Computer Hardware
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50 free Computer Hardware trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every app, game and web page runs on physical parts: a processor doing the sums, memory holding the work in progress, storage keeping files safe, and a tangle of ports, screens and peripherals connecting it all to you. Computer hardware is full of clever engineering and stranger-than-expected history, from odd first prototypes to brand names with hidden meanings. This quiz covers the parts inside a PC case, the connectors on the back, the keyboards, mice, monitors and printers on the desk, and the companies and engineers who shaped them. Some questions are basics a high school computing class would cover; others are the fun stories behind everyday kit. It suits students revising for a computing or IT test, PC builders who want to check their knowledge, and anyone who has wondered what is going on inside the box. Each question comes with a short explanation, so you learn something whether or not you get it right.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Douglas Engelbart's first computer mouse, which rolled on two metal wheels, had a shell made of which material?
Wood
Wood formed the shell of the first prototype, which Bill English helped Engelbart build in 1964. The nickname mouse likely came from the cord, which looked like a tail.
Q 02Which outdated storage medium still appears as the save icon in many programs, long after computers stopped using it?
Floppy disk
Floppy disk icons are a classic of skeuomorphic design, where an on-screen symbol copies a physical object. IBM made the first ones in 1971, a full 8 inches across.
Q 03The world's first webcam, set up at the University of Cambridge in 1991, kept watch on which everyday object?
A coffee pot
A coffee pot in the Trojan Room was put on camera so researchers could check it was full before walking over. One of the machines seen on the feed later sold on eBay for £3,350.
Q 04Which term for the smallest controllable dot on a screen blends a slang word for pictures with the word 'element'?
Pixel
Pixel combines 'pix', a slang shortening of pictures, with the first syllable of 'element', and first appeared in print in 1965. Voxel and texel were later built on the same pattern.
Q 05Which element, the second most abundant in Earth's crust after oxygen, is the base material of most computer chips?
Silicon
Silicon makes up about 28% of Earth's crust, though chipmakers use only a highly purified fraction of it. The very first integrated circuit, built by Jack Kilby, relied on germanium instead.
Q 06Which keyboard layout, devised for 1870s typewriters, is named after the first six keys of its top letter row?
QWERTY
QWERTY was devised by Christopher Latham Sholes, a Wisconsin newspaper editor, and reached buyers on a typewriter sold by Remington from 1874.
Q 07Which Apple co-founder designed the Apple I computer and was the primary designer of the Apple II?
Steve Wozniak
Steve Wozniak built the Apple I for his own use after the Altair 8800 impressed him at Homebrew Computer Club meetings. Selling it as a product was his friend Steve Jobs's idea.
Q 08Which precious metal is plated onto connector contacts inside a PC because it conducts well and resists corrosion?
Gold
Gold does not corrode, so a thin plated layer keeps contacts conducting for years. A nickel barrier usually sits beneath it, because copper would otherwise creep through and tarnish the surface.
Q 09Which keyboard key is named for what it did on typewriters, physically moving the type to print capitals?
Shift
Shift keys physically moved a typewriter's type so each key could print a second character. The first machine to have one was the Remington No. 2 of 1878, since the earlier No. 1 typed only capitals.
Q 10Which company marketed its 1999 GeForce 256 graphics chip as the world's first GPU?
Nvidia
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by three engineers who sketched out their plans at a Denny's diner in San Jose. A plaque now marks the corner booth where they sat.
Q 11Which main circuit board, also called a logic board, links a PC's processor, memory and expansion cards?
Motherboard
Motherboard is the everyday name, though Apple's technical documents say 'logic board' for machines from the Apple II to the Mac. Unlike a simple backplane, it carries major subsystems of its own.
Q 12In RAM, the working memory sold in sticks called DIMMs, what does the letter R stand for?
Random
Random access means any item can be read or changed in almost the same time, wherever it sits in the memory. A tape, by contrast, takes longer the further away the item is.
Q 13Which connector, first specified in 2002, carries both video and sound to a monitor or TV over one cable?
HDMI
Q 21Which Intel co-founder gives his name to the 'law' that the components on a chip double about every two years?
Gordon Moore
Gordon Moore first predicted in 1965 that components per chip would double every year, then slowed his forecast to every two years in 1975. It has held up well enough to be called a law.
Q 22Which tiny electronic switch, invented at Bell Labs in 1947, is the basic building block of modern processors?
Transistor
Transistor pioneers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention. Their first working device was made from germanium.
Q 23ENIAC, the pioneering American computer completed in 1945, ran on about 18,000 of which fragile glass components?
Vacuum tubes
HDMI was designed to be backward-compatible with DVI, so a simple adapter joins the two with no signal conversion or loss of picture quality.
Q 14Which tiny board, created to teach coding in schools, became the best-selling British computer of all time?
Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi boards have sold in the tens of millions. The first batches in 2012 sold out almost immediately, with one distributor reporting over 100,000 pre-orders on day one.
Q 15Which common computer part counts as both an input device and an output device?
Touchscreen
Touchscreen displays pair a touch panel for input with a visual display for output. The first finger-driven one was developed by Eric Johnson at Britain's Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern.
Q 16PC builders often clip a grounded strap to one wrist to protect chips from which invisible hazard?
Static electricity
Static electricity can damage some components with discharges as faint as 30 volts, in sparks that are neither seen nor heard. The harm sometimes shows up only after long use.
Q 17Which compound do PC builders spread between a processor and its cooler to fill tiny air gaps?
Thermal paste
Thermal paste pushes out trapped air, which would otherwise act as insulation and keep heat in the chip. It adds no strength to the joint, so screws or clips still have to hold the cooler down.
Q 18The protective solder mask coating on a printed circuit board has traditionally been which colour?
Green
Green is the traditional solder mask colour, though boards now come in many others. The coating's real job is to stop solder bridging neighbouring tracks and causing shorts.
Q 19Which company, started in a Palo Alto garage in 1939, settled the order of its founders' names with a coin toss?
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard could just as easily have been Packard-Hewlett had the coin landed the other way. Its first big contract supplied audio oscillators for Walt Disney's film Fantasia.
Q 20Blu-ray discs, which hold far more data than DVDs, are named after the colour of what?
The laser
The laser in a Blu-ray drive is blue rather than red, and its shorter wavelength lets data be packed more densely than on a DVD.
Vacuum tubes burned out so often, several almost every day, that ENIAC sat broken about half the time. Special high-reliability versions did not arrive until 1948.
Q 24A monitor's refresh rate is counted in which unit, named after the German who proved electromagnetic waves exist?
Hertz
Hertz, written Hz, means cycles per second, so a 144 Hz monitor shows a new image 144 times every second. Heinrich Hertz proved in the 1880s that the waves James Clerk Maxwell had predicted were real.
Q 25What do PC enthusiasts call running a processor faster than its rated speed, sometimes with liquid nitrogen cooling?
Overclocking
Overclocking can squeeze extra performance from a chip, but most manufacturers' warranties do not cover any damage it causes. Liquid nitrogen is reserved for record attempts, not everyday machines.
Q 26Which PC part, often sold with an '80 Plus' efficiency badge, turns wall-socket AC into low-voltage DC?
Power supply unit
Power supply unit makers earn the voluntary 80 Plus badge, launched in 2004, by proving that more than 80% of the energy drawn is delivered to the PC at several load levels.
Q 27Which screen technology uses organic compounds that glow when powered, so it needs no backlight?
OLED
OLED panels emit their own light when current flows, while an LCD merely changes how light from its backlight passes through. They now appear in TVs, monitors, phones and handheld consoles.
Q 28Which laptop line, created by IBM and later sold to Lenovo, is known for the red pointing nub in its keyboard?
ThinkPad
ThinkPad laptops were for many years the only ones certified for use on the International Space Station. IBM sold its PC business, the line included, to China's Lenovo in 2005.
Q 29Which connector, introduced in 2014 with 24 pins, was designed so it can be plugged in either way up?
USB-C
USB-C plugs are reversible, so there is no wrong way up. The connector was designed to supersede every earlier USB plug, all of which were designated legacy in 2014.
Q 30Which rechargeable battery type, whose developers won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, powers most laptops?
Lithium-ion
Lithium-ion cells first went on sale in 1991, six years after Akira Yoshino built the first prototype. He went on to share the Nobel Prize with two other pioneers of the technology.