Technology: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 4

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In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee ran the first website from a NeXT computer in his office at CERN, near Geneva. A handwritten sticker on it read: ‘This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!’ At first it was the only web server, so switching it off would have taken the web offline.

NeXT was the computer company Steve Jobs founded in 1985 after leaving Apple. On this machine Berners-Lee wrote the building blocks the web still uses: HTML, the language web pages are written in; HTTP, the rules a browser and a server use to talk to each other; and the first browser, called WorldWideWeb, which could also edit pages. The first website, info.cern.ch, went online on 20 December 1990 and explained what the web was and how to set up a server. The web opened to the wider internet in August 1991, and on 30 April 1993 CERN made the software free for anyone to use. By then the web had spread far beyond CERN: the first web server outside Europe had gone online at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California in December 1991.

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A solar cell turns sunlight straight into electric current. Most are thin slices of silicon, a semiconductor: a material that conducts electricity well only when its electrons gain extra energy. Sunlight supplies it, and an electric field between two layers of the cell drives the freed electrons out through a wire as current.

The two layers are silicon with tiny amounts of other elements added: one has spare electrons, the other is short of them. Where they meet, a boundary called a p–n junction forms, and with it an electric field. This effect, called the photovoltaic effect, was first seen in 1839 by the French physicist Edmond Becquerel, who noticed a small current when light fell on metal plates in a liquid. It is related to, but not the same as, the photoelectric effect, in which light knocks electrons out of a metal surface. The first practical silicon solar cell was shown at Bell Labs in the United States in April 1954 and turned about 6 per cent of sunlight into electricity. Ordinary panels today convert around a fifth. One cell gives only about half a volt, so a panel links dozens of cells together.

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A digital camera's sensor is a silicon chip covered with millions of tiny light-sensitive squares called pixels. Light falling on each pixel frees a little electric charge: the brighter the light, the more charge. The camera measures every pixel's charge and turns the pattern into an image.

The key invention was the charge-coupled device, or CCD, created in 1969 by Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs. It passed each pixel's charge across the chip, step by step, to be measured at the edge. CCDs transformed astronomy, and Boyle and Smith shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics with Charles Kao. Most cameras and phones now use CMOS sensors, built with the same technology as computer chips and developed in the early 1990s, including at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; they read each pixel where it sits and use less power. Pixels cannot tell colours apart, so tiny red, green and blue filters sit on top in a pattern devised by Bryce Bayer at Kodak in 1976, with twice as many green ones to match the human eye. The idea behind it goes back to Einstein's 1905 explanation of how light frees electric charge.

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In 1843 the English mathematician Ada Lovelace published notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer that was designed but never built. Her Note G set out, step by step, how the machine could calculate Bernoulli numbers, and is often called the first published computer program.

Lovelace (1815–1852) was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, and her mother had her taught mathematics from an early age. In 1842 the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea published an article in French about Babbage's machine. Lovelace translated it into English and added seven notes, labelled A to G, about three times longer than the article itself. They appeared in September 1843 in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, signed only with her initials, A.A.L. Bernoulli numbers are a sequence of numbers important in mathematics, and Note G turned their calculation into a table of instructions for the machine. Babbage had drafted simpler sample programs a few years earlier but never published them, which is why calling her 'the first programmer' is debated. Her boldest idea is not in doubt: she saw that such a machine could work with symbols of any kind, not just numbers, and might even compose music.

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In September 1947, operators of the Harvard Mark II computer traced a fault to a moth trapped in one of its relays. They taped the insect into the logbook with the note 'First actual case of bug being found', a joke, as engineers already called faults 'bugs'.

A relay is a switch that is opened and closed by electricity; the Mark II calculated with electromechanical relays that clicked open and shut. 'Bug' for a small fault is much older than computers: in an 1878 letter, Thomas Edison described the little faults that show up in every invention as 'Bugs'. The moth story was popularised by Grace Hopper (1906–1992), a US Navy mathematician who worked on the Harvard machines and later helped create COBOL, one of the first programming languages written in English-like words. She did not find the moth herself; the operators on duty did, and they were probably making a pun on the two meanings of the word. The logbook page, with the moth still taped to it, is kept at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington. Finding and fixing faults in software is still called debugging.

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Email is older than the World Wide Web. People sharing one computer could leave each other messages by 1965, and Ray Tomlinson sent the first email between two networked computers in 1971. The web, a system of linked pages, was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 and opened to the whole internet in 1991.

The internet and the web are often confused. The internet is the worldwide network that connects computers; the web is one service that runs on it, as email is another. By 1965 the Compatible Time-Sharing System at MIT, which let many users work on one central computer, had a MAIL command. In 1971 Tomlinson, at the American firm BBN, sent messages over ARPANET, the US research network that grew into the internet, and chose the @ sign for addresses. Email caught on fast: a 1973 study found that three-quarters of ARPANET traffic was email, and on 26 March 1976 Queen Elizabeth II sent one from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern, England. Berners-Lee wrote his proposal for the web at CERN, the physics laboratory near Geneva, and in April 1993 CERN made the web's software free for anyone to use, which helped it spread.

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The first text message was sent on 3 December 1992 by Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old British engineer. He typed 'Merry Christmas' on a computer and sent it to the phone of Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone director who was at his office Christmas party.

Papworth worked for Sema Group, which was building a message centre for Vodafone's network in Britain, and the message was a test. Jarvis received it on an Orbitel 901, a handset that could display a text but not write one, so he could not reply. The idea of SMS, short for Short Message Service, was worked out in 1984 by Friedhelm Hillebrand of Deutsche Telekom and Bernard Ghillebaert of France Télécom for GSM, the new European mobile phone standard. Hillebrand counted the characters in typical postcards and telex messages and decided that 160 characters were enough for most short messages, and that became the limit. The first service letting customers text each other started in Finland in 1993; at first, Nokia was the only maker whose phones could all send texts. The 160-character limit also gave rise to texting shorthand such as 'gr8' and 'c u'.

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In 1991 researchers at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory pointed a camera at the coffee machine in the Trojan Room, so colleagues could check from their desks whether the pot was full. In 1993 the picture went onto the World Wide Web, making it one of the first webcams.

Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky set it up so that nobody would make the trip to the coffee room only to find the pot empty. The camera took grey-scale pictures just 128 by 128 pixels, and at first they could be seen only on computers inside the laboratory's own network. In 1993 web browsers gained the ability to show pictures, and that November Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson put the camera on the World Wide Web. People around the world began watching a coffee pot in Cambridge, and it became one of the best-known sights of the early web. The camera was switched off on 22 August 2001, after the laboratory moved to a new building. The last coffee machine, a Krups, sold on eBay for £3,350; since 2016 it has been on permanent loan to the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, a computer museum in Paderborn, Germany.

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On 3 April 1973 Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, made the first public call from a handheld mobile phone while standing on Sixth Avenue in New York. He rang Joel Engel at the rival Bell Labs, which was working on phones for cars.

Until then a phone number belonged to a place: a house, an office, a phone box or, at best, a car. Car phones existed, but they needed about 14 kg of equipment in the boot. Cooper's prototype, the DynaTAC, weighed about 1.1 kg, was 25 cm long and was nicknamed 'the brick'. After ten hours of charging it gave about 30 minutes of talk; Cooper joked that this hardly mattered, because nobody could hold the phone up for that long. The call came just before a press conference at the New York Hilton, where Motorola presented its plans. It took ten more years to reach customers: the DynaTAC 8000X was approved in the United States in 1983 and went on sale the next year for $3,995. Cooper, born in Chicago in 1928, later founded several wireless communication companies.

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'The cloud' is really a network of data centres: large buildings full of computers that store files and run apps for people far away. They need electricity and cooling around the clock, and in 2024 they used about 1.5% of all the electricity in the world.

When a phone backs up photos or streams a film, much of the work is done by servers, powerful computers stacked in racks, often in a data centre hundreds of kilometres away. Machines that never stop give off a lot of heat, so cooling takes a large share of the energy: efficient large sites keep it to a small fraction, while older company data centres can spend over 30% of their electricity on it. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centres used about 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 (a terawatt-hour is a billion kilowatt-hours), and that this could more than double by 2030, with artificial intelligence a major reason. A typical AI-focused data centre uses as much electricity as 100,000 households. The biggest ones are run mainly by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, and fibre-optic cables on land and under the sea link them across continents.

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In 1965 Gordon Moore, then research director at Fairchild Semiconductor, noticed that the number of components on a computer chip was doubling every year, and predicted that this would continue. In 1975 he revised the pace to every two years. The forecast became known as Moore's law.

A chip, or integrated circuit, is a small slice of silicon carrying many tiny electronic parts, above all transistors, the switches that do a computer's work. Moore made his prediction in an article called 'Cramming more components onto integrated circuits', written for the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics magazine. In 1968 he co-founded Intel. The Caltech professor Carver Mead popularised the name 'Moore's law' soon after 1975, although it was never a law of nature, only an observation that the industry then treated as a target. The results were enormous: Intel's first microprocessor, in 1971, had about 2,300 transistors, while the largest chips today hold more than 100 billion. Progress has slowed since around 2010, because parts are now so small that shrinking them further is difficult and expensive. Moore died in 2023.

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The early reCAPTCHA, launched in 2007, showed two hard-to-read words. One was already known and checked that you were human; the other came from a scanned old book or newspaper that a computer had failed to read, so millions of people typing it helped digitise printed text.

A CAPTCHA is a small test that computers find hard and people find easy, used to keep automated programs, or bots, out of sign-up forms and comment boxes. The name stands for 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'; it was coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University. Von Ahn realised that people were spending millions of hours in total on these puzzles, and reCAPTCHA put that effort to use. Scanned pages were read by optical character recognition (OCR), software that turns pictures of letters into text; words it was unsure of became puzzles, and several people's answers were compared. The system helped digitise The New York Times archive and was then used for Google Books. Google bought reCAPTCHA in 2009, and from 2014 it moved to image puzzles and a simple 'I'm not a robot' box.

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On 25 August 1991 Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old student in Helsinki, announced online that he was writing a free operating system, 'just a hobby'. He shared the code for anyone to study and improve, and volunteers and companies turned it into Linux, which now runs much of the internet and every Android phone.

Torvalds posted his announcement to comp.os.minix, an online discussion group about MINIX, a small teaching operating system he was using on his PC, and added that his project would not be 'big and professional'. Strictly, Linux is a kernel: the core of an operating system, which shares out the processor, memory and devices so that other programs can run. He first called it Freax, but Ari Lemmke, who ran the university server where the files were shared, named the folder Linux, and the name stuck. In 1992 Torvalds released the code under the GNU General Public License, which lets anyone use, change and share it as long as their versions stay open too; he later called this the best thing he ever did. Today thousands of developers around the world work on the kernel, and Linux also runs every one of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers.

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Konrad Zuse's Z3, completed in Berlin in 1941, is regarded as the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. It calculated with about 2,600 relays, switches worked by electricity, and read its programs from holes punched in strips of film.

Zuse (1910–1995) was a civil engineer whose first job, at an aircraft factory, meant doing many routine calculations by hand, which led him to design machines to do them. From 1936 he built computers in his parents' flat in Berlin. His first, the Z1, was purely mechanical and unreliable; the Z3 used relays instead. It used binary numbers, made only of 0s and 1s, which suit switches that are either on or off, and floating-point arithmetic, a way of handling very large and very small numbers. It helped with calculations on wing flutter, a dangerous vibration in aircraft wings. The original was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid on Berlin on 21 December 1943, but Zuse's company built a working replica in 1961, now in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. In 1998 the computer scientist Raúl Rojas showed that the Z3 could, in principle, compute anything a modern computer can.

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The name Wi-Fi was coined in 1999 by the branding firm Interbrand for a wireless networking standard whose technical name was IEEE 802.11b. It was chosen because it sounded like hi-fi; the slogan 'wireless fidelity' came only afterwards, and was used for a short time.

The companies behind the new standard, then called the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, wanted a name 'a little catchier than IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'. Interbrand proposed ten names, and Wi-Fi was chosen, together with its yin-yang style logo. Hi-fi, short for high fidelity, was a familiar term for good-quality sound equipment, so the echo suggested quality. Soon afterwards the group briefly used the slogan 'The Standard for Wireless Fidelity', which is why many people believe Wi-Fi is an abbreviation. Phil Belanger, a founding member of the group, has said the name never stood for anything. The group renamed itself the Wi-Fi Alliance in 2002 and still certifies that devices work together. The technology is older than the name: the first 802.11 standard appeared in 1997, building on WaveLAN, developed by NCR and AT&T in the Netherlands in 1991, and on patented research by Australia's national science agency, CSIRO.

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GPS, the Global Positioning System, was built by the US Department of Defense from 1973 for the military. A receiver, like the one in your phone, works out where it is by timing signals from at least four satellites orbiting about 20,200 km up. Since 2000 it has been accurate to a few metres for everyone.

Each GPS satellite carries very precise atomic clocks and constantly broadcasts the time and its own position. Radio signals travel at the speed of light, so the delay tells the receiver how far away each satellite is: three satellites fix a position, and a fourth corrects the receiver's own, less accurate clock. The clocks even have to allow for Einstein's relativity. Seen from the ground, they run about 38 microseconds a day fast, which would otherwise add kilometres of error every day. After a Korean airliner strayed into Soviet airspace and was shot down in 1983, President Ronald Reagan promised that GPS would be free for civilian use. At first the civilian signal was deliberately degraded to an accuracy of about 100 metres, a policy called Selective Availability; President Bill Clinton ended it on 1 May 2000. Europe's Galileo, Russia's GLONASS and China's BeiDou now work alongside GPS.

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More than half of all web traffic does not come from people. In 2024 automated programs, called bots, made 51% of all requests to websites, according to the security company Imperva, and about 37% came from harmful bots that copy data, try stolen passwords or look for weaknesses.

A bot, short for robot, is a program that visits websites automatically. Many are useful. Search engines such as Google send out crawlers, also called spiders, that follow links from page to page and copy what they find so it can be searched. Other bots check that sites are online, compare prices or archive old pages. Harmful ones copy content without permission, try stolen passwords, snap up concert tickets or flood a site with requests to knock it offline. Since 1994 websites have been able to publish a file called robots.txt telling bots which pages to leave alone; it became an official internet standard in 2022, but it works only if a bot chooses to obey it. Imperva's 2025 report, which gave the 2024 figures, said automated traffic had overtaken human traffic for the first time in a decade, and that artificial intelligence is making simple bots easier to build.

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In 1965 Eric Johnson, an engineer at Britain's Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern, described a screen that sensed the touch of a fingertip, intended for air traffic control. Screens that sense touch the same basic way, called capacitive, reached mobile phones only in 2007, more than 40 years later.

Johnson described the idea in a short article in the journal Electronics Letters in 1965, and in more detail in 1967. His screen had fine wires across its face. A finger touching them changed their capacitance, their ability to store an electric charge, and the electronics detected where. Today's phones use the same principle through a transparent conducting layer under the glass, which is why a thick glove usually does not work. In the early 1970s Frank Beck and Bent Stumpe built a transparent touchscreen for a control room at CERN. In the late 1970s the American company Elographics developed resistive screens, which sense two layers being pressed together, so any object can work them. IBM's Simon, sold from 1994, is widely seen as the first touchscreen phone. The LG Prada, released in May 2007, was the first phone with a capacitive screen, shortly before the first iPhone.

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By tradition, the first program people write in a new programming language simply makes the computer display 'Hello, world'. The habit comes from Brian Kernighan of Bell Labs, who used the phrase in tutorials in 1972 and 1974 and in The C Programming Language, the 1978 book he wrote with Dennis Ritchie.

The earliest known version is in Kernighan's 1972 tutorial for B, a forerunner of the C language, where it appeared in an example about variables; the example before it printed only 'hi!'. The 1978 book made the phrase famous, and today almost every programming course and language manual starts with a version of it. It survives because it is a quick check that everything works: that the language is installed, that the code can be turned into a program the computer can run, and that the programmer knows how to run it, all before anything harder begins. In Python it takes a single line, while older languages need several. On devices without a screen, such as tiny microcontrollers, the equivalent first test is often making a light blink. Outside computing the phrase was already the catchphrase of the New York radio presenter William B. Williams in the 1950s.

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The Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek bronze device that modelled the sky with gears, is more than 2,000 years old and survives only as corroded fragments. From 2005 researchers scanned them with X-rays in 3D, reading hidden text and working out how the gears predicted eclipses.

The mechanism was recovered in 1901 from a Roman-era shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera and is kept, in 82 fragments, at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. In 2005 a team led by Mike Edmunds of Cardiff University, with Tony Freeth, scanned the fragments using high-resolution X-ray tomography, the method behind hospital CT scans: many X-ray images taken from different angles are combined into a 3D picture, so the researchers could look through the crust layer by layer. A Hewlett-Packard team also photographed the surfaces lit from many directions to bring out faint letters. The results, published in Nature in November 2006, doubled the amount of deciphered inscription. They also showed that a pin-and-slot arrangement of gears copied the Moon's changing speed across the sky, following a theory of the astronomer Hipparchus. The lost front display, which probably showed the planets, is still partly reconstructed by educated guesswork.

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A program can stop working even if nobody changes a line of it, because the computers, operating systems and online services it relies on keep changing. Programmers call this software rot, or bit rot.

The name is a joke: the bits do not really decay, though it can look that way. A classic case is old computer games that used the speed of the processor as their clock, so on faster computers they ran too fast to play. Online features fail when the company switches off its server. Secure websites rely on digital certificates, electronic proofs of identity that have expiry dates, so an old phone or computer that no longer gets updates slowly loses the ability to open them. In March 2021 the older versions of TLS, the security standard that encrypts web connections, were officially retired, cutting off many old browsers. Programs also rely on ready-made building blocks written by others, called libraries; when a library changes or disappears, the program can break. This is why software needs regular maintenance, and why archives run old programs in emulators, which imitate old machines.

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Tetris was created in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a researcher at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Seven shapes, each made of four squares, fall one at a time, and the player turns and fits them into rows that vanish when complete. The rules take seconds to learn, and the game needs no words at all.

Pajitnov wrote the first version on an Elektronika 60, a Soviet computer with a text-only screen, at the Academy's Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre. He was inspired by pentominoes, a puzzle of twelve shapes made of five squares, and simplified it to seven four-square pieces, called tetrominoes. The name joins tetra, Greek for four, with tennis, his favourite sport. Floppy-disk copies spread freely around Moscow and then abroad, and in 1989 Nintendo bundled Tetris with the Game Boy in the United States; that version alone sold 35 million copies. Because Pajitnov worked for a state institute, the rights belonged to the Soviet state and he received no royalties. That changed only after the rights returned to him at the end of 1995; in 1996 he and the Dutch-born game designer Henk Rogers set up The Tetris Company. Counting all versions and mobile downloads, Tetris has sold over 500 million copies.

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Wikipedia went live on 15 January 2001, founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Written and corrected by volunteers, it now has editions in more than 300 languages and over 7 million articles in English alone, and it is one of the most visited websites in the world.

Wikipedia began as a side project of Nupedia, an online encyclopedia whose expert-written articles moved so slowly through review that few were ever finished. The new site used a wiki, software that lets anyone edit a page directly; the name comes from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning quick. Since 2003 it has been run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, paid for mainly by readers' donations. Its quality rests on citing published sources and on other editors checking every change. In 2005 the journal Nature compared 42 science articles with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and found four serious errors in each, although Wikipedia had more small slips, 162 against 123. Turkey blocked the site in April 2017; in December 2019 the Constitutional Court ruled that the ban violated freedom of expression, and access returned in January 2020.

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A modern smartphone carries a set of tiny sensors: an accelerometer and a gyroscope that track movement and rotation, a magnetometer that works as a compass, light and proximity sensors, often a barometer, and a satellite receiver that works out where you are.

Most of these sensors are MEMS, micro-electro-mechanical systems: tiny machines etched into silicon chips, with moving parts measured in thousandths of a millimetre. The accelerometer senses how a minute weight on springs shifts as the phone moves, which is how the screen knows when to rotate and how steps are counted. The gyroscope measures turning and helps steady photos and video. The magnetometer detects the Earth's magnetic field so maps can point north. The light sensor adjusts screen brightness, and the proximity sensor turns the screen off when you hold the phone to your ear. A barometer measures air pressure, which reveals how many floors you have climbed. For location, the phone times signals from several satellites and checks them against nearby Wi-Fi networks and phone masts. The first iPhone, in 2007, already had accelerometer, light and proximity sensors; a gyroscope followed in 2010.

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