Tech Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
8correct to beat the crowd
190 free Tech trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 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 190 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Apple co-founder unveiled the first iPhone at Macworld in January 2007?
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone at Macworld on 9 January 2007, calling it a phone, an iPod and an internet communicator in one; it 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 Wi-Fi Alliance, then called WECA, hired the brand consultancy Interbrand in 1999 to name its wireless networking certification; Interbrand also designed the yin-yang style logo.
Q 04The QR code was invented in 1994 by a subsidiary of which car maker, to label auto parts?
Toyota
Denso Wave, part of the Toyota group, created the QR code in 1994 to track car parts; engineer Masahiro Hara took the square pattern idea from the board game Go.
Q 05The first network email, which introduced the @ sign in addresses, was sent in which year?
1971
Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email over ARPANET in 1971, choosing the @ sign to separate the user's name from the host machine.
Q 06Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at which organisation?
CERN
Berners-Lee wrote his Web proposal in March 1989 at CERN, the particle-physics laboratory near Geneva; CERN put the Web software into the public domain in April 1993.
Q 07The Nokia 3310, launched in 2000, sold about how many units?
126 million
The Nokia 3310 sold about 126 million units, making it one of the best-selling phones ever; it shipped with Snake II and earned an 'indestructible' reputation online.
Q 08The Motorola DynaTAC, unveiled in 1983, holds what distinction?
Earliest commercial handheld cellphone
The DynaTAC 8000X was the earliest commercial handheld cellphone, priced near $4,000; Martin Cooper had made the first public handheld mobile call on a DynaTAC prototype 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
Apple's tagline was '1,000 songs in your pocket': the 5 GB hard drive held roughly that many tracks, and the first iPod worked only with Macs.
Q 10The compact disc was co-developed by Sony and which other company?
Philips
Sony and Philips jointly developed the compact disc, publishing the Red Book standard in 1980; the first players and discs went on sale in Japan in 1982.
Q 11ENIAC, the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer, was completed in which year?
1945
ENIAC was completed in 1945 and publicly dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania in February 1946, when the press called it a 'Giant Brain'; 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
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that transistor counts were doubling yearly and in 1975 revised the rate to every two years, the form now known as Moore's law.
Q 21Posts on Twitter were originally limited to how many characters?
140
Tweets were capped at 140 characters so they fit inside a 160-character SMS with room for a username; the limit doubled to 280 in 2017.
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
The message read 'Merry Christmas': engineer Neil Papworth typed it on a computer and sent it over Vodafone's network on 3 December 1992 to Richard Jarvis at a party in Newbury.
Q 14Which Rolling Stones song did Microsoft license for the Windows 95 launch, a nod to the new taskbar button?
Start Me Up
Microsoft licensed 'Start Me Up' for the August 1995 Windows 95 campaign, playing on the new Start button; reported fees ranged from about $3 million to $14 million.
Q 15Who directed Apple's famous '1984' Macintosh commercial aired during the Super Bowl?
Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott, fresh from Blade Runner, directed the '1984' commercial; it aired nationally once, during Super Bowl XVIII on 22 January 1984, and the Macintosh went on sale two days later.
Q 16The name Google is a misspelling of which mathematical term?
Googol
Googol is the number written as 1 followed by 100 zeros; Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the google.com domain in September 1997.
Q 17Amazon began in 1994 as an online store for what?
Books
Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore, run from his garage in Bellevue, Washington; the site opened in July 1995 and later branded itself 'The Everything Store'.
Q 18Facebook was launched in 2004 at which Ivy League university?
Harvard
Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com from his Harvard dorm in February 2004; it was open only to Harvard students at first, then spread to other universities.
Q 19YouTube's three founders had all previously worked at which company?
PayPal
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim all worked at PayPal before founding YouTube in February 2005; Google bought the site for $1.65 billion in November 2006.
Q 20Netflix was founded in 1997 as what kind of business?
A DVD-by-mail rental service
Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded Netflix in Scotts Valley, California in 1997 as a DVD-by-mail rental service; streaming did not arrive until 2007.
Q 24The GPS project was started by which US organisation in 1973?
The Department of Defense
The Department of Defense launched the Navstar GPS project in 1973; the 24-satellite constellation became operational in 1993, and deliberate civilian degradation ended in 2000.
Q 25The widely known 1999 emoji set was created by Shigetaka Kurita for which Japanese mobile carrier?
NTT DoCoMo
Shigetaka Kurita drew the 176-character set for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service in 1999; a 1997 SoftBank phone set was later found to predate it.
Q 26ChatGPT hit 100,000,000 monthly users how long after its November 2022 launch?
Two months
ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022 and analysts estimated it passed 100 million monthly users in January 2023, about two months later, a record pace for a consumer app at the time.
Q 27The Roomba robot vacuum, introduced in 2002, is made by which company?
iRobot
iRobot, founded in 1990 by three MIT roboticists, built military PackBot robots before launching the Roomba in 2002.
Q 28The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the development of what technology?
Lithium-ion batteries
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
Douglas Engelbart of SRI gave the 9 December 1968 demo in San Francisco, showing the mouse alongside hypertext, video conferencing and windows decades before they were common.
Q 30The QWERTY layout comes from the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, sold from 1874 by which company?
E. Remington and Sons
E. Remington and Sons, the gunmaker, put the Sholes and Glidden typewriter on sale in 1874; QWERTY is simply the first six letters of its top row.