IBM Trivia
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57 free IBM trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This IBM trivia quiz covers the company that started out selling scales, time clocks and cheese slicers and went on to build the mainframes that ran the world. It begins with the origins: Hollerith's tabulator, Charles Flint's 1911 merger, Thomas Watson Sr. and THINK, the 1924 rename, the German subsidiary and the Order of the German Eagle, the Harvard Mark I and the M1 carbines. Then it works through the inventions and machines: the 701, RAMAC and the first hard disk, FORTRAN, the Selectric golf ball, SABRE, the $5 billion System/360, Codd's relational model, the floppy disk and the barcode on a pack of gum. The second half is the modern company: the PC and its clones, Charlie Chaplin ads, OS/2, the $8 billion loss and Gerstner's elephants, the Simon 'smartphone', Deep Blue and Kasparov, Watson's Toronto blunder, Lenovo, Red Hat, Kyndryl, Rometty and Krishna, the atoms spelled out under a microscope and six Nobel Prizes. About a third of the questions are easy; the rest are for people who know what a 1401 was. Our computer history and Apple quizzes cover the neighbours. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on IBM, its leaders, machines and inventions, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What do the letters IBM stand for?
International Business Machines
International Business Machines: under Thomas J. Watson Sr., the company's revenue doubled within four years of his arrival.
Q 02Where is IBM headquartered?
Armonk, New York
The company operates in over 175 countries and is one of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Q 03Under what name was IBM founded in 1911?
Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company
Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company: the financier Charles Ranlett Flint engineered the 1911 merger that created it.
Q 04Where was the IBM name used before the company adopted it in 1924?
Canada
Canada: once the company had expanded abroad, Watson took that more expansive name for the whole firm.
Q 05Which inventor's punched-card census machine, patented in 1889, is a founding technology of IBM?
Herman Hollerith
Herman Hollerith: the Census Office leased a fleet of his machines, and the 1890 count finished months ahead of schedule and under budget.
Q 06At which company did Thomas J. Watson Sr. spend over a decade in sales before joining IBM's forerunner in 1914?
National Cash Register
National Cash Register: he and other executives there were convicted over anti-competitive sales practices, but the verdict was overturned in 1915.
Q 07What one-word slogan did Thomas Watson Sr. make IBM's mantra?
THINK
THINK: Watson had used the motto before joining IBM, and IBM's THINK-stamped notepads later inspired the name of the ThinkPad laptop.
Q 08What controversial medal did Watson Sr. receive from Hitler's government at a 1937 Berlin trade congress?
The Order of the German Eagle
The Order of the German Eagle: Watson later sent the medal back to Germany, in 1940.
Q 09What was IBM's German subsidiary, whose machines the Nazis used, called?
Dehomag
Dehomag: its punch-card machines processed Nazi censuses, including the 1939 count that recorded who was Jewish.
Q 10What weapon did IBM manufacture as a war contractor between 1943 and 1944?
The M1 Carbine rifle
The M1 Carbine rifle: Thomas Watson Sr. capped IBM's profit on war products at 1% and put it into a fund for widows and orphans of IBM war casualties.
Q 11The Harvard Mark I of 1944, built with IBM, was also known by what IBM name?
Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator
Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator: after it reached Harvard in 1944, it spent the rest of the war computing for the US Navy.
Q 12What was IBM's first commercial scientific computer, announced in 1952?
The IBM 701
The IBM 701: work on it began after the Korean War broke out, and it was known as the Defense Calculator during development.
Q 13Which storage technology did the IBM 305 RAMAC introduce in 1956?
The hard disk drive
Q 21Thomas Watson Jr., who bet IBM on its 1964 mainframe family, later served as US ambassador to which country?
The Soviet Union
The Soviet Union: in retirement he pressed for nuclear arms reduction, and Jimmy Carter sent him to Moscow as ambassador in 1979.
Q 22What nickname did IBM's much smaller 1960s mainframe rivals, such as Burroughs, UNIVAC and Honeywell, share?
Seven Dwarfs
Seven Dwarfs: after GE and RCA quit computers, the five survivors became known by their initials as the BUNCH.
Q 23Which IBM researcher's 1970 paper introduced the relational model that underlies modern databases?
Edgar F. Codd
Edgar F. Codd: IBM was slow to build on his model, and Larry Ellison's Oracle beat IBM to market with a relational database.
The hard disk drive: RAMAC let businesses reach any record directly for real-time accounting, and every hard disk since descends from it.
Q 14How many characters could the IBM 350 storage unit of 1956 hold?
5 million
5 million: a RAMAC computer using this unit later handled the data processing at the 1960 Winter Olympics.
Q 15Which programming language, announced by IBM in 1957, was created by John Backus's team for the IBM 704?
FORTRAN
FORTRAN: Backus, frustrated by the complexity and cost of programming, later said much of his work came from being lazy.
Q 16About how many IBM 1401 computers were installed at its mid-1960s peak?
About 10,000
About 10,000: IBM had received 5,200 orders in the first five weeks, more than it had forecast for the machine's whole life.
Q 17For which airline did IBM build SABRE, the computerised booking system?
American Airlines
American Airlines: the project grew from a chance 1953 flight on which IBM salesman Blair Smith sat beside the airline's president, C. R. Smith.
Q 18What did IBM's Selectric typewriter of 1961 use instead of individual typebars?
A rotating 'golf ball' element
A rotating 'golf ball' element: typists could swap in a different ball to change fonts, even within the same document.
Q 19On 7 April 1964 IBM launched which family of compatible computers, called its five-billion-dollar gamble?
System/360
System/360: the bet paid off quickly, and its design became a de facto standard for the whole industry.
Q 20Who was the chief architect of IBM's 1964 mainframe family?
Gene Amdahl
Gene Amdahl: he later left IBM and founded Amdahl Corporation, which sold cheaper mainframes that could run IBM's software.
Q 24What size were the first floppy disks, invented by IBM in 1971?
8 inches
8 inches: IBM designed it as a way to load instructions into its machines.
Q 25What was the first UPC-barcoded item scanned at a checkout, in Troy, Ohio, in 1974?
A pack of Juicy Fruit gum
A pack of Juicy Fruit gum: its barcode used IBM engineer George Laurer's design of bars, chosen over a bull's-eye symbol that smeared in printing.
Q 26Which graphic designer created IBM's eight-bar logo in 1972?
Paul Rand
Paul Rand: he split the letters into horizontal lines to make IBM's mark look more dynamic.
Q 27What did IBM's Boca Raton team build the first IBM PC from?
Off-the-shelf parts
Off-the-shelf parts: though IBM had designed and made nearly everything it sold, the team used other makers' parts and published the specifications.
Q 28Which processor powered the original IBM PC?
Intel 8088
Intel 8088: the same chip went into many IBM-compatible clones, and those rivals soon eroded IBM's hold on the PC market.
Q 29Which silent-film character was licensed for the IBM PC's advertising campaign?
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp: IBM's ad agency wanted a simple, friendly Everyman, under the theme Keeping Up With Modern Times.
Q 30Which operating system did IBM and Microsoft agree in 1985 to develop together?
OS/2
OS/2: the partners fell out in 1990, IBM carried on alone, and OS/2 lost the market to Microsoft's Windows.