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148 free Computers trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
18 free computer trivia questions with answers. Are you a computer enthusiast or tech expert? Our engaging 148-question computer trivia quiz will test your knowledge across hardware, software, internet history, and modern technology. Whether you're a casual user or IT professional, see how well you understand the machines that power our world.
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Q 01Which daughter of the poet Lord Byron is often called the first computer programmer for her notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine?
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace translated an Italian engineer's paper on the Analytical Engine in 1843 and added far longer notes of her own, including the first published step-by-step sequence of operations for the machine.
Q 02What does the acronym RAM stand for in computing?
Random Access Memory
RAM stands for Random Access Memory: any location can be read or written in about the same time regardless of where it physically sits, unlike sequential tape.
Q 03Which 1977 personal computer was one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers?
Apple II
The Apple II came ready to use, with keyboard, power supply and BASIC built into one case, where the earlier Apple I had been a bare board for hobbyists; it was sold as a computer for ordinary people.
Q 04What is the full form of CPU in the context of computer hardware?
Central Processing Unit
Central Processing Unit: early CPUs were built from many separate components, until chip designers in 1971 squeezed the whole CPU onto a single chip, the microprocessor, as nearly all are made today.
Q 05What software manages hardware and resources and provides common services for programs?
Operating System
An Operating System was a later invention: the first computers of the 1940s had none and were programmed directly, and the earliest systems of the 1950s simply ran one batch job after another.
Q 06Who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web?
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee, a CERN scientist, proposed the Web in March 1989 and by the end of 1990 had written the first browser, web server, HTML and HTTP.
Q 07What network security system controls incoming and outgoing traffic based on predetermined rules?
Firewall
A firewall borrows its name from the fireproof wall built to stop a blaze spreading through or between buildings.
Q 08What job was a computer's GPU originally designed to do?
Accelerating image rendering
Accelerating image rendering is still a GPU's core job: its many small cores work on thousands of pixels at once, a parallel design since adopted for training AI models.
Q 09In computing, what playful name is given to half a byte?
Nibble
A nibble continues the edible pun of bit and byte, since 'byte' sounds like 'bite'; it is sometimes spelled 'nybble' to match, and holds exactly one hexadecimal digit.
Q 10In computing, what is a 'byte' composed of?
8 bits
A byte is 8 bits largely thanks to IBM's System/360 of 1964, whose success made that size the standard; other machines of the 1960s used six-bit or nine-bit bytes.
Q 11What does IDE stand for in the world of programming?
Integrated Development Environment
Integrated Development Environment: 'integrated' because it combines the code editor, build tools and debugger, which programmers would otherwise run as separate programs, in one application.
Q 12What does VPN stand for?
Virtual Private Network
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network: traffic is wrapped in an encrypted tunnelling protocol so a remote user appears to be plugged straight into the private network.
Q 13In computing, what is a 'daemon'?
A background process
Q 21Which Charles Babbage design did London's Science Museum finally build from his plans in 1991?
The Difference Engine
The Difference Engine No. 2 existed only on paper in Babbage's lifetime; built for his 1991 bicentenary with no more precision than Victorian workshops could manage, it worked, settling whether his design was sound.
Q 22Alan Turing's portrait appears on which Bank of England banknote, first issued on his birthday in 2021?
The £50 note
The £50 note carrying Turing was first issued on 23 June 2021, his birthday; he had been convicted in 1952 over a homosexual relationship and received a posthumous royal pardon in 2013.
Q 23During World War II, Alan Turing worked at which British codebreaking centre?
A background process got the name at MIT in the 1960s after Maxwell's demon, the imaginary being of physics that tirelessly sorts molecules behind the scenes; Unix later inherited the term.
Q 14Which programming paradigm builds software from entities that bundle data together with the functions that act on it?
Object-Oriented Programming
Object-Oriented Programming took its classes and inheritance from Simula, written in 1960s Norway by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard to simulate real-world systems; the ideas later shaped Smalltalk and Java.
Q 15Which kind of chip is built to be configured by the customer after it leaves the factory?
FPGA
FPGA stands for Field-Programmable Gate Array: it can be reconfigured again and again, so engineers prototype new chip designs on one before committing them to an ASIC, whose logic is fixed for good.
Q 16What term describes data sets characterized by the 'three Vs' of volume, velocity and variety?
Big Data
Big Data outgrew single machines, so tools such as Google's 2004 MapReduce and the freely available Hadoop split the work across clusters of servers processing in parallel.
Q 17What type of cyberattack exploits leaked information such as timing, power use or electromagnetic emissions?
Side-channel attack
A side-channel attack lay behind Meltdown and Spectre, the notorious processor flaws: by watching side effects inside the chip, a rogue program could read passwords and other secrets held by other programs.
Q 18In cryptography, what maps data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values, used for integrity checks and password storage?
Hash function
A hash function only runs one way, so a website can store the hash of your password instead of the password itself and simply compare hashes when you log in.
Q 19ENIAC, completed in 1945, was originally built to calculate what for the US Army?
Artillery firing tables
Artillery firing tables were the Army's reason for funding ENIAC, but the war ended before it was ready, and its first real job, in December 1945, was a calculation for the hydrogen-bomb project.
Q 20Where was ENIAC formally dedicated in February 1946?
Penn
Penn unveiled ENIAC in February 1946 with a showpiece demonstration programmed by two women mathematicians, whose work went uncredited in the press coverage that hailed the machine.
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park housed the Government Code and Cypher School, where Turing led the attack on German naval messages and designed the bombe, the electromechanical machine that worked out Enigma settings.
Q 24Which device, first demonstrated at Bell Labs in December 1947, went on to replace the vacuum tube in most electronics?
The transistor
The transistor was built by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain as the phone company sought a replacement for its unreliable, power-hungry vacuum tubes; Bell Labs kept it quiet until a press conference in June 1948.
Q 25Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit in 1958 while working for which company?
Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments had hired Kilby only months earlier, so he had no holiday to take when the plant emptied for its summer break; alone in the lab he worked out the idea, and showed a working chip that September.
Q 26In 1975 Gordon Moore revised his forecast to say transistors per chip would double roughly how often?
Every two years
Every two years turned from forecast into target: chipmakers planned their research around Moore's revised 1975 figure, making his observation a self-fulfilling prophecy for decades.
Q 27Steve Jobs secured the Apple-1's first order, for 50 machines, from which retailer?
The Byte Shop
The Byte Shop ordered its 50 machines fully assembled, not as the bare boards hobbyists soldered up themselves; filling that order turned Wozniak's hobby design into Apple's first product.
Q 28The original IBM Personal Computer, model 5150, was powered by which processor?
Intel 8088
The IBM PC 5150 ran a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088; released on 12 August 1981, its open architecture spawned the PC-compatible industry.
Q 29The team that created the IBM PC worked in which Florida city?
Boca Raton
Boca Raton was home to the IBM lab whose director, William Lowe, was given a year to ship a PC; to make the deadline his team broke with company habit and built it from off-the-shelf parts.
Q 30Windows 1.0, released in November 1985, was originally developed under what working name?
Interface Manager
Interface Manager was the planned name until shortly before the 1983 announcement, when it gave way to 'Windows', after the on-screen boxes each program ran in; the product then took two more years to ship.