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60 free IBM trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This IBM trivia quiz covers the company that started out selling scales, time clocks and cheese slicers and went on to build the mainframes that ran the world. It begins with the origins: Hollerith's tabulator, Charles Flint's 1911 merger, Thomas Watson Sr. and THINK, the 1924 rename, the German subsidiary and the Order of the German Eagle, the Harvard Mark I and the M1 carbines. Then it works through the inventions and machines: the 701, RAMAC and the first hard disk, FORTRAN, the Selectric golf ball, SABRE, the $5 billion System/360, Codd's relational model, the floppy disk and the barcode on a pack of gum. The second half is the modern company: the PC and its clones, Charlie Chaplin ads, OS/2, the $8 billion loss and Gerstner's elephants, the Simon 'smartphone', Deep Blue and Kasparov, Watson's Toronto blunder, Lenovo, Red Hat, Kyndryl, Rometty and Krishna, the atoms spelled out under a microscope and six Nobel Prizes. About a third of the questions are easy; the rest are for people who know what a 1401 was. Our computer history and Apple quizzes cover the neighbours. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on IBM, its leaders, machines and inventions, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What do the letters IBM stand for?
International Business Machines
The name had first been used by the company's Canadian division before it was adopted for the whole firm in 1924.
Q 02What is IBM's long-standing nickname?
Big Blue
It comes partly from the blue logo and partly from the old dress code of white shirts and blue suits.
Q 03Where is IBM headquartered?
Armonk, New York
The company operates in over 175 countries and is one of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Q 04Under what name was IBM founded in 1911?
Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company
Charles Ranlett Flint merged four companies making scales, time clocks, tabulators and meat slicers.
Q 05In which year was CTR renamed International Business Machines?
1924
Thomas Watson Sr. hated the clumsy hyphenated name.
Q 06Which inventor's electric tabulating machine, patented in 1889, is a founding technology of IBM?
Herman Hollerith
His punched-card machines cut the processing of the 1890 US census from eight years to six.
Q 07From which company had Thomas J. Watson Sr. been fired before joining CTR in 1914?
National Cash Register
He brought NCR's sales conventions, dark-suited salesmen and evangelical company pride with him.
Q 08What one-word slogan did Thomas Watson Sr. make IBM's mantra?
THINK
He had coined it at NCR in 1911; it lives on in the ThinkPad name.
Q 09What controversial medal did Watson Sr. receive from Hitler's government at a 1937 Berlin trade congress?
The Order of the German Eagle
Critics linked it to the punched-card machines IBM's subsidiary Dehomag supplied for Nazi censuses; Watson later returned it.
Q 10What was IBM's majority-owned German subsidiary, whose machines the Nazis used, called?
Dehomag
Edwin Black's 2001 book IBM and the Holocaust documented the relationship.
Q 11What weapon did IBM manufacture as a war contractor between 1943 and 1944?
The M1 Carbine rifle
It made about 346,500 of them, 6% of all those used in the war.
Q 12The Harvard Mark I of 1944, built with IBM, was also known by what IBM name?
Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator
John von Neumann ran Manhattan Project calculations on the 51-foot machine.
Q 13What was IBM's first commercial scientific computer, announced in 1952?
The IBM 701
Known as the Defense Calculator during development, it used vacuum tubes.
Q 21Who was the chief architect of the 1964 mainframe family?
Gene Amdahl
Brooks managed the project and later wrote The Mythical Man-Month about it.
Q 22Thomas Watson Jr., who bet the company on the 1964 mainframe family, later served as US ambassador where?
The Soviet Union
Fortune called him 'the greatest capitalist in history'.
Q 23Roughly what share of computers worldwide did IBM produce in the 1960s and 1970s?
70 percent
It made 80 percent of those in the United States.
Which IBM researcher's 1970 paper introduced the relational model that underlies modern databases?
Q 14Which storage technology did the IBM 305 RAMAC introduce in 1956?
The hard disk drive
Its IBM 350 unit held data on fifty 24-inch disks, weighed about a ton and leased for $3,200 a month.
Q 15How much data did the IBM 350 storage unit of 1956 hold?
3.75 MB
That was 5 million six-bit characters; it had to be moved by forklift.
Q 16Which programming language, announced by IBM in 1957, was created by John Backus's team for the IBM 704?
FORTRAN
The name comes from Formula Translation; the first compiler was delivered in April 1957.
Q 17By the mid-1960s, roughly what share of the world's computers were IBM 1401-type systems?
Nearly half
More than 10,000 were installed at the peak.
Q 18For which airline did IBM build SABRE, the computerised booking service launched in 1964?
American Airlines
The idea came from a chance meeting between an IBM salesman and the airline's boss on a 1953 flight.
Q 19What did IBM's Selectric typewriter of 1961 use instead of individual typebars?
A rotating 'golf ball' element
Designed by Eliot Noyes, it captured 75% of the US business electric typewriter market.
Q 20On 7 April 1964 IBM launched which family of compatible computers, called its five-billion-dollar gamble?
System/360
Gene Amdahl was chief architect and Fred Brooks managed the project.
Edgar F. Codd
He won the 1981 Turing Award; SQL grew out of his work.
Q 25What size were the first floppy disks, invented by IBM in 1971?
8 inches
The 5¼ and 3½-inch formats came later.
Q 26What was the first UPC-barcoded item scanned at a checkout, in Troy, Ohio, in 1974?
A pack of Juicy Fruit gum
IBM's George Laurer designed the UPC symbol; the gum was scanned at 8:01 a.m. on 26 June 1974.
Q 27Which graphic designer created IBM's eight-bar logo in 1972?
Paul Rand
It replaced a 13-bar version because photocopiers of the day could not render the narrow stripes.
Q 28On what date was the IBM Personal Computer released?
August 12, 1981
It was built in Boca Raton, Florida, around an Intel 8088 and an open architecture.
Q 29Which processor powered the original IBM PC?
Intel 8088
Its open architecture let clone makers copy the design; the first legal clone appeared within a year.
Q 30What was the starting price of the IBM PC in 1981?
$1,565
That bought 16 KB of RAM, a keyboard and no disk drives.