Silicon Valley Trivia
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122 free Silicon Valley trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Silicon Valley trivia quiz covers both things people mean by the name. Most of it is the real place: the Santa Clara Valley that was once the Valley of Heart's Delight, Frederick Terman and Stanford, the garage on Addison Avenue where Hewlett-Packard began, William Shockley's lab and the traitorous eight who left to found Fairchild, Intel's first microprocessor, the venture firms of Sand Hill Road, Xerox PARC, the Homebrew Computer Club and the dot-com bubble. The rest is Mike Judge's HBO comedy: Richard Hendricks, Pied Piper, Hooli, Erlich Bachman and the finale that made the team crash their own launch. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who follows tech, a third need a working knowledge of the region's history and the show's plot, and the rest reward the people who know which journalist popularised the name, who the first tenant of Stanford Industrial Park was and which cast member's early death shaped season one. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the region, the HP Garage, the traitorous eight and the series before publishing, and each question carries the sentence that establishes it. If you think one is wrong, use the report button and we will look again.
30 of 122 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Silicon Valley is a nickname for roughly the same ground as which California valley?
Santa Clara
Santa Clara Valley, at the south end of San Francisco Bay, is the original ground, but the nickname outgrew it and now also stands for tech firms across the whole Bay Area.
Q 02What was Silicon Valley's nickname in the decades when fruit orchards covered it?
The Valley of Heart's Delight
The Valley of Heart's Delight was named for its orchards and their spring blossom; from the 1960s the electronics boom turned the farmland into suburbs and office parks.
Q 03Which arcade game, test-run in a Silicon Valley bar in 1972, became Atari's first hit?
Pong
Pong's prototype stopped working two weeks after it went into Andy Capp's Tavern; engineer Al Alcorn opened it up and found the coin box jammed full of quarters.
Q 04Which products, the region's founding industry, put the 'silicon' in Silicon Valley?
Transistors and chips
Transistors and chips are built on silicon, a semiconductor; William Shockley's bet that it would beat the germanium most rivals used brought the industry to the valley in 1956.
Q 05Which Stanford engineering dean, who urged graduates to start companies, is called a father of Silicon Valley?
Frederick Terman
Frederick Terman urged his students Bill Hewlett and David Packard to start a firm nearby rather than leave California, helped such start-ups find funding, then leased Stanford land to tech companies.
Q 06Which company's San Jose laboratory built the first commercial hard disk drive, shipped in 1956?
IBM
IBM built it so that business accounts could be looked up at once instead of being sorted from punched cards and tape; its fifty spinning disks together held under four megabytes.
Q 07At what address is the HP Garage, the private museum billed as the Birthplace of Silicon Valley?
367 Addison Avenue
367 Addison Avenue's one-car garage came with a house rented in 1938; Hewlett and Packard started there with $538 and built their first product, an audio oscillator, on its bench.
Q 08What decided whose name came first in Hewlett-Packard?
A coin toss
A coin toss settled it when the two friends formalised their partnership in 1939; they numbered their first product the 200A so that the young firm would look long established.
Q 09Hangar One at Moffett Field, one of the world's largest freestanding structures, was built in the 1930s to house what?
A Navy airship
A Navy airship, USS Macon, a flying aircraft carrier that carried up to five small biplanes; it was lost in a storm off the California coast after less than two years in service.
Q 10Which aerospace firm opened its Missiles and Space plant in Sunnyvale, beside Moffett Field, in the 1950s?
Lockheed
Lockheed arrived in Sunnyvale in 1956, the year it won the contract for the Navy's Polaris submarine missile, so defence work was a mainstay of the valley well before personal computers.
Q 11Hewlett-Packard's first big customer bought eight audio oscillators to test the sound of which Disney film?
Fantasia
Fantasia was the first commercial film released in stereo, and Disney bought the oscillators, the young firm's first product, to test the sound equipment the film needed.
Q 12Why did William Shockley move his new semiconductor lab to Mountain View in 1956?
To be near his mother in Palo Alto
To be near his mother in Palo Alto: a family reason put the first company working on silicon devices in the valley, and engineers he hired went on to start most of its chip firms.
Q 13By what name are the engineers who quit Shockley's lab in 1957 to form Fairchild Semiconductor remembered?
Q 21When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March 2023, it was the biggest US bank failure since which lender's in 2008?
Washington Mutual
Washington Mutual is still the largest American bank ever to fail; Silicon Valley Bank went under in two days, after its customers pulled out $42 billion in a single day.
Q 22Silicon Valley's best-known club of computer hobbyists held its first meeting in March 1975 in what kind of place?
A garage
A garage belonging to co-founder Gordon French: the hobbyists came to look over a newly arrived kit computer, and the club soon outgrew the space and moved to a physics-lab auditorium.
Q 23Where was the Apple I first previewed?
The traitorous eight
The traitorous eight is a label often credited to Shockley himself, who called their exit a betrayal; two of them, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, went on to found Intel.
Q 14Which San Jose-based online marketplace made its first sale in 1995, a broken laser pointer?
eBay
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar wrote to warn the winning bidder that the pointer did not work; the buyer replied that he collected broken laser pointers.
Q 15Which of the eight Fairchild founders later co-founded a famous venture firm bearing his name?
Eugene Kleiner
Eugene Kleiner led the hunt for money in 1957, flying to New York to find investors for the breakaway; fifteen years later he co-founded the venture firm Kleiner Perkins.
Q 16Robert Noyce's silicon chip of 1959 came months after the first integrated circuit, built by which Texas Instruments engineer?
Jack Kilby
Jack Kilby's 1958 chip was made of germanium with its parts joined by fine gold wires; Noyce's design put the connections on the chip itself, which made mass production practical.
Q 17Which chip, released in 1971, was the first commercially produced microprocessor?
Intel 4004
Intel 4004 began as a commission from the Japanese firm Busicom, which wanted a set of chips for its calculators; Intel's engineers answered by putting the whole processor on one chip.
Q 18On which street beside Stanford University are Silicon Valley's venture capital firms famously clustered?
Sand Hill Road
Sand Hill Road has become shorthand for venture capital itself, much as Wall Street stands for stocks; at the dot-com peak its offices rented for more than Manhattan's.
Q 19Which streaming giant has its headquarters in the Silicon Valley town of Los Gatos?
Netflix
Netflix began in 1997 by posting DVDs to its customers; in 2000 the video chain Blockbuster turned down the chance to buy it for $50 million.
Q 20What feature of California law let Valley workers hop between employers, unlike Boston's Route 128?
Unenforceable non-compete clauses
Unenforceable non-compete clauses are a California rarity, since most states uphold such contracts; an engineer there could quit for a rival or a start-up and take his know-how along.
The Homebrew Computer Club
The Homebrew Computer Club saw it first because Steve Wozniak meant to give the design away to his fellow members; Steve Jobs persuaded him that they should sell it instead.
Q 24Douglas Engelbart's 1968 presentation of the mouse and hypertext tools is now known by what name?
The Mother of All Demos
The Mother of All Demos ran for 90 minutes: Engelbart worked from the stage in San Francisco while his team, back at the lab, joined him live over two microwave video links.
Q 25Which research centre pioneered graphical user interfaces, Ethernet and laser printers in the 1970s?
Xerox PARC
Xerox PARC's inventions led directly to 3Com and Adobe and indirectly to Apple's Macintosh, while Xerox itself made little of its computing breakthroughs.
Q 26Which company grew out of routing multiple protocols over Stanford's campus network?
Cisco
Cisco was started by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who ran computer facilities at Stanford and turned the campus's multi-protocol router into a product.
Q 27Which university sent the ARPANET's first message to Stanford Research Institute in 1969?
UCLA
UCLA student Charley Kline typed 'login', but the system crashed after two letters, so the first message ever sent on the ARPANET, the internet's forerunner, was 'lo'.
Q 28The dot-com bubble is said to have burst when which US stock index went into a steep slide?
NASDAQ
NASDAQ, home to most of the young internet stocks, went on to lose about 78% of its value, handing back every gain it had made during the bubble.
Q 29Which group of ex-colleagues is sometimes credited with reviving consumer start-ups after the dot-com bust?
The PayPal Mafia
The PayPal Mafia posed in gangster dress for a 2007 Fortune photo that spread the nickname; after the firm was sold in 2002 they went on to found YouTube, LinkedIn and Yelp.
Q 30Which NFL team has played its home games at Levi's Stadium, in the heart of Silicon Valley, since 2014?
San Francisco 49ers
San Francisco 49ers kept the city's name despite moving about forty miles south of it; the team is named for the prospectors who poured into California in the 1849 Gold Rush.