The QWERTY keyboard was designed to be as inefficient as possible because if people typed too fast the typewriter would become jammed. To alleviate jamming, manufacturers arranged the keys so that many words would be typed with only one hand, few words can be typed on the home row, and the left hand gets the majority of the work.

The DVORAK keyboard, using a different setup, improves efficiency by at least 70%. friends don't let friends type QWERTY.

Counting only domain name sites with content, Netcraft has tracked the growth of the internet since 1995 and says of the 100m, around 48 million are active sites that are updated regularly. When it began observing sites through the domain name system in 1995, there were 18,000 web sites in existence.

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Mr Tomlinson sent this first email back in 1971 -- he invented the software that allowed messages to be sent between computers. He even started the convention of using the "@" sign in email addresses (his email was "tomlinson@bbn-tenexa").

The number of visitors to Facebook has almost doubled in the past year!

Approximately eight in 10 e-mails received at its gateway were blocked as junk.

In addition, the average consumer has maintained the same e-mail address for four to six years.

An estimated 126 million employees use Microsoft Outlook on desktop.

In 1947, engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark 1 system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."

AOL has 27 million subscribers.

America Online (AOL) says that at any time between 1/3 and 2/3 of its server capacity is taken up by spam.

Allchin played a video showing how Windows slowed down a lot after running an Internet Explorer removal tool. Turns out that the video was false -- "It's not slow due to the Felten program," David Boies (lead attorney Department of Justice) continued. "It's slow because of Windows 98, isn't it?"

It was a plug from a marketing representative at Digital Equipment Corporation for the new Decsystem-20 computer.

Yahoo started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" -- as in Jerry Yang and David Filo who were Ph.D. candidates at Stanford in 1994 when they started the site.

This site registers every domain name imaginable and then sells them at a set rate ($995 for 3-letter domains, $695 for 6-letter domains).

Just think - you can get www.3t8.com or www.q4d.com for only $995!

And just as discovered with last April's fact, they still keep track of everything!

Anthony Greco, 18, became the first person arrested for spim (unsolicited instant messages) on February 21, 2005.

In November 2004, Blue Gene posted a new record 70.72 Teraflops, or trillions of floating point calculations per second.

Who needs that many calculations? IBM's primary partner, the National Nuclear Security Agency, who's getting a 360 Teraflop version soon.

So a videogame beat out every one of the Top 100 Grossing Films of all time (including Titanic, ET, Forrest Gump, etc. in first day sales).

For anyone that's ever messed with Windows fonts:

The sentence: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet.

IP (Internet Protocol), the way computers talk on the internet, defines an addressing scheme so that every device attached to a network can be uniquely identified and contacted.

IPv4 (IP Version 4), which is what we are currently using, allocates 32 bits for addresses. Hence there are up to 2³² = 4,294,967,296 addresses. 4 billion addresses for computers, etc.

However, we are running out of IP addresses. The next version of IP, version 6, allocates 128-bits for identifying each network device. That is, there will be 2¹²⁸ = 3.4 x 10³⁸ = 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses.

There are 7.5 x 10¹⁸ grains of sand in all the worlds beaches.
There are 10²⁸ atoms in your body.
IPv6 will give us 3.4 x 10³⁸ addresses for computers, etc.