I don't know if this happened elsewhere in the world, but in Finland it used to be a common misconception (in the 1980s and early 1990s) that computers "know" a lot of things, and you can ask about these things by writing questions in natural language (i.e. English, because that's the only language computers understand).

It was mostly adults who had never touched a computer who asked annoying questions like "Can you ask your computer about <this and that>?" but even some kids who actually had a computer believed that there would be a special "questions asking mode" you could get to with some secret Basic command. It was often a huge disappointment to learn that there was none.

I assume this misconception might have been fuelled by the fact that computer in Finnish is "tietokone", which literally means 'knowledge machine'.