Wayne Heather

The first actual computer "bug" was a real moth — found trapped in a relay of the Harvard Mark II. Grace Hopper's team taped it into the log book. The term stuck forever.

The first computer mouse was rectangular, made of wood, and had two wheels instead of a ball. Douglas Engelbart built it. It took another 21 years to ship with a commercial computer.

ARPANET — the ancestor of today's internet — was designed by the US Department of Defense to survive a nuclear attack. The first message sent was "LO." The system crashed before it could finish "LOGIN."

Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email to himself in 1971. He chose the @ symbol because it was the least used key on the keyboard and unlikely to appear in anyone's name.

Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal for the World Wide Web at CERN. His supervisor wrote three words on it: "Vague, but exciting." The Web went public two years later, on August 6, 1991.

The world's first website — info.cern.ch — is still online today. It started as just one page. By 2014 the number of registered websites had crossed 1 billion. As of 2022, nearly 2 billion exist.

Alan Turing proposed the "Imitation Game" — now known as the Turing Test — as a way to measure machine intelligence. A machine passes if a human can't tell whether they're talking to a computer or a person.

IBM's Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a reigning world chess champion under standard match conditions, defeating Garry Kasparov in a six-game series. Kasparov demanded a rematch. IBM declined and retired the machine.

AlphaGo defeated world Go champion Lee Sedol. The game of Go has more possible moves than there are atoms in the observable universe — a googol times more complex than chess. Nobody expected a machine to win for decades.

ChatGPT hit one million users in five days after launch — faster than Instagram, Spotify, or any consumer app in history. It took Netflix 3.5 years to reach the same milestone.