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50 free Computer History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Computing has a short history packed with odd turns: calculators built to ease a tax collector's workload, codebreaking machines kept secret for decades, a hobby kit named during a TV episode, and a pocket organiser that beat the smartphone to market by a decade. The people behind them were often working in spare rooms, research stations and university basements rather than glossy labs. These 50 questions cover the machines, people, languages and firsts that shaped computing: the mechanical and relay calculators of the 1930s and 40s, the first stored-program and mass-produced computers, the labs that gave us the mouse, the graphical desktop and office printing, the home computers of the late 1970s and 80s, and the early days of the online world. Every answer comes with a short explanation and a source. It suits pub quiz setters, students of computer science and anyone who likes knowing where the tools on their desk came from. Most questions are answerable by a curious general reader; a handful are there for the completists.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Before machines took the name, the word 'computer', first recorded in 1613, described what?
A person doing calculations
A person doing calculations was a 'computer' for three centuries: the word meant 'one who computes', and teams of them worked through astronomical and ballistic tables by hand.
Q 02Which animal is Tux, the official mascot of the Linux kernel, drawn by Larry Ewing in 1996?
A penguin
A penguin was Linus Torvalds' own idea for the Linux brand character; Ewing drew Tux as an entry to a logo competition, and distributions still swap in their own versions of him.
Q 03The 1975 Altair 8800 hobby computer reportedly took its name from a destination in which TV series?
Star Trek
Star Trek supplied the name: Popular Electronics editor Les Solomon said his 12-year-old daughter Lauren suggested Altair because 'that's where the Enterprise is going tonight'.
Q 04Hotmail launched on which symbolic 1996 date, chosen to suggest freedom from ISP-tied email?
4 July
4 July, American Independence Day, was chosen to symbolise 'freedom' from ISP-based email and the novelty of reading an inbox from anywhere; Microsoft bought Hotmail in December 1997 for about $400 million.
Q 05What kind of gadget was the first BlackBerry, launched by Research In Motion in 1999?
A two-way pager
A two-way pager called the Inter@ctive Pager 950 was the first BlackBerry; RIM did not ship a BlackBerry that could make phone calls until the 5810 arrived in 2002.
Q 06Whose 1945 'First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC' gave the stored-program design its familiar name?
John von Neumann
John von Neumann's name stuck to the architecture, which still irks historians: the unfinished draft was circulated with only his name on it, leaving out ENIAC engineers Eckert and Mauchly.
Q 07The 1977 TRS-80, nicknamed the 'Trash-80', was sold through which electronics chain owned by Tandy?
Radio Shack
Radio Shack got 3,500 machines in the first run because Tandy's John Roach argued each store could use one for inventory if customers did not buy; instead the computer sold out.
Q 08Douglas Engelbart's first mouse, patented with two metal wheels in 1970, had a shell made of what?
Wood
Wood housed the prototype, which Bill English built from Engelbart's notes before 1965; the patent, filed in 1967 and granted in 1970, covered that shell and its two perpendicular wheels.
Q 09Which MIT engineer who led Apollo's on-board flight software coined the term 'software engineering'?
Margaret Hamilton
Margaret Hamilton coined the term so that software would be taken as seriously as hardware, and her team's priority alarm displays helped Apollo 11's computer cope when alarms fired minutes before touchdown.
Q 10Blaise Pascal built his 1642 calculator to ease which job held by his father Étienne in Rouen?
Tax supervisor
Tax supervisor was Étienne Pascal's post, and the laborious arithmetic it demanded drove his teenage son to design a machine that added and subtracted directly, with gears handling the carries.
Q 11Who picked 'artificial intelligence' as the 1956 Dartmouth workshop's theme to sidestep cybernetics?
John McCarthy
John McCarthy picked the name for the Dartmouth proposal partly for its neutrality, so the new field would not be tied to Norbert Wiener's cybernetics; he went on to create Lisp.
Q 12Which country rolled out Minitel, a pre-web online service for shopping and chat, in 1982?
France
France ran Minitel through its PTT, giving millions online directories, mail and train bookings years before the web, and the network still logged 10 million monthly connections in 2009.
Q 13Which DEC founder declared in 1977 'no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home'?
Ken Olsen
Q 21The 1996 PalmPilot made users learn which single-stroke shorthand alphabet for pen input?
Graffiti
Graffiti gave each letter a simplified glyph drawn in a dedicated input zone, and a patent suit over its resemblance to PARC's Unistrokes pushed Palm to release Graffiti 2 in 2003.
Q 22The 1982 GRiD Compass, the first portable with a clamshell design, famously flew aboard what?
The Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle carried the Compass in the early 1980s because it was powerful, light and compact, and its folding screen leads some historians to call it the first true laptop.
Q 23Who did the hands-on programming of ENIAC in 1945–46, setting its switches and cables by hand?
Six women
Ken Olsen admitted making the remark but insisted he meant computers running the household, not personal computers; the quote dogged Digital Equipment Corporation as PCs ate its minicomputer business.
Q 14How many host sites, starting with UCLA, did the initial ARPANET configuration link in 1969?
Four
Four sites formed the first ARPANET: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah, whose computing school had just recruited graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland.
Q 15The ARM chip design now in most smartphones began in 1983 at which British maker of the BBC Micro?
Acorn
Acorn Computers started the official Acorn RISC Machine project in October 1983 after its engineers saw a tiny team could design a processor; the architecture was spun off as Advanced RISC Machines in 1990.
Q 16PARC engineer Gary Starkweather invented which office machine before turning to colour management?
The laser printer
The laser printer was Starkweather's creation at PARC, the Palo Alto research centre that also produced the Alto and Ethernet; he later took his colour expertise to Apple and then Microsoft Research.
Q 17Hollerith's punched cards were partly inspired by railway conductors who marked tickets with what?
Punch photographs
Punch photographs let a conductor punch out a passenger's description — light hair, dark eyes, large nose — so a ticket could not be resold, and Hollerith said he simply made a punch photograph of each person.
Q 18Mike Sendall, Tim Berners-Lee's manager, gave what three-word verdict on his 1989 web proposal?
Vague, but exciting
'Vague, but exciting' was enough to let Berners-Lee carry on, and Robert Cailliau, who had independently proposed a hypertext system at CERN, joined him to get the web off the ground.
Q 19Which 1981 workstation was the first commercial computer sold with icons, folders and a desktop?
Xerox Star
The Xerox Star 8010 arrived three years before the Macintosh, and its designer David Canfield Smith invented the concept of computer icons and the desktop of documents and folders.
Q 20Commodore's 1977 PET was named after the Pet Rock fad; its letters were later backronymed to what?
Personal Electronic Transactor
Personal Electronic Transactor was the after-the-fact expansion; Andre Souson had suggested 'PET' after seeing the Pet Rock in Los Gatos and declaring Commodore would make the 'pet computer'.
Six women — Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman — worked out how to program ENIAC, yet most were not invited to its 50th-anniversary event in 1996.
Q 24The 1948 Manchester Baby, the first stored-program computer, was mainly a testbed for which memory?
A cathode-ray tube
A cathode-ray tube, the Williams tube, stored bits as a grid of dots on its screen and was the first truly random-access memory; the Baby was its testbed, never meant as a practical machine.
Q 25Tommy Flowers built Colossus at the Post Office Research Station in which London district?
Dollis Hill
Dollis Hill housed the Post Office's research station, where Flowers, head of its switching group, designed an electronic machine on his own initiative after the Heath Robinson's synchronised tapes left him unimpressed.
Q 26Where did Konrad Zuse build the Z1, his motor-driven binary mechanical computer, from 1936 to 1938?
In his parents' home
In his parents' home, with money from his parents, his sister Lieselotte and fraternity friends, Zuse assembled a machine that was the first freely programmable computer using binary floating point, though it proved unreliable.
Q 27What happened to the original Z3, Konrad Zuse's 1941 relay computer, on 21 December 1943?
Destroyed in an air raid
Destroyed in an air raid on Berlin, the original Z3 — first called V3, then renamed to avoid confusion with Germany's V-weapons — survives only as a working 1961 replica built by Zuse KG.
Q 28Which Cambridge mathematics chair did Charles Babbage hold from 1828, as Stephen Hawking later did?
Lucasian
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics was Babbage's title, in the chair Isaac Newton once held and that Stephen Hawking had to vacate at 67 under Cambridge's retirement rule.
Q 29Ada Lovelace's 1843 notes went with her translation of an Analytical Engine paper by which Italian?
Luigi Menabrea
Luigi Menabrea, a military engineer, wrote the article in French; Lovelace's seven notes ran far longer than it, and Menabrea went on to serve as Italy's prime minister from 1867 to 1869.
Q 30A 1973 court ruling voided the ENIAC patent, finding its inventors drew on whose earlier machine?
John Atanasoff
John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry's ABC, prototyped at Iowa State in 1939, was ruled the source of ENIAC's key ideas in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, leaving the electronic digital computer unpatented.