Microsoft Trivia
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8correct to beat the crowd
This Microsoft trivia quiz has 110 free questions with answers and runs the company's whole story: two Lakeside schoolboys bluffing MITS about an Altair BASIC interpreter, the 86-DOS purchase that became MS-DOS, the 1986 IPO that made 12,000 millionaires, Windows 1.0 through Windows 11, and the Office apps, one of which Microsoft did not even write. It covers the Xbox and Halo, Minecraft and Mojang, the Surface, Azure and the OpenAI deal, plus the products people love to mock: Microsoft Bob, Zune, Comic Sans, Clippy and the chatbot that lasted 16 hours. The early questions suit anyone who has used a PC; the later ones ask about Xenix, Forethought, Wes Cherry and the memo that turned the company toward the internet. It works for a tech-team quiz, an office icebreaker or a computing-history classroom. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and company records, and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and which childhood friend?
Paul Allen
Paul Allen, who had known Gates since their Seattle school days, had already run Traf-O-Data with him, selling a rudimentary computer for analysing road-traffic counts.
Q 02The company's name, first written with a hyphen, was coined by a co-founder from what two words?
Micro-computer software
A co-founder coined 'Micro-Soft' as a blend of micro-computer software; the hyphen went when the name was registered in New Mexico in 1976, and the company was formally established on April 4, 1975, with Gates as CEO.
Q 03Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter for which early microcomputer?
Altair 8800
Altair BASIC was written for the MITS Altair 8800; Gates told MITS he had a working interpreter before writing a line of code, yet the March 1975 demonstration worked flawlessly.
Q 04In which city was Microsoft based when it demonstrated Altair BASIC in 1975?
Albuquerque, New Mexico
MITS, the microcomputer maker that licensed its BASIC, was based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so Microsoft set up there in 1975; the company moved to the Seattle area in January 1979.
Q 05Microsoft's headquarters are in which Washington city?
Redmond
The move from Bellevue to Redmond came on February 26, 1986, weeks before the company's stock market debut.
Q 06MS-DOS began life as a product Microsoft bought from Seattle Computer Products called what?
86-DOS
Tim Paterson's 86-DOS (originally QDOS) was bought for about $75,000 in all in 1981; IBM wanted a CP/M-style system for its PC, and Microsoft crucially kept the right to license the rebranded MS-DOS to others.
Q 07Microsoft's first operating system, released in 1980 before MS-DOS, was a licensed version of what?
Unix
Called Xenix, it was licensed from AT&T a year earlier.
Q 08Windows 1.0 was released on November 20 of which year?
1985
Windows 1.0 shipped on November 20, 1985, as a graphical shell on top of MS-DOS, two years after its announcement; Microsoft was simultaneously co-developing OS/2 with IBM.
Q 09Microsoft's 1986 stock market debut is estimated to have made how many employees millionaires?
About 12,000
The rise in the stock after its NASDAQ listing on March 13, 1986, is estimated to have made about 12,000 employees millionaires and four of them billionaires.
Q 10Gates's co-founder left day-to-day work at the company in 1983 after being diagnosed with what?
Hodgkin's lymphoma
The diagnosis was Hodgkin's lymphoma, treated with radiation; he recovered and went on to own the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers, dying in 2018 of complications of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Q 11Bill Gates dropped out of which university to build Microsoft?
Harvard
Gates enrolled at Harvard in 1973 and took Math 55, the notoriously hard freshman course, before leaving in 1975 to work on Microsoft full-time.
Q 12At which private Seattle academy did the two founders meet and first get access to a computer?
Lakeside
Lakeside School's Mothers' Club bought time on a Teletype terminal in 1968, and the two future founders, two school years apart, taught themselves programming on it.
Q 13The company's text-editing application was first released in 1983 under what longer title?
Multi-Tool Word
Multi-Tool Word, renamed Microsoft Word soon after its 1983 debut, was developed by Charles Simonyi, hired from Xerox PARC; free demo copies on floppy were bundled with PC World magazine.
Q 21The animated Office Assistant everyone calls Clippy is officially named what?
Clippit
The paperclip's official name was Clippit, one of several Office Assistants alongside a cat, a dog and a robot; it became a byword for annoying software and was switched off by default in Office XP.
Q 22Windows Solitaire, included since Windows 3.0 in 1990, was programmed by whom?
An intern named Wes Cherry
An intern named Wes Cherry wrote Solitaire in 1989 and was never paid royalties for it; Susan Kare, who drew the original Macintosh icons, designed the card deck.
Q 23Windows XP's default wallpaper Bliss was photographed in 1996 in which region?
Napa and Sonoma, California
Q 14Bill Gates announced Excel in 1985 at a joint press conference with which rival?
Steve Jobs of Apple
Gates and Steve Jobs of Apple unveiled Excel together in New York that May because the first versions ran only on the Macintosh; the aim was to beat Lotus 1-2-3, which had crushed Microsoft's earlier Multiplan.
Q 15Microsoft bought PowerPoint in 1987, for about $14 million, from which company?
Forethought
Forethought Inc. of Sunnyvale, whose Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin had created the program, sold it to Microsoft in July 1987; the first version ran only on Macintosh and was designed for producing overhead transparencies.
Q 16In which year did Microsoft Office first appear for Windows?
1990
Office for Windows arrived in 1990, a year after the Macintosh bundle, and Windows 3.0 launched the same year; both products became dominant in their fields.
Q 17Which Rolling Stones song did the Windows 95 launch campaign use, a nod to the new button?
Start Me Up
'Start Me Up' ran in the Windows 95 television ads as a nod to the new Start button; the Rolling Stones took a reported multimillion-dollar fee, and the New York Times called it the splashiest product launch in industry history.
Q 18Windows 95 introduced long file names of up to how many characters?
255
Windows 95's VFAT file system allowed file names of up to 255 characters, ending the MS-DOS 8.3 limit, while keeping a short alias for older programs.
Q 19Microsoft Bob, the cartoon-house interface released in March 1995, featured which animated guide?
Rover the dog
Rover the dog was the default guide around the cartoon house; the product was discontinued in early 1996 and is regularly listed among the worst products in tech history.
Q 20Comic Sans was drawn to replace which typeface in Microsoft Bob's cartoon speech bubbles?
Times New Roman
Vincent Connare saw a 1994 Microsoft Bob beta in which cartoon characters spoke in Times New Roman speech bubbles and drew Comic Sans, modelled on comic-book lettering, as a friendlier substitute.
Charles O'Rear, a former National Geographic photographer, shot the hill on the road between Napa and Sonoma, California, on medium-format Velvia film, which is why the greens are so vivid.
Q 24Windows XP was released on October 25 of which year?
2001
Windows XP went on sale on October 25, 2001, unifying the consumer and NT lines on the NT codebase; the first Xbox followed three weeks later.
Q 25Bill Gates handed the CEO job to Steve Ballmer in January 2000 and took what new title for himself?
Chief Software Architect
Gates became Chief Software Architect, a title he held until Ray Ozzie took it in 2006, while remaining chairman; Ballmer, an old college friend who had joined in 1980, took over as CEO.
Q 26Before joining Microsoft, Steve Ballmer worked as an assistant product manager at which company?
Procter & Gamble
At Procter & Gamble he shared an office with Jeff Immelt, later CEO of General Electric; he then tried screenwriting in Hollywood and attended Stanford's business school before joining Microsoft in 1980.
Q 27Which NBA franchise did Steve Ballmer buy in 2014?
Los Angeles Clippers
Ballmer paid a then-record $2 billion for the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014, months after stepping down as Microsoft CEO in February that year.
Q 28The original Xbox launched in November 2001 alongside which game, its signature title?
Halo: Combat Evolved
Halo: Combat Evolved shipped with the console on launch day, November 15; Microsoft had bought its developer, Bungie, in June 2000 and turned the game into the Xbox's flagship launch title.
Q 29The idea for the Xbox came from four engineers on which Microsoft team?
DirectX
The name is a nod to DirectX; the console was designed to compete with Sony's PlayStation 2.
Q 30Microsoft's motion-sensing camera controller, first released in November 2010, was called what?
Kinect
Kinect launched for the Xbox 360 on November 4, 2010, and sold eight million units in its first 60 days; an upgraded version was bundled with the Xbox One in 2013.