140 free Tech trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
55 free tech trivia questions with answers. This tech trivia quiz is about the technology people actually use and argue about: phones, the web, wireless standards, social networks, games, gadgets and the AI systems that keep beating humans at things. It covers the founding stories of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook, the first email, text message and mobile phone call, the origins of names like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Google, and the pioneers from Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing to Grace Hopper and Hedy Lamarr. Easy questions cover things anyone with a smartphone will know; the hard ones reach into the history of ENIAC, the Deep Blue rematch, the first ATM and the Bitcoin pizza. It is a good fit for an office quiz, a STEM classroom warm-up or a pub round where the engineers finally get their revenge. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and reference sources, and each question shows an explanation and its citation once you answer.
30 of 140 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Apple co-founder unveiled the first iPhone at Macworld in January 2007?
Steve Jobs
He called it a revolution for the mobile phone industry, and the phone went on sale that June.
Q 02The short-range wireless standard Bluetooth is named after what?
A Viking king
Intel's Jim Kardach proposed the codename in 1997 after reading about Harald Bluetooth, the tenth-century king who united Denmark.
Q 03The name Wi-Fi was coined in 1999 by whom?
The brand consultancy Interbrand
The name is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance, and whether it was ever really short for 'wireless fidelity' is still disputed.
Q 04The QR code was invented in 1994 by a subsidiary of which car maker, to label auto parts?
Toyota
Masahiro Hara of Denso Wave based the position-marker pattern on the black and white counters of a Go board.
Q 05The first network email, which introduced the @ sign in addresses, was sent in which year?
1971
It travelled over ARPANET, the US defence research network that became the technical foundation of the internet.
Q 06Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at which organisation?
CERN
He wanted a better way to store, find and share documents across the sprawling physics lab, and opened the Web to the public in 1993.
Q 07The Nokia 3310, launched in 2000, sold about how many units?
126 million
Its tough casing earned it a reputation online as 'indestructible', and it shipped with the game Snake II.
Q 08The Motorola DynaTAC, unveiled in 1983, holds what distinction?
Earliest commercial handheld cellphone
Motorola's Martin Cooper had made the first publicised handheld mobile call on a prototype ten years earlier, in April 1973.
Q 09The first iPod, launched in 2001, was sold on the promise of putting how many songs in your pocket?
1,000
It had a 5 GB hard drive and was only Mac-compatible; Tony Fadell was recruited to build it after pitching a better MP3 player.
Q 10The compact disc was co-developed by Sony and which other company?
Philips
It launched in Japan in 1982, and a standard disc holds about 74 minutes of audio.
Q 11ENIAC, the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer, was completed in which year?
1945
The press called it a 'Giant Brain' when it was dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania, and its first programmers were six women.
Q 12The transistor was invented in 1947 at which research laboratory?
Bell Labs
Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for it.
Q 13Moore's law observes that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every how long?
Two years
Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, first made the observation in 1965 and expected it to hold for about a decade.
Q 21Posts on Twitter were originally limited to how many characters?
140
The limit doubled in 2017, and the service was renamed X in 2023.
Q 22Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and which co-founder?
Larry Sanger
It began as a side project to Nupedia, an expert-written encyclopedia that never took off.
Q 23The first text message, sent in December 1992, read what?
Merry Christmas
Engineer Neil Papworth sent it from a computer over the Vodafone network to a colleague at a party in Newbury.
The GPS project was started by which US organisation in 1973?
Q 14Which Rolling Stones song did Microsoft license for the Windows 95 launch, a nod to the new taskbar button?
Start Me Up
Reports put the fee at between $8 million and $14 million.
Q 15The Apple Macintosh was introduced by a famous TV commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl. Who directed it?
Ridley Scott
The ad ran once nationally, and the computer went on sale two days later.
Q 16The name Google is a misspelling of which mathematical term?
Googol
A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros; the founders first ran the company from Susan Wojcicki's garage.
Q 17Amazon began in 1994 as an online store for what?
Books
Jeff Bezos founded it in Bellevue, Washington, and later positioned it as 'The Everything Store'.
Q 18Facebook was launched in 2004 at which Ivy League university?
Harvard
It was open only to that campus at first, then spread to other North American universities.
Q 19YouTube's three founders had all previously worked at which company?
PayPal
Google bought the site in November 2006, less than two years after it was founded, for $1.65 billion.
Q 20Netflix was founded in 1997 as what kind of business?
A DVD-by-mail rental service
Streaming did not launch until 2007, a decade after Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings started the company in Scotts Valley, California.
The Department of Defense
The full constellation of 24 satellites became operational in 1993, and civilian accuracy was deliberately degraded until 2000.
Q 25The widely known 1999 emoji set was created by Shigetaka Kurita for which Japanese mobile carrier?
NTT DoCoMo
A 1997 SoftBank set was later found to predate it, and in 2015 Oxford Dictionaries made the crying-laughing emoji its word of the year.
Q 26ChatGPT hit 100,000,000 monthly users how long after its November 2022 launch?
Two months
The chatbot is built on OpenAI's generative pre-trained transformer models and runs on a freemium model.
Q 27The Roomba robot vacuum, introduced in 2002, is made by which company?
iRobot
The company had roots in MIT robotics research and military robots before it turned to housework.
Q 28The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the development of what technology?
Lithium-ion batteries
Since the first commercial cells were sold in 1991, their energy density has tripled and their cost has fallen tenfold.
Q 29Who first publicly demonstrated a computer mouse in the 1968 Mother of All Demos?
Douglas Engelbart
The same demo showed off hypertext, video conferencing and windows, decades before they were common.
Q 30The QWERTY keyboard layout comes from a typewriter sold from 1874 by which company?
E. Remington and Sons
The name is simply the first six letters of the top row, and the layout is still the de facto standard 150 years on.