Information Technology
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Information Technology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Information and communication technology is the machinery of modern life: the devices in our pockets, the networks that join them and the software that runs on top. Most of it is younger than people think, and a surprising amount of it began as a side project, an accident or a joke. This quiz covers ICT the way a good general course would. There are questions on the pioneers of the telegraph, radio and television, the engineers behind computing and the internet, the companies that grew out of garages and student projects, and the everyday terms whose origins almost nobody knows. It suits students revising ICT, teachers and quiz hosts who want a ready-made round, and anyone who uses technology all day and wonders where it came from. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up a story whether or not you get it right.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What everyday object did the world's first webcam watch at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory from 1991?
A coffee pot
A coffee pot was the star: a camera was aimed at it so nobody trekked to the Trojan Room only to find it empty. The last of the machines was auctioned on eBay for £3,350.
Q 02Which Hollywood star co-invented a frequency-hopping radio guidance system for torpedoes with composer George Antheil?
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, long after her wartime patent had expired. Frequency hopping went on to become a standard technique in wireless communications.
Q 03What product carried the first barcode ever scanned at a shop checkout, at a Marsh supermarket in Ohio in 1974?
Chewing gum
Chewing gum made retail history when a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit crossed the scanner at 8:01 a.m. on 26 June 1974. A facsimile of the pack went on display at the Smithsonian.
Q 04Which piece of internet slang comes from a 1970 Monty Python sketch featuring singing Vikings?
Spam
Spam took its name from a sketch in which a restaurant serves the luncheon meat in almost every dish while Vikings sing about it. Early chat-room pranksters flooded screens with lines from it.
Q 05Which short-range wireless technology is named after a tenth-century king who united the scattered tribes of Denmark?
Bluetooth
Bluetooth borrows the epithet of King Harald, because the standard was meant to unite devices as he united Denmark. Intel's Jim Kardach proposed it in 1997 after hearing tales from a Viking novel.
Q 06Which scannable label technology did engineers at Japan's Denso Wave invent in 1994 to track car parts in factories?
QR code
QR code is short for quick-response code, and its square pattern was inspired by the black and white stones on a Go board. Ordinary striped labels kept failing under factory oil stains.
Q 07Which company, founded as a pulp mill in 1865, was the world's largest mobile phone vendor for a decade from 1998?
Nokia
Nokia had long been known for rubber and cables before it turned to telecoms. The Finnish Rubber Works, later part of the group, built its factory beside the town of Nokia in 1904.
Q 08What two-word greeting was the world's first SMS text, sent by engineer Neil Papworth over Vodafone's UK network?
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas was typed on a personal computer and sent to the Orbitel 901 handset of Vodafone's Richard Jarvis on 3 December 1992, three weeks before the day itself.
Q 09Which obsolete storage medium, first made in an eight-inch size in 1971, survives as the save icon in many programs?
Floppy disk
Floppy disk icons have outlived the disks: Sony ended domestic sales of its last 3½-inch models in 2011. The first version, eight inches across, was a read-only device for loading microcode.
Q 10Which company was founded in 1997 by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings as a service renting DVDs by post?
Netflix
Netflix started in Scotts Valley, California, and did not launch streaming until January 2007. Its monthly subscription arrived in 1999, replacing a fee for every disc rented.
Q 11Which English computer scientist proposed the World Wide Web in March 1989 while working at the CERN physics laboratory?
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee gave his idea away freely, with no patent and no royalties due, which let anyone build on it. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 2004.
Q 12Which keyboard symbol did Ray Tomlinson choose in 1971 to separate user from machine in email addresses?
The at sign
The at sign was relatively obscure when Tomlinson picked it; in 2010 it joined the Museum of Modern Art's design collection. His first test emails went between two computers placed side by side.
Q 13Which invention did Alexander Graham Bell patent in March 1876 but refuse to keep in his own study?
The telephone
Q 21What was Samuel Morse's established profession before he helped invent the telegraph and the code named after him?
Portrait painter
Portrait painter was Morse's trade until middle age, when he turned to telegraphy. His first idea for a code gave way to an alphabet-based one credited to his partner Alfred Vail.
Q 22Which inventor reported hearing the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901 through an antenna hung from a kite?
Guglielmo Marconi
Guglielmo Marconi listened in Newfoundland for the letter S, sent about 3,500 km from Poldhu in Cornwall. Storms had damaged his planned receiving station at Cape Cod, so he set up a temporary one.
Q 23Which science fiction author proposed in 1945 that geostationary satellites could relay communications worldwide?
The telephone struck Bell as an intrusion on his real work as a scientist. His mother and his wife were both deaf, which shaped a lifetime of research into speech and sound.
Q 14Which company employed Martin Cooper when he made the first handheld mobile phone call in Manhattan in 1973?
Motorola
Motorola's Cooper rang his counterpart at rival Bell Labs from the sidewalk to make the point. The first handset weighed 1.1 kg and needed a 10-hour recharge after 30 minutes of talk.
Q 15Which software company did Bill Gates and Paul Allen found in 1975 to sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800?
Microsoft
Microsoft began as 'Micro-Soft', Allen's shorthand for microcomputer software. Allen flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1975 to demonstrate their interpreter to the Altair's maker.
Q 16Which search engine grew out of BackRub, a 1996 research project by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin?
Google got its name from a misspelling of googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, to signal how much of the web it meant to search. It was incorporated in a friend's garage in 1998.
Q 17Which language gave Wikipedia the word 'wiki', taken by Ward Cunningham from the name of an airport shuttle bus?
Hawaiian
Hawaiian for quick, 'wiki' stuck with Cunningham after a Honolulu airport employee sent him to the Wiki Wiki Shuttle. In 1995 he chose it over calling his editable website quick-web.
Q 18Which video-sharing site's first upload, in April 2005, showed co-founder Jawed Karim standing at San Diego Zoo?
YouTube
YouTube was founded by three former PayPal employees, and that first clip, titled 'Me at the zoo', can still be watched. A Nike advert became its first video to reach a million views.
Q 19Which pointing device did Douglas Engelbart first demonstrate publicly in 1968 during the Mother of All Demos?
Mouse
Mouse was a nickname that likely came from the cord, which trailed behind the device like a tail. In his 1963 notebook Engelbart had first called the idea a 'bug'.
Q 20Which keyboard layout did newspaper editor Christopher Latham Sholes devise in the early 1870s for his typewriter?
QWERTY
QWERTY spread with the success of Remington's typewriters, sold from 1874. German keyboards mostly use QWERTZ and French ones AZERTY, each named after the first six letters of its top row.
Arthur C. Clarke
The idea first appeared in a letter to Wireless World magazine. The geostationary orbit, 36,000 kilometres above the equator, is sometimes called the Clarke orbit after Arthur C. Clarke.
Q 24Which Scottish inventor built the first working television set from a hatbox, darning needles and a used tea chest?
John Logie Baird
John Logie Baird demonstrated his mechanical system on 26 January 1926, the year after showing moving silhouettes to shoppers at Selfridges in London. He later demonstrated the first colour system too.
Q 25Which cable technology won Charles Kao a 2009 Nobel Prize after he traced its signal losses to material impurities?
Optical fibre
Optical fibre carries data as light, and in the 1960s Kao showed that its losses came from impure glass rather than a flaw in the idea. He was knighted a year after his Nobel.
Q 26Which satellite navigation system did Ronald Reagan open to civilians after Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down?
GPS
GPS signals for civilians were at first deliberately blurred to about 100 metres. The error was switched off during the Gulf War because so many US soldiers were carrying civilian receivers.
Q 27Which animal is Tux, the official mascot of the Linux kernel that Linus Torvalds first released in 1991?
A penguin
A penguin was Torvalds's own idea: he claims to have caught 'penguinitis' after one nibbled him at a zoo in Canberra, Australia, in 1993.
Q 28Which mobile operating system named its early versions after sweet treats such as Cupcake, Donut, Eclair and Froyo?
Android
Android dropped its dessert names in 2019 with version 10. The company behind it was founded in Palo Alto in 2003 by Andy Rubin and Chris White, who first set out to build software for digital cameras.
Q 29Which Apple product did Steve Jobs unveil at Macworld in January 2007 after two years of development in secrecy?
iPhone
iPhone was pitched by Jobs as three devices in one: a widescreen music player, a mobile handset and an internet communicator. It grew from his wish for a touchscreen worked by fingers, not a stylus.
Q 30Which company, founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 under the name Cadabra, began as an online bookstore?
Amazon
Amazon moved into cloud computing in 2006, launching its S3 storage service in March and its EC2 service in August. Bezos had moved from New York City to Bellevue, Washington, to start the shop.