Computer science facts, each with its source

Short answer

Before machines, a "computer" was a person who did sums by hand. Since then, engineers taped a real moth into a logbook as a computer "bug", the first network message was "lo", and the top supercomputer now does more than two billion billion calculations a second. Here are 30 facts, each with its source.

Last reviewed: 20 October 2026 6 min read

How were these facts chosen and checked?

Each fact is one sentence you can check yourself. Every one links to the organization, archive or paper it comes from, such as a museum, a university, a science agency, a standards body or the original research paper. Where a source calls something the "first", the fact says who says so. Numbers that change, such as supercomputer speeds, carry the date they were measured.

What are some facts about the history of computers?

#	Fact and source
1	Before electronic computers, "computer" was a job title for a person who did calculations by hand, and the NASA lab at Langley formed its first group of women computers in 1935. Source: NASA, "When the Computer Wore a Skirt: Langley's Computers, 1935–1970"
2	In 1843, Ada Lovelace published notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine that included, according to the Computer History Museum, the first published step-by-step sequence of operations for solving a math problem. Source: Computer History Museum, "Ada Lovelace"
3	In 1936, Alan Turing described an imaginary machine, now called a Turing machine, to explore what can and cannot be computed. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Turing Machines"
4	In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published a paper describing the on-off activity of nerve cells with the logic of true and false. Source: The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, "A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity"
5	ENIAC was announced at the University of Pennsylvania on February 14, 1946; Penn Engineering calls it the first general-purpose electronic computer, and a team of six women ran it. Source: Penn Engineering, "Celebrating Penn Engineering History: ENIAC"
6	In 1947, engineers working on the Mark II computer at Harvard found a moth stuck in the machine and taped it into their logbook as the "first actual case of bug being found." Source: Smithsonian National Museum of American History, "Log Book With Computer Bug"
7	In December 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain made the first working transistor, a tiny electronic switch, and they shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with William Shockley. Sources: Computer History Museum, "1947: Invention of the Point-Contact Transistor"; NobelPrize.org, "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1956"
8	In 1948, C. E. Shannon's paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" named the unit of information the bit, short for binary digit, and credited the word to John Tukey. Source: C. E. Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" (1948)
9	On October 29, 1969, a computer at UCLA tried to log in to a computer at SRI over the ARPANET, the network that grew into the internet, and the system crashed after the letters "l" and "o", so the first message was "lo". Source: Leonard Kleinrock, UCLA, "The Day the Infant Internet Uttered its First Words"
10	Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web at CERN in March 1989, and info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first website. Source: CERN, "A short history of the Web"

What are some facts about computer hardware?

#	Fact and source
11	Jack Kilby shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in inventing the integrated circuit, a single chip that holds many electronic parts. Source: NobelPrize.org, "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2000"
12	The first commercial hard disk drive, shipped in 1956, stored about 3.75 megabytes on 50 large disks. Source: Computer History Museum, "1956: First commercial hard disk drive shipped"
13	A graphics chip (GPU) has many more processing units than a main processor (CPU), which is why it suits the many multiply-and-add steps that AI models use. Source: Dive into Deep Learning, "Hardware"
14	In May 2022, a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory measured 1.1 exaflops, more than a billion billion calculations a second, breaking the exascale barrier. Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, "Frontier supercomputer debuts as world's fastest, breaking exascale barrier"
15	On the June 2026 TOP500 list, the top supercomputer measured 2.198 exaflops, and five systems measured more than one exaflop. Source: TOP500, "June 2026"
16	US data centers used about 4.4% of all US electricity in 2023, according to a US Department of Energy report. Source: US Department of Energy, "DOE Releases New Report Evaluating Increase in Electricity Demand from Data Centers"

What are some facts about data?

#	Fact and source
17	A byte is 8 bits, and one byte can hold a number from 0 to 255, enough for one typed letter. Source: Stanford CS101, "Bits and Bytes"
18	A color pixel is usually stored as three numbers from 0 to 255, one each for red, green and blue. Source: Stanford CS101, "Image-1 Introduction to Digital Images"
19	In UTF-8, a common way of storing text, each character takes 1 to 4 bytes, and basic English letters take exactly 1. Source: IETF, RFC 3629, "UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646"
20	Version 18.0 of the Unicode Standard, released in September 2026, covers 172,808 characters from the world's writing systems, symbols and emoji. Source: Unicode Consortium, "Unicode 18.0.0"
21	In 2022, the metric system added two new prefixes, ronna (10²⁷) and quetta (10³⁰), so the largest named data size is now the quettabyte. Sources: BIPM, "Resolution 3 of the 27th CGPM (2022)"; NIST, "Metric (SI) prefixes"
22	In December 1998, the International Electrotechnical Commission approved names such as kibibyte (1,024 bytes) so they would not be confused with kilobyte (1,000 bytes). Source: NIST, "Prefixes for binary multiples"
23	Common Crawl's August 2026 public web crawl holds 2.14 billion web pages, or 360 tebibytes of uncompressed content. Source: Common Crawl, "August 2026 crawl archive now available"
24	About 6 billion people, roughly three-quarters of the world's population, used the internet in 2025, according to the International Telecommunication Union. Source: ITU, "Global number of Internet users increases, but disparities deepen key digital divides" (November 17, 2025)

What are some facts about artificial intelligence?

#	Fact and source
25	The phrase "artificial intelligence" appears in the title of an August 31, 1955 proposal for a summer research study at Dartmouth College in 1956. Source: J. McCarthy and colleagues, "A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence" (1955), hosted by Stanford University
26	In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test, now called the Turing test, as a way to approach the question of whether machines can think. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "The Turing Test"
27	In July 1958, Frank Rosenblatt's perceptron, an early learning machine, learned to tell cards marked on the left from cards marked on the right after 50 trials. Source: Cornell Chronicle, "Professor's perceptron paved the way for AI – 60 years too soon"
28	The 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, named for Alan Turing, went to Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for breakthroughs that made deep neural networks a critical part of computing. Source: ACM, "Fathers of the Deep Learning Revolution Receive ACM A.M. Turing Award"
29	The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. Source: NobelPrize.org, "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024"
30	The US National Institute of Standards and Technology released its AI Risk Management Framework, voluntary guidance for managing the risks of AI, on January 26, 2023. Source: NIST, "AI Risk Management Framework"

What do these facts show, and what don't they?

They show:
Computing grew from people doing sums, to room-sized machines, to chips in every pocket.
Many of the ideas behind today's AI, such as neurons as simple logic units and machines that learn from trials, are more than 60 years old.
Data sizes and computing speeds now use numbers so large that the metric system needed new words.

They don't show:
The whole history. Thirty facts leave out many people, places and machines.
What happens next. Speeds, counts and rankings change; each one here carries its date.
How these systems work inside. For that, start with Parts of a computer, and which ones run AI and What is a neural network?.

Try it at home: check a fact (no device needed for the first round)

Pick one fact from this page. Before reading its source, guess one detail: the year, the number or the person.
Read the source together. Was your guess right? Does the source say exactly what the fact says, or more, or less?
Find one fact you heard elsewhere, such as "the first computer bug was a real bug". Is it true, half true or false? Fact 6 is a good place to start: the word "bug" was already in use before the moth.

What to talk about afterwards: who decides what counts as "the first"? And why does a fact about the "fastest" anything need a date?

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