. Originally named “BackRub.” the name “Google” is

28 Years Ago : eBay (& Amazon by Comparison) Whilst eBay’s market cap is dwarfed by that of Amazon (i.e. circa 24 billion dollars compared to circa 1.4 trillion dollars), it’s easy to forget eBay helped shape online purchasing too. Before it was rebranded as eBay in 1997, the site was originally called AuctionWeb. Founded

“This Message Sent Around The World” At 7:00 p.m. on August 20, 1911, a commercial telegram was sent by the telegraph operator at the Times, working on the seventeenth level of the newspaper’s headquarters in Times Square. The message made a westward journey from New York, and shortly afterwards, the very same operator received his

The Wonderful Wizard of Woz! Steve Wozniak – business partner of Steve Jobs and co-founder of Apple – was born on August 11, 1950. Most people know that Apple went on to become one of the most valuable companies in the world and even though Steve the company way back in left in 1985, there

August 6, 1997 : Microsoft & Apple Cooperate By the mid-1990s, Apple was in dangerously bad shape. The company’s market share was dwindling, its product line was confused, and it was bleeding money. Their future looked bleak, and it needed a lifeline and they all knew it. Enter Microsoft, led by Bill Gates (the then-richest

How Bright Is Your Toothpaste? The Oppenheimer blockbuster launched with an IMDB rating of 9.0, so it appears lots of people liked it. Whilst the film made mention of many of the pioneers in physics who helped during the Manhattan project, it could perhaps have made more than at least a passing reference to Marie