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The digital world moves so fast that it is easy to forget how we got here. Some of the most common things we use today started out in the strangest ways. Here are five facts about the technology that rules our lives.

• The First Computer Bug Was an Actual Bug: In 1947, engineers working on the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth stuck in one of the relays, which was causing the machine to malfunction. They literally debugged the system by removing the insect, and the term has been used for software errors ever since.
• Domain Names Were Free Until 1995: Back in the early days of the internet, you didn’t have to pay to register a website name. That changed in 1995 when a company called Network Solutions was granted the right to charge for them. At the time, a two-year registration cost 100 dollars.
• The First Webcam Was for a Coffee Pot: Researchers at the University of Cambridge were tired of walking all the way to the breakroom only to find an empty coffee pot. They set up a camera that took a picture three times a minute so they could check the coffee levels from their computer screens.
• Google Was Originally Named Backrub: In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin called their search engine Backrub because the algorithm focused on analyzing back-links to understand how important a website was. They eventually changed it to Google, a play on the mathematical term googol.
• The QWERTY Keyboard Was Designed to Slow You Down: On early mechanical typewriters, fast typing would cause the metal arms to jam together. The QWERTY layout was created to separate common letter pairs, forcing typists to slow down just enough to keep the machine running smoothly.