10 Technology Fun Facts to Break Your Brain

Technology has numerous trivia bits and bobs that will make you sit there, mouth agape. Every day, technology advances at a rate humans can hardly comprehend, so it’s not impossible to imagine that tech’s past is dressed in a few surprising secrets. What exciting technology fun facts can you bring up at your next party?

1. The Founder of Bitcoin Is Shrouded in Mystery

If you Google the inventor of bitcoin, the name Satoshi Nakamoto will appear. It is a legitimate enough name, but nobody knows for sure. People have never verified this to be the founder’s name, and some theorize it could be a pseudonym for a group instead of a person. It is so mysterious that some conspiracy theorists even believe the real face behind the name is Nick Szabo or some other tech mogul — perhaps even Steve Jobs.

2. A 50-Petabyte Hard Drive Could Hold History

It’s wild that humans have entered a point where terabyte hard drives are the standard. Having more storage on your gaming PC will be a reality one day, but how far will it go? One petabyte equals 1024 terabytes, which seems like a wild jump. But imagine if you have 50 of those petabytes — in 2006, people discovered that amount of space could hold all written works in human history in every language.

3. Nintendo Wasn’t Always a Video Game Staple

The prolific video game producer — home to The Legend of Zelda, Mario, and Kirby franchises — didn’t start making these classics when they opened in 1889. They still made games, but they were much more straightforward. They came in the form of Hanafuda playing cards. Each deck contains 48 cards in 12 suits to play popular games such as Hachi-Hachi and Sakura. Usually, the cards have stylized flowers adorning them.

Nintendo now sells Hanafuda cards branded with their most recognizable intellectual properties as an homage to their origins. They didn’t start making tech until the 1970s.

4. Firefox Isn’t a Fox

If you google “What is Firefox’s logo,” you will see forums and articles explaining vastly different perspectives. The claim is this — the Firefox logo does not have a fox in it, it is, in fact, a red panda. Some say a fox is on the iconic logo, but their mascot for events and the like features a red panda instead.

Digging deep into Mozilla’s archives solves the answer. Firefox is an alternative name for the adorable red panda. Though this does not solidify if the logo itself is a fox or a red panda, it does determine the name’s origin is a red panda.

5. Humans Need to Pull Back on E-Waste

OK, this is not necessarily a fun fact, but it is mind-blowing. Electronic waste, or e-waste, is a growing concern for the planet. Everything is techy these days, from water bottles to books. While this provides a lot of convenience for our daily lives, that means a lot of dangerous, toxic tech is heading to landfills without being recycled. Humans throw so much tech waste worldwide it equals 800 laptops per second. E-waste has already exceeded all other types of waste in density. 

Consider how often you replace technology that works simply because a new version is available. If you want to upgrade or increase your tech repertoire, always look for responsible trade-in or recycling problems to bring that number down to zero.

6. Imagine Meeting Your Future Love in YouTube Comments

Here’s a bonus fact for you — about 500 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded every minute as if you weren’t already feeling content overload.

YouTube has saucier origins. Its creators thought it would excel as a dating app where people could post videos about their likes and dislikes and start conversations in an organic way that was new to the internet. With a cheesy original slogan like “Tune In, Hook Up,” it’s obvious why it didn’t succeed going in that direction.

7. Mobile Games Earn Money in Different Ways

Depending on what kind of game you’re playing, you’re more likely to make the developers money through varying avenues. Casual phone games make most of their money through advertisements, amounting to around 94.09%, whereas roleplaying games earn most of their money through microtransactions, totaling 80.94% of revenue. 

Between the two, roleplaying games such as Genshin Impact and AR-powered Pokémon Go earn the mobile gaming industry most of its money.

8. There Is an AI That Has a Citizenship

The famous Sophia the robot is known for her human likeness, dipping into the uncanny valley. She is so lifelike that Saudi Arabia granted her citizenship, which is good and bad. The good news is that humans have created such astounding technology capable of so much. The bad news is, now humans will begin a debate that was inevitable in human history — should artificial intelligence obtain similar rights as humans, or should they be in a class of their own?

9. The Google Campus Employed Goats

Two hundred goats won’t be responsible for curating SEO or crafting the next failed iteration of Google Glasses. Still, they provide an essential service to the tech giant — mowing the grass.

The Googleplex in California is on a large piece of land, and goats munch on the grass and keep the land fertilized while humans inside do the significant brain work. They also serve a more critical safety purpose, as California has been rife with droughts and, therefore, wildfires. 

The goats double as a safety precaution. Numerous acres of dried grass invite fire to sweep the campus, but goats are incredibly efficient at eating it away.

10. Steve Jobs Learned Magic Tricks

Everyone remembers when Steve Jobs presented the first iPhone to the world, but he had to stock up a few tricks to make the presentation worth watching. The iPhone was not ready when the press events started running their course, and to show off the phone’s “capabilities,” Jobs used sleight of hand to switch phones mid-presentation. If he used the model phone for too long, bugs and RAM capacity would too quickly minimize the impact of the reveal.

What Technology Fun Facts Do You Know?

There are certainly more technology fun facts than our team managed to cover here. Discovering the truth is sometimes difficult, especially with how fast information multiplies online. Always research to find what’s real so you can become the one true tech genius you were born to be.