Tech Trivia

July 1940 : “We Saw Them Coming”…. In July 1940, a Bristol Blenheim like this one was the first aircraft to successfully use radar to detect enemy aircraft, proving that radar could help provide an effective electronic defence whilst being deployed in the air. It’s often been said that Britain would have lost the Battle […]

Wordfence warned that large-scale attacks are under way against a vulnerability (CVE-2023-28121) in the in the WooCommerce Payments WordPress plugin. The flaw in the plugin, which is installed on over 600,000 sites, gives attackers authentication bypass so they can impersonate arbitrary users, and perform some actions, including as an administrator, potentially leading to site takeover.

July 1968 … The Start of ‘More Noise’. On 18th July 1968, Intel was incorporated. These days, you’ll know them as the wildly successful manufacturer of microchips and indeed the processor that you’re using right now in whichever device you’re holding may well have “Intel Inside”. One of their big-breaks came when they correctly predicted

Computers Before Keyboards Computing was a lot more challenging before July 4th 1956 because that’s when MIT revolutionised their Whirlwind Computer … by introducing a keyboard ! Before that, interacting with computers was a laborious, time-consuming process. Programmers would offer instructions to these mammoth machines by the manual insertion of punched cards, an operation requiring

Consider all the atoms in 10 million galaxies … At midnight on June 18th, 1997, the DESCHALL Project bore fruit. The challenge had been to use ‘Brute Force’ to discover the meaning of a message which had been encrypted. Going through up to seven billion possibilities per second, the key was cracked after 96 days

Would E.T. Be Better Off With Zoom? In the iconic movie E.T (1982), a memorable scene shows the alien rigging up a child’s toy (Speak & Spell) with an umbrella, a record player and other paraphernalia to make a makeshift intergalactic communicator, while uttering the unforgettable line “E.T. phone home.” This moment demonstrates Spielberg’s genius,

For a Few Bits More On June 8th, 1978, a technological milestone was born, significantly shaping the future of computing because this was the day that marked the introduction of the Intel 8086, Intel’s inaugural 16-bit microprocessor. In the world of computing and microprocessors, the term “bit” signifies the basic units of data a processor

02 June 1966 : Getting Off The Ground Isn’t Always Easy! Chuck Yeager (famous for being the first to break the sound barrier) mentioned in his excellent autobiography that whilst he was training Neil Amstrong in high-altitude flying, he found him a little a bit cocky. In fairness, Neil did have a training crash at one

Let There Be Light On May 16th, 1960, a new kind of light existed that nobody had ever seen before. This kind of light has unique properties and doesn’t exist in nature and as far as we know, it had never existed anywhere in the universe since it began, 13.8 billion years ago. Theodore Maiman

Computers, Margaret Thatcher & Ice Cream On 6th May 1949, the Electronic Delay Storage Calculator (EDSAC) ran its first set of programs. This historic British computer calculated a table of square numbers and a list of prime numbers. It was developed by Maurice Wilkes with his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory. The computer