5 Interesting IT facts we bet you didn’t know

With this in mind, we’ve put together 5 Interesting IT facts we bet you didn’t know:

1. Email was a thing pre-www

Back in 1984, you could still send emails without the presence of the World Wide Web. All you had to do was use a computer and a rotary telephone to link up with a service called, “Micronet”. No “www” means that there were no URLs at this time. Users had to make do with numbered web pages. Emails were found on web page number 7776.

2. Domains were free until 1995

Seeing that few people knew what the Internet was back in the 1980s day, there was a massive opportunity to own as many domains as they liked. In 1995, Network Solutions won the rights to start charging people for domains they wished to own. And they didn’t come cheap! Standard prices started at $100 for two years of domain registration. Around 30% of these registration fees went to the National Science Foundation.

3. The world’s currency is 92% digital

The third of our IT facts should surprise you – the majority of the money that we all earn and transact with exists mainly on computers or hard drives, not in the banks. In fact, the amount of physical global currency floating around the world is estimated to be only around 8%. The online portion (92%) includes all bank transfers like debit or credit card transactions and EFTs.

4. The youngest person to hack NASA was 15

In 1999, armed with a PC, Jonathan James was able to hack a division of the United States Department of Defence. This included a source code for the International Space Station that controlled humidity and temperature of the space station. As a result, NASA shut down all computers for three weeks, a process that cost them $41 000. He was sentenced when he was 16.

5. Wikipedia and its anti-vandal bots

With Wikipedia offering information to anyone with an Internet connection, anybody with connectivity can vandalise the facts provided by the site. That’s because Wikipedia allows any user to sign up, sign in and edit any of the pages. As a result, they were forced to implement strict moderation measures in the form of anti-vandal bots that trawl Wikipedia for false additions. These bots track all changes and immediately restore the previous page if vandalism occurs. There are currently around 2000 bots that trawl 40 000 000 pages on Wikipedia.

We hope these IT facts prove that IT is always evolving, and that what was once commonplace can quickly become obsolete or outdated.  The same could be said for your business.