Four of the top seven highest-grossing films of all time were released in 2015. Avengers: Age of Ultron, Furious 7, Jurassic World, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
100 Mind-Blowing Released Facts
Gaming-related accidents increased by 26.5% during the first 5 months of Pokémon Go being released. This included 2 deaths and $25.5 million in damages.
An 18-year-old with dwarfism played the 8-year-old Grinch in The Grinch (2000). He passed away two years after the film was released.
Before Apple bought Siri, it was originally going to be released as an app for Android & Blackberry.
In 1998, David Bowie released an Internet provider called BowieNet. Subscribers were offered exclusive content and a BowieNet email. It was shut down in 2006.
President Ulysses S. Grant was arrested while in office. He was charged, booked, and released for speeding on a horse and had to pay a fine.
Japan released sushi-inspired Kit Kats.
The first Barbie doll was released in 1959.
Japan released sushi-inspired Kit Kats. For a limited time in 2017, Tokyo’s Kit Kat Chocolatory shop made three types of chocolate bars that were inspired by sushi but didn’t taste like raw fish. The tuna sushi was raspberry, the seaweed-wrapped one tasted like pumpkin pudding, and the sea urchin sushi was the flavour of Hokkaido melon with mascarpone cheese. All were made with puffed rice, white chocolate, and a bit of wasabi.
A woman called the police when her ice cream didn’t have enough sprinkles. The West Midlands police in England released a recording of a woman who called 999 (the U.K. version of 911) because there were “bits on one side and none on the other,” she says in the recording. She was even more upset when the ice cream truck man did not want to give her money back.
The Little Mermaid was Disney’s first princess movie in 30 years. When Disney released Sleeping Beauty, it was such a box office bomb that the company was put off creating princess movies. Disney didn’t make another princess movie until 30 years later when The Little Mermaid was released in 1989.
Bubble wrap was originally designed to be used as wallpaper. Bubble wrap was born in 1957 when engineer Al Fielding and Swiss inventor Marc Chavannes tried creating a textured wallpaper. However, their product was rejected. They also tried marketing it as a greenhouse insulator, but the material still fell short. However, when IBM released a new computer, Fielding and Chavannes pitched their concept as a protective covering for computer shipments. From then on, bubble wrap was adopted as the go-to protective wrap. The third time’s the charm, I guess.
Mercedes invented a joystick-controlled car. In 1966, Mercedes released the Mercedes F200. One of its most defining features is its joystick controller that replaces the steering wheel and pedals. The car could sense which side the driver was sitting on, so someone could control it from the passenger seat.
A U.K. woman has called 911 because of ice cream. The West Midlands police in England once released a recording of a woman who dialled 999 (the U.K. equivalent of 911) because her ice cream didn’t have enough sprinkles.
Super Mario Land was the most popular game on the Game Boy during its release. It is also the first platform where the Mario games were released. To this day, Super Mario Land continues to be one of the highest-ranked games loved by retro gamers.
You cannot crack your knuckles. The sound it makes is due to the gasses that are released when you put pressure on them. When joints are stretched, the pockets of gas between the joints are released.
Buzz Aldrin is the first man to ever urinate on the moon. He released himself onto the moon shortly after stepping onto the surface. Now that’s one way to mark your territory.
Mozart once sold more CDs than Beyoncé. This friendly competition between two musical greats may sound like a pipe dream, but it’s one of the interesting facts that happened. The Universal Music Group released a box set for Mozart’s 225th death anniversary in 2016. With 200 discs of Mozart’s work in each set, each disc was counted as one CD sold. Get the last box set and listen for yourself.
Clothes can take 40 years to decompose. Depending on the material, the average piece of clothing will take about 40 years before it breaks down fully. Unfortunately, the methane released as well as the dyes and chemicals that can pollute the soil and water.
Game of Thrones Night’s Watch cloaks are made from Ikea rugs. Creating something like Game of Thrones takes a lot of painstaking attention to detail to take people to the rugged, sooty world of Westeros. However, you’d be surprised that some of the production designs are just from everyday things. Namely, IKEA rugs for the Night Watch’s cloaks. IKEA has since released a tutorial for how to make GoT cloaks.
Blue Ivy Carter is the youngest person ever to appear on a Billboard chart. When Jay-Z released “Glory” in 2012, he put his daughter Blue Ivy Carter as a feature. Her crying sample made her the youngest person to hit the Billboard charts at two days old.
America accidentally dropped an atomic bomb on South Carolina in 1958. Talk about clumsy. Here’s one of the scary WTF facts: In 1958, a B-47 plane was headed to the United Kingdom with an atomic bomb even bigger than the Nagasaki bomb. During the flight, one of the pilots accidentally released the emergency pin. However, the critical part of the bomb needed to activate it was still on the plane. If it were already equipped with the bomb, it would have obliterated the entire state and even more.
Toy Story 2 was almost deleted. A year before Toy Story 2 was released, someone entered the command, ‘/bin/rm -r -f *’ on the drive which started deleting the files for the movie. Thankfully, an employee had the entire film backed up on her laptop. If not, the deleted material would have taken a year to recreate.
In 16th-century England, pies were filled with surprises. Celebratory pies served in 16th century England contained live animals that were released when the pie was cut. Such animals were frogs, squirrels, and blackbirds.
Mr. Potato Head used to be made of actual potatoes. When Mr. Potato Head was first released in 1952, the toy only included eyes, noses, and mouths. For the potato body, kids were expected to provide their own. However, due to the possible safety hazards of the sharp pieces, the plastic body was provided in 1964.
The Bucket List was released in 2007. The movie, directed by Rob Reiner, debuted in theatres in 2007, captivating audiences with its heartfelt story.
“Schindler’s List” was released in 1993. Directed by Steven Spielberg, this powerful black-and-white film tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.
She has released her music. Peyton List has ventured into the music industry, delighting her fans with her melodic vocals and relatable lyrics.
The U.S. Treasury printed $100,000 bills between 1934 and 1935. They never were released to the public.
Trees are breathers. Trees are one of the most effective tools we have to combat climate change. Forests are home to around 80% of biodiversity on land and tropical forests alone produce over 40% of the oxygen we breathe. Covering around 30% of Earth’s land surface, we depend on forests for our survival. Forests absorb around 8 Gigatonnes a year of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and play a crucial role in the carbon cycle and climate system. However, climate change, forest degradation and deforestation are causing much of this stored carbon to be released back into the atmosphere. Recent research found that recovering tropical forests was only successfully combating a quarter of the current carbon emissions which indicates the importance of preserving and restoring our tropical forests. To better understand the role of trees in regulating our planet’s carbon cycle, ESA’s upcoming mission called Biomass will use advanced radar technology to measure the amount of carbon stored in Earth’s forests and other biomass, providing a more accurate assessment of carbon storage and uptake than ever before. By monitoring changes in biomass over time, scientists will be able to assess the effectiveness of forest conservation efforts and better understand the impact of deforestation on our climate.
The United States government once had to issue a statement confirming that mermaids are NOT real. Animal Planet released a “documentary” about mermaids claiming they were real. This mockumentary tricked so many people, that National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stepped in to clarify things.
It cost $265 million to make Grand Theft Auto V. When the game was released in 2013, it became the most expensive video game ever made. This was no cause for concern for its developers after it raked in a shocking $1 million within the first seventy-two hours of sales. It took five years to develop the game, with Rockstar’s studios all over the world working together in tandem.
Christopher Lee released three metal albums. Sir Christopher Lee was a fan of metal from its very beginning and was particularly fond of Black Sabbath. That being said, it wasn’t until 2010, when he was well into his eighties, that he recorded his first album: Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross. Lee’s second and third albums were released in 2013 and 2014, but he also dabbled in several metal-inspired Christmas carol parodies.
There’s a soviet version of The Lord of the Rings, and it’s downright woeful. Titled Khraniteli (The Keepers) followed the plot of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in JRR Tolkien’s legendary trilogy. It was released straight to TV in 1991, and much like the Soviet Union as a whole, it ended up being a complete and utter catastrophe. While the characters and plot may be recognizable to those who dare to watch Khraniteli, the special effects (if you can call them that!) are so lacking that it ruins the point of producing it in the first place.
The 2007 video game Halo 3 was so popular that film executives blamed its creators for a drop in cinema attendance the week it was released. When it was released, the game was so popular that it broke previous sales records, raking in an incredible $170 million in the first day alone. The weekend the game was released, box office numbers were down 27%, something which Microsoft wasn’t even surprised about. Microsoft advertised the game similarly to a movie, targeting the same demographic (18-34) that frequent cinemas the most.
WiFi was released to the public in 1997.
First cellular/mobile phone ever. Motorola released the world’s first mobile phone, the DynaTAC 8000x, in 1983. This portable phone cost $3,995 upon release and offered 30 minutes of talk time. Charging the device required 10 hours, and it could only store 30 phone numbers in memory. Unsurprisingly, few people purchased the device, but it marked a breakthrough in mobile technology. Nowadays, cell phones and smartphones (no matter how cheap or expensive they are) are indispensable gadgets in people’s lives.
The original name of Microsoft Windows was “Interface Manager”. In 1981, Microsoft began the development of a program called “Interface Manager”. Most people won’t recognise that name because Interface Manager became Windows in 1983. Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in 1985, and it’s now the most common operating system in the world. It’s hard to believe the OS would be successful with its original name. Interface Manager perfectly describes what Windows would become. In the marketing department, making that name sound interesting or useful would have been impossible. Everyone recognises Windows, and millions of computers run on Windows 10 today. Interface Manager should be considered a work-in-progress name and something best left in the past.
This Is The World’s Largest Hard Disk Drive (HDD). Seagate launched the Exos 20+ hard disk drive (HDD) in December 2020. The HDD utilises HAMR and MACH2 technologies to offer 20 terabytes (TB) of storage. Typically, home computers utilise hard drives ranging from 1TB to 4 TB. Businesses and data centres may use significantly larger hard drives. It’s an impressive development from Seagate. The company recently launched 18TB hard drives to the market as well. Lately, companies have released larger and larger hard drives with improved performance. Solid state drives (SSDs) continue to grow in popularity, but the HDD remains a competitive alternative, especially for larger capacities.
IBM 305 RAMAC: The Supercomputer That Weighed A Ton (Literally). In September 1956, IBM announced and released the IBM 305 RAMAC supercomputer. It was the first supercomputer to use magnetic disk storage. More than 1,000 systems were built and sold before the 305 RAMAC became obsolete in 1962. The machine weighed more than a ton and required multiple people to set up or move. IBM charged companies and organisations $3,200 per month for the IBM 305. That amounts to nearly $30,000 in today’s dollars. For that reason, government organisations and large corporations were the main customers of IBM’s supercomputer. Subsequent supercomputers were released by IBM. The company releases a new supercomputer every few years on average.
Top 5 best-selling video games of all time. Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time by a large margin. The game was released in November 2011 and has sold 200 million units. People of all ages love crafting and survival games. Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto V holds the number two spot with 140 million units sold. Quite a few people log on every week to partake in this regularly updated open-world title. Both titles include sales across multiple platforms. On the other hand, Tetris holds the number three spot in mobile sales alone. The classic game has amassed 100 million in sales since its release in 2006. Wii Sports lands at number four and features sales on one platform as well. Finally, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds hit 70 million in sales across multiple platforms to round out the top five best-selling games list. Every title on the list saw an initial release between 2006 and 2017.
“123456” is the most used password in the world!! NordPass released the list of the most common passwords of 2020. Over 2.5 million users decided to use the password “123456”. Unsurprisingly, that’s a weak password that nobody should ever use. It was cracked over 23.5 million times in 2020. Hackers can crack the password in less than a second due to its sequential and common nature. For better or worse, NordPass lists “12345” as the most common password from 2019. That password fell to number eight on the company’s list for 2020. The most secure passwords include letters, numbers, and symbols. Also, a longer password is always more difficult to crack than a shorter one.
The first online gaming was before the year 2000. Sega Dreamcast was the first 128-bit console to hit the market. Released in 1999, it was the first console that allowed real-time online play. Unfortunately, it was a little too early for its time, as back then, most Internet connections were not reliable enough.
PlayStation 1 had Scratch and Sniff discs. In 1999, Gran Turismo 2, the 2-disc edition of the game, the blue disc featured the smell of fuel and burning rubber. When FIFA 2001 was released in 2000, they used Scratch and Sniff technology on their discs, so it smelled like football stadium turf.
Over 6,000 new computer viruses are created and released every month. This number has drastically risen since 1990, at which point there were only 50 known computer viruses. Today, 90% of emails contain some form of malware, and most people don’t know about it.
The first computer virus was harmless. In 1971, the first ever computer virus was developed. Named Creeper, it was made as an experiment just to see how it spread between computers. The virus simply displayed the message: “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” The first virus ever released into the wild was called Brain, which also wasn’t harmful. However, it was the very first IBM PC virus.
Sonic the Hedgehog’s full name is Ogilvie Maurice Hedgehog. This is a bit of a contentious one, though, as some fans claim that it isn’t canon. This is because Sonic’s full name was never published. Archie Comics, who published two different Sonic comics, released a comic that mentions that Sonic’s middle name is Maurice but never mentions his first name. One of the Archie Comic writers has since shared that Sonic’s first name is Ogilvie. Fans disagree, as they say, that Archie Comics’s Sonic isn’t true canon, only the video games and the Japanese manga are.
The term “footage” comes from films being measured in feet when being edited in the early days of filmmaking. Why footage got its name is one of those questions that you have when taking a long shower or when you’re just starting to drift off to sleep. Fortunately, we have the answer for you and even an explanation! Back in the day, when movies were released without audio, they used to use 35mm film. During this era, the film was measured out and cut into foot-long (0.3 m) strips, which contained 16 frames in each. One foot of 35mm film was just one second of screen time. The amount of seconds in a film naturally became known as the footage.
Havoc! One of the few known medieval battlefield orders is the cry of ‘Havoc!’. Havoc released the army from any formation and gave freedom to loot, and was an order only ever to be given when it was utterly certain that a battle was won and discipline was no longer required. It was considered so dangerous that it was expressly forbidden without permission from the army’s commander. A wrongly timed cry of havoc could cost a battle and there were severe punishments for crying havoc without permission – sometimes extending to beheading.
Linux 1.0, was released on March 14, 1994, more than three years after Linus’ initial announcement. It featured 176,250 lines of code. Version 2.0 followed in 1996.
It may be the biggest free software project now (see #1) but when the very first kernel was released back in 1991 it was made up of a comparatively minuscule 10k lines of code — baby Linux!
Following a rejig of its development and release schedules, a new version of the Linux kernel is now released every 66 days or so, with new point releases appearing regularly in between.
Linux is the most famous example of open source software but did you know that it wasn’t always that way? Early versions of Linux were distributed with a license forbidding commercial use or redistribution. It was version 0.12, released in 1992, that saw Linus adopt the GPL, making his code freely available to all.
The 1st Linux kernel was released on September 17, 1991
One of the first Linux distributions was Softlanding Linux System (SLS), first released in 1992 and using the .96p4 Linux kernel.
Linux Has Its Origins in UNIX: The Linux Kernel was developed by Linux Torvalds, a Finnish computer scientist. It was officially released in 1991 under the GNU General Public License. It was a hobby project he was working on while still a student at the University of Helsinki. He was working on a project based on Minix, a UNIX-based operating system.
Linus Never Intended to Make Money Out of Linux: As a strong advocate for open-source software, Linux never intended to commercialize Linux. In fact, as a hobby project, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, never envisioned making a profit from his groundbreaking operating system. When he started working on Linux in 1991, his primary motivation was to develop a free and open-source alternative to proprietary Unix systems. Torvalds released Linux under the GNU General Public License, ensuring that it would always remain open for anyone to use, modify, and distribute freely. This commitment to openness and collaboration led to rapid growth and popularity over the years to become one of the most essential operating systems in the IT world.
The First Linux GUI Distribution: One of the first Linux distributions is the Softlanding Linux System, shortened as SLS. It was the first Linux distro to include the X window system or GUI (Graphical User Interface). It was released in 1992 and was the predecessor to Slackware which was released on July 16, 1993, and is supported to date.
Debian: The Mother of Many Linux Distributions: Debian was among the first GNU/Linux distributions to be community-driven. Debian 0.01 was the first Debian release and was made publicly available on September 15, 1993. Its first stable version – Debian 1.1 – was released on June 17, 1996. Debian is considered the ‘Mother’ of many Linux distributions. Popular Debian-based Linux distributions include Ubuntu, MX Linux, Deepin, and Pop! OS, Zorin OS, and Kali Linux to mention a few examples.
The First Commercial Linux Distribution: Yggdrasil is the first commercial Linux distribution and was released in Live CD format on 8, December 1992, offering a unique blend of open-source software and a user-friendly interface for sale, marking a significant milestone in the history of Linux. Yggdrasil incorporated the X Window System and provided a graphical user environment when Linux was primarily command-line-based. Although it faced competition from free Linux distributions, its pioneering approach paved the way for the commercialization of Linux and the development of more user-friendly distributions in the years that followed.
Ubuntu follows a strict development schedule. It releases a new stable version every six months, in April and in October. In the last 25 stable releases, only one release got delayed. It was Ubuntu 6.06 which was released in June rather than in April.
Ubuntu follows a very tremendous and strict development schedule. Its new stable version is released in every six months, i.e. in April and October.
The World Wide Web (WWW) was invented in England: The World Wide Web came to be in 1989 when it was discovered by Tim Berners-Lee, an English scientist. Berners-Lee began the project whilst working at CERN, The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and its main use was for scientists to share information and institutes across the globe. The WWW was used privately until 1993 when CERN released it to the public. It’s flourished since then, and you’re using it to view this blog right now!
The United Kingdom First Invented Stamps: Before the introduction of postage stamps, mail delivery was expensive. The first stamp ever released in the United Kingdom was called “the Penny Black”, and it showed Queen Victoria. It was released in May 1840. With the invention of the postage stamp, sending letters, postcards, and Christmas cards became more affordable.
OpenAI released the first version of the Generative Pre-Train Transformer (GPT) artificial intelligence language model in June 2018. OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, was started as a non-profit in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and others, and is backed by Microsoft and led by Sam Altman.
In June 2020, GPT-3 was released, trained with over 175 billion parameters, the first generative artificial intelligence with the ability to comprehend and write human-like texts.
Some of the applications that were developed based on GPT-3 are ChatGPT: launched in November 2020, which is a chatbot, article writer, and code writer. DALL-E: first appearing in January 2021, it creates images from text. Whisper: released in September 2022, it performs as a multilingual voice-to-text.
ChatGPT 4o, also known as GPT-4o, is an updated version of the underlying large language model technology that powers ChatGPT. It was released in May 2024 and is touted as a “natively multimodal” model that can reason across audio, vision, and text in real-time. This new version is significantly faster than its predecessors, with response times as low as 232 milliseconds for audio inputs, which is comparable to human response times in conversations.
According to research released by BlackBerry, 51% of IT decision-makers believed a successful cyber attack would be credited to ChatGPT within a year, and it happened. Multiple firms have also reported ChatGPT’s ability to create malware.
ChatGPT is banned in at least five countries, such as China, Russia, and Venezuela. Italy also banned the chatbot temporarily after GPT-4 was released.
In December 2023, the European Parliament released an Artificial Intelligence Act, a regulation that aims to protect citizens from “high risks of AI.”
GPT-4, released in March 2023, is the most prominent language model, supporting over 50 languages and marking a significant leap in AI capabilities.
Top Retailers Aim to Implement AI in 2023 to Facilitate Price Optimisation: Aware of the fact that 60 per cent of consumers choose the best-priced offers, leading retailers are planning to implement AI systems by 2021 to optimise the pricing of their products, according to Artificial Intelligence stats released in a study by IBM.