Blog / IT Trivia

Let’s play a round of IT trivia for a change of pace.

With all the glum talk in IT circles these days, what with the rising rates of cybercrime, out-of-control inflation (IT isn’t immune), and wildfires burning down parts of the province, we thought it would be nice to talk a break from all the heavy stuff, just for a few minutes, to have a little fun. Instead we dug deep into the internet (okay, not that deep) and found a few fascinating tidbits of IT trivia to share with you all. Please don’t take this as an exhortation to forget about the essentials or deprioritize your backups, but we didn’t want to lay another news item at your feet with so much else going on these days.

So without further ado, please enjoy a little bit of IT trivia, courtesy trivia nerds from around the world.

Why did computer researchers start referring to software errors as ‘bugs’, and when?

Software errors have been around for as long as software has, but calling them bugs wasn’t always a standard term. In fact, it came about waaaaay back in 1947, when computer scientists at Harvard discovered a moth had been trapped inside their punch-card reading computing machine, creating a steady stream of errors in its output.

Which ‘rodent’ made its desktop computer debut in 1983?

The mouse. We’d say more but it’s pretty straight forward and every trivia list needs at least one simple one- or two-word answer.

What was the first computer game ever invented?

This question is a great example of the Mandela effect, which is when people believe distorted memories to be accurate. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was Pong, since that’s the line most of us are fed, but you’d be wrong. Pong was developed by Atari in 1972 and was the first commercially successful arcade game, but Tennis for Two, released in 1958 as an experiment at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

What do you call a computer program that runs inside a web page on the internet?

Here’s a hint: the term is derived from the word ‘application’.

It also uses the suffix -let, used with some nouns to make their meaning ‘small.’

So what do you get when you smush applications and the -let suffix together? Applets, of course!

When is World Computer Literacy Day?

Did you even know there was a World Computer Literacy Day, because even a few of us didn’t know this one. It’s December 2nd, for the record, and it’s been a thing since 2001!

Of course, there’s plenty of weirdly wonderful bits of IT trivia (pun fully intended) when it comes to computers and information technology and this quiz would go on far, far too long if we were to put down every single one. And as great as occasional distractions are, we all have to return to the real world eventually. So if you’d like some help handling your IT during these troubling times, please contact us to get yourself some stress-free IT along with your trivia.

Sincerely,

The TRINUS Team
trinustech.com