Technology Fun Facts: 20 Crazy Things You Didn’t Know About Gadgets

Technology fun facts still blow my mind every single time I stumble across them, like seriously I’m sitting here in my kinda messy apartment somewhere in the Midwest United States at like 10 p.m. surrounded by empty energy drink cans and three different chargers that don’t belong to any device I currently own, and I’m just thinking… how did we get here?

I mean I remember being that kid who thought having a flip phone with Snake on it was the absolute peak of human achievement. Now I panic if my smartwatch takes longer than three seconds to tell me my heart rate. Anyway.

Here are 20 technology fun facts that genuinely make me go “wait… what?” and sometimes question every life choice that led me to this moment.

Why These Technology Fun Facts Feel So Personal to Me

I’m not gonna lie—half these crazy gadget facts hit different when you’ve personally owned like eight generations of failed tech experiments.

• I once dropped my first iPod (the OG click-wheel one) into a toilet at a high school party. Yes I fished it out. Yes I tried to save it with rice. No it never worked again.
• My current phone has survived two cross-country moves, one angry cat attack, and approximately 47 drops onto concrete, yet the charging port is starting to give me trust issues.
• I still keep an old Blackberry in a drawer because throwing it away feels like betraying my 2009 self who thought physical keyboards were forever.

Anyway. Let’s get into the actual wild stuff.

1–5 Technology Fun Facts That Will Ruin Your Brain

1. The first computer “bug” was actually a literal dead moth taped into a log book in 1947. Like… an actual insect. Engineers at Harvard just went “yep that’s the bug” and kept it as a souvenir. I respect the commitment.
2. The QWERTY keyboard was literally designed to slow typists down. Back in the typewriter days, people were so fast the keys jammed. So they made it intentionally worse. We’re still using sabotage tech in 2026. Make it make sense.
3. Your average smartphone today has more computing power than the entire Apollo 11 guidance computer that landed humans on the moon. I think about this every time my phone lags loading TikTok.
4. The first webcam watched a coffee pot. University of Cambridge guys got tired of walking down the hall to see if coffee was ready, so they pointed a camera at it. Peak human laziness. I love it.
5. CDs were designed to hold 74 minutes of music because Sony wanted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to fit on one disc without breaks. That’s why we got 80-minute CDs later—greed won.

6–10 Crazy Gadget Facts I Wish I Didn’t Know

6. The guy who invented the mouse (Douglas Engelbart) demoed it in 1968 along with video conferencing, hypertext, and windows. We’re still catching up to that one presentation. Bro was playing 4D chess.
7. There’s a 99% chance the emoji you just sent was designed in Japan in the late 90s by a guy named Shigetaka Kurita. We owe all our feelings to one man’s pager project.
8. The first spam email was sent in 1978 by some dude advertising DEC computers. People were already pissed about spam before most of us were born.
9. Nintendo was originally a playing card company in 1889. They made hanafuda cards. Then they pivoted to toys, then to video games. Imagine telling someone in 1890 that their card company would one day make Mario. Insane.
10. The sound you hear when you take a photo on most phones? Fake. Digital cameras don’t make noise. That shutter click is there purely for psychological reasons—so you know it took the picture. We’re all being psychologically manipulated by a fake sound.

(Okay I just spilled coffee on my desk while typing that. Classic.)

11–15 Mind-Blowing Gadget Secrets I Learned the Hard Way

11. Early laser printers used to sometimes catch fire. Like actual flames. I had a roommate in college whose printer literally smoked once. We just opened the window and pretended it didn’t happen.
12. The USB symbol (the little trident-looking thing) is supposed to be a caliper. It points toward the side that’s supposed to go up. I’ve been plugging things in upside down for 20 years.
13. There’s an actual law in Switzerland that makes it illegal to flush the toilet after 10 p.m. in some apartments. Not tech related but I think about it every time I see a smart toilet now.
14. The first-ever banner ad (1994) had a 44% click-through rate. Today we’d kill for 0.44%. We ruined advertising forever.
15. Amazon’s first name was going to be “Cadabra” (as in abracadabra). They changed it because people kept hearing “cadaver.” Good call Jeff.

16–20 Technology Fun Facts That Honestly Make Me Uncomfortable

16. Your smart TV is probably listening to you right now. Most of them have mics that are “only active when you say the wake word.” Sure Jan.
17. The guy who invented the PDF (John Warnock) wanted to call it “The Camelot Project” because he thought it was a noble quest. We got PDF instead. Anticlimactic.
18. In 2004 someone bought pizza with 10,000 Bitcoin. Today that would be worth hundreds of millions. I ate ramen that week. Different life paths.
19. The first computer virus was called Creeper and it just said “I’M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.” No damage. Just vibes.
20. There’s a 404 error page on the White House website that says “The page you’re looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.” Even the government gaslights us.

So yeah… technology fun facts. They make me feel simultaneously smarter and dumber at the same time.

If any of these hit you the same way they hit me, drop a comment and tell me which one made you go “wait what” the hardest. Or tell me about the dumbest tech purchase you ever made. I’ll start: I bought a $300 mechanical keyboard just to use it for typing Reddit comments. Living the dream.

Outbound Links

• https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/september9/ – The Harvard Mark II log book with the actual moth (first “bug”)
• https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web – Information about the first webcam watching the coffee pot at CERN