Computer History Trivia
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100 free Computer History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 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 100 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 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 2016 film follows Black women who worked as 'human computers' at NASA during the Space Race?
Hidden Figures
Hidden Figures follows NASA's human computers, a reminder that for centuries before machines took the name, a 'computer' was a person who calculated.
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 choice, and he said a small, timid penguin had once bitten him on a visit to Canberra.
Q 03The 1975 Altair 8800 hobby computer reportedly took its name from a destination in which TV series?
Star Trek
Star Trek, in editor Les Solomon's telling, supplied the name: his daughter suggested Altair because that was where the Enterprise was headed.
Q 04On which symbolic date in 1996 did the webmail service Hotmail launch?
4 July
4 July, American Independence Day, was picked because the founders saw free email you could read from anywhere as a kind of independence.
Q 05What kind of gadget was the first BlackBerry, launched by Research In Motion in 1999?
A two-way pager
A two-way pager was the first BlackBerry, and its always-on email made it an enterprise device long before RIM courted consumers.
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 design because the draft Herman Goldstine circulated credited only him, leaving out ENIAC engineers Eckert and Mauchly.
Q 07Which electronics chain owned by Tandy sold its 1977 home computer?
Radio Shack
Radio Shack reportedly built just 3,500 at first, planning to use any unsold ones for store bookkeeping, but the TRS-80 far outsold that.
Q 08Douglas Engelbart's first mouse, patented with two wheels in 1970, had a shell made of what?
Wood
Wood housed that first mouse, and in the team's speed tests against rivals such as a joystick and a knee control, the mouse won.
Q 09Which MIT engineer, who led Apollo's on-board flight software, says she began calling her field 'software engineering'?
Margaret Hamilton
Margaret Hamilton designed priority displays that let the software interrupt astronauts with warnings, as it did during the Apollo 11 landing.
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 11Which organiser of the 1956 Dartmouth workshop that named artificial intelligence went on to create Lisp?
John McCarthy
John McCarthy's proposal rested on the conjecture that every feature of intelligence could in principle be described precisely enough for a machine to copy it.
Q 12Which country rolled out Minitel, a pre-web online service for shopping and chat, in 1982?
France
France's Minitel put banking, travel bookings and the phone directory online for millions in the 1980s, and it was only switched off in 2012.
Q 13Which DEC founder declared in 1977 'no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home'?
Ken Olsen
Ken Olsen admitted saying it but said the line was taken out of context: he meant computers that run a household, not personal computers.
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 23At which university did six women do ENIAC's hands-on programming in 1945–46, setting its switches and cables?
University of Pennsylvania
Q 14Which university became the first node of the ARPANET, the internet's forerunner, in 1969?
UCLA
UCLA sent the first message, to SRI, but the host crashed after 'l' and 'o', so the first word online was 'lo'.
Q 15Which British maker of the BBC Micro started the ARM processor project in 1983?
Acorn
Acorn chose to design its own processor after a 1983 visit showed that a tiny firm was updating the 6502 chip, and ARM was spun off in 1990.
Q 16PARC engineer Gary Starkweather invented which office machine before turning to colour management?
The laser printer
The laser printer's first working model was built by Starkweather at PARC in 1971, and the machine went on to become ubiquitous in offices.
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's windows, mouse and icons set it apart in 1981, and other computers soon copied those features, which are now standard.
Q 20Which after-the-fact expansion did Commodore give the letters of its 1977 PET computer?
Personal Electronic Transactor
Personal Electronic Transactor was the official reading, and the PET was born after Commodore bought chipmaker MOS Technology, whose engineer Chuck Peddle pushed it into computers.
The University of Pennsylvania drew ENIAC's six programmers from women doing ballistics sums by hand, yet their work was long left out of official histories.
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 is where Flowers's team built and tested Colossus, which was then taken apart, shipped to Bletchley Park and put back together.
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, on private money alone, Zuse built the first freely programmable binary floating-point computer, 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, as Stephen Hawking later did?
Lucasian
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics was Babbage's chair for more than a decade, though he neglected the teaching the post was expected to carry.
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 origin of ENIAC's key ideas in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, leaving the electronic digital computer unpatented.