Microsoft Trivia
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8correct to beat the crowd
This Microsoft trivia quiz has 109 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 109 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 02Microsoft's name, first written with a hyphen, was coined by a co-founder from what two words?
Micro-computer software
Micro-computer software was squeezed into 'Micro-Soft' when the company was founded in 1975; the hyphen had gone by late 1976, when the name was officially registered.
Q 03Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter for which early microcomputer?
Altair 8800
Altair 8800 maker MITS was offered a demo before the interpreter existed; written on a simulator, with no Altair to test on, it worked flawlessly at MITS in March 1975.
Q 04In which city was Microsoft founded in 1975?
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Albuquerque, New Mexico was home to MITS, the microcomputer maker that licensed Microsoft's first product, so the founders set up beside it; the company left for the Seattle area in January 1979.
Q 05Microsoft's headquarters are in which Washington city?
Redmond
Redmond became home in February 1986, weeks before Microsoft went public; the first campus was six buildings for 800 staff, and the company is now by far the city's largest employer.
Q 06MS-DOS began life as a product Microsoft bought from Seattle Computer Products called what?
86-DOS
86-DOS, nicknamed QDOS for 'Quick and Dirty Operating System', cost Microsoft about $75,000 in two payments; renamed MS-DOS for the IBM PC, it stayed Microsoft's to sell to rival PC makers.
Q 07Microsoft's first operating system, announced in 1980 before MS-DOS, was a licensed version of what?
Unix
Unix reached Microsoft under an AT&T licence; the company sold its version as Xenix and later handed it on to its partner, the Santa Cruz Operation.
Q 08Which stock exchange listed Microsoft when the company went public in March 1986?
Nasdaq
Nasdaq listed Microsoft on March 13, 1986 at $21 a share; the rise that followed is estimated to have made about 10,000 employees millionaires by 2000.
Q 09Gates'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 10Bill Gates dropped out of which university to build Microsoft?
Harvard
Harvard got him back in 2007 to collect an honorary degree, when he joked that he had waited more than 30 years to tell his father he would come back and get it.
Q 11At which private Seattle academy did Microsoft's two founders meet and first get access to a computer?
Lakeside
Lakeside School's Mothers' Club used rummage-sale money to buy a Teletype terminal and computer time, and the two future founders, two class years apart, taught themselves to program on it.
Q 12Which Microsoft program, launched in 1983, was given away on a demo disk with PC World magazine?
Word
Word began as Multi-Tool Word, led by Charles Simonyi, whom Microsoft had hired from Xerox PARC, where he built Bravo, the first what-you-see-is-what-you-get word processor.
Q 13Bill Gates announced Excel in 1985 at a joint press conference with which rival?
Steve Jobs of Apple
Q 21Which Windows game was written by a summer intern, Wes Cherry, with cards drawn by Macintosh icon designer Susan Kare?
Solitaire
Solitaire shipped with Windows 3.0 in 1990, partly to get nervous newcomers used to dragging and dropping; Cherry's version had a 'boss key' that hid the game, which he was asked to remove.
Q 22Windows XP's default wallpaper Bliss was photographed in 1996 in which region?
Napa and Sonoma, California
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 23The XP in Windows XP, released in 2001, is short for what?
Experience
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 14Which program did Microsoft gain in 1987 by buying its maker, Forethought, for about $14 million?
PowerPoint
PowerPoint was just three months old and ran only on the Macintosh, turning out overhead transparencies rather than slideshows; the Windows version waited until 1990.
Q 15Office 2007 replaced the old menus and toolbars with which tabbed strip?
Ribbon
The Ribbon was built to make Office's features easier to discover, grouping commands under tabs instead of burying them in menus; Windows' own Paint and WordPad later adopted it.
Q 16Which Rolling Stones song did the Windows 95 launch campaign use, a nod to the new button?
Start Me Up
'Start Me Up' sold the new Start button in the TV ads; press reports put the Rolling Stones' fee as high as $14 million, though Microsoft said it had paid about $3 million.
Q 17Windows 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 18Microsoft Bob (1995) featured which animated guide, later the default search companion in Windows XP?
Rover the dog
Rover the dog outlived Bob, which was dropped within a year; Melinda Gates, its marketing manager, later said it had needed a more powerful computer than most people owned.
Q 19Comic Sans was drawn to replace which typeface in Microsoft Bob's cartoon speech bubbles?
Times New Roman
Times New Roman looked too formal to designer Vincent Connare, who modelled Comic Sans on comic-book lettering; it was finished too late for Bob and first shipped in other Microsoft software.
Q 20The animated Office Assistant everyone calls Clippy is officially named what?
Clippit
Clippit was the paperclip's official name; Office XP switched him off by default in 2001, and Microsoft's own launch campaign joked that he was out of a job.
Experience was the pitch: XP put home users on the sturdier NT core built for businesses, retiring the DOS-based line that ended with Windows Me.
Q 24Bill Gates handed the CEO job to Steve Ballmer in January 2000 and took what new title for himself?
Chief Software Architect
Chief Software Architect kept Gates on the product side while Ballmer ran the company; he passed the title to Ray Ozzie in June 2006, when he announced his shift toward full-time philanthropy.
Q 25Before 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 26Which NBA franchise did Steve Ballmer buy in 2014?
Los Angeles Clippers
Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling had just been banned from the NBA for life over racist remarks, forcing a sale; Ballmer's $2 billion bid won months after he stepped down as Microsoft's chief executive.
Q 27The 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 28The 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 29Microsoft's motion-sensing camera controller, first released in November 2010, was called what?
Kinect
Kinect sold eight million units in 60 days, but bundling its successor with the Xbox One made that console $100 dearer than the PlayStation 4, and Microsoft unbundled it within a year.
Q 30Which Microsoft music player, launched in 2006 to take on the iPod, was discontinued in 2011?
Zune
Zune was built with Toshiba on its Gigabeat S player; its headline trick was beaming songs wirelessly to another Zune, yet a shared track expired after three plays or three days.