› added 12 years ago

72

TIL that the worlds first smartphone was released in 1994 by IBM, and cost $899, and had only one 3rd party app

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e09KD TIL that Arthur C. Clarke (served RAF there), Simon Pegg (studied there), Gordon Ramsay (moved there at age 9), and of course William Shakespeare (lived there) all were connected with the small locus of Stradford-Upon-Avon in England.
4d5 TIL There’s a donut shop in Portland, OR that used to have Nyquil and Pepto-Bismol donuts
mJ4x TIL that after the xkcd comic “Time” was posted, it spawned a 67000-post, 3300000-views thread whose regulars developed their own Time-based culture, creating their own mannerisms and vocabulary. It got so bad that newcomers to the thread could barely understand the latest posts.
49mR TIL That between 1965 and 1972, the CIA oversaw a torture program that killed between 26,000 and 41,000 people, which used tactics such as gang rape, electrocution, and even rape using a live eel. Most prisoners did not survive.
8aEVa TIl of The “rural purge” of American television networks (in particular CBS) which was a series of cancellations in the early 1970s of still-popular rural-themed shows that led toward ones with supposedly more appeal to urban and suburban audiences.