Tech Trivia
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189 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 189 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which games console, launched in 1994, grew out of a collapsed partnership with Nintendo?
PlayStation
PlayStation began as a CD add-on Sony was building for Nintendo's console; when Nintendo publicly switched to a rival partner, Sony turned the project into a machine of its own.
Q 02The wireless standard Bluetooth is named after a tenth-century king of which country?
Denmark
Denmark's Harald Bluetooth was famed for uniting Scandinavian lands, much as the standard would unite PCs and phones; the name was meant as a stopgap codename, and the logo joins the runes for H and B.
Q 03The name Wi-Fi was coined in 1999 by whom?
The brand consultancy Interbrand
The brand consultancy Interbrand was hired because the industry group wanted something catchier than its engineering label; Wi-Fi was picked from ten proposed names, and the 'Wireless Fidelity' slogan was bolted on afterwards.
Q 04The QR code was invented in 1994 to track car parts at Denso, a parts maker in which car company's group?
Toyota
Toyota's supplier Denso wanted a code that held far more than a barcode and could still be read at speed; engineer Masahiro Hara found his pattern in the black and white stones of a lunchtime game of Go.
Q 05Who sent the first network email in 1971 and chose the @ sign for its addresses?
Ray Tomlinson
Ray Tomlinson wanted a keyboard symbol that would never turn up in a username; his first message went between two computers standing side by side, and he later admitted he had forgotten what it said.
Q 06Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at which organisation?
CERN
CERN, the physics lab near Geneva, was where Berners-Lee's boss scribbled 'Vague, but exciting' on his 1989 proposal; four years later CERN put the Web software in the public domain, so anyone could build on it for free.
Q 07Which Nokia phone, launched in 2000, is joked about online as being indestructible?
Nokia 3310
Nokia 3310 handsets sold about 126 million units, and the jokes about their toughness outlived them: in 2017 a new maker revived the name and shape for a nostalgic relaunch, complete with a version of Snake.
Q 08Which company's brick-sized DynaTAC 8000X became the first handheld cellphone sold to the public?
Motorola
Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first public call on a prototype in 1973, cheekily ringing his rival at AT&T; the finished phone took another decade to reach shops and cost $3,995.
Q 09The first iPod, launched in 2001, was sold on the promise of putting how many songs in your pocket?
1,000
1,000 songs fitted on its 5 GB drive, but Apple's other boast was speed: a FireWire cable copied a whole CD in under ten seconds when USB players needed minutes, and the first iPod worked only with Macs.
Q 10The compact disc was co-developed by Sony and which other company?
Philips
Philips and Sony engineers settled the format over six meetings in 1979 and 1980; even the hole in the middle has a story, since the Dutch side sized it to match their own ten-cent coin, the dubbeltje.
Q 11Which US Army computer, unveiled in 1946, was first programmed by six women?
ENIAC
ENIAC's six programmers, among them Kay McNulty and Betty Snyder, had to work out how to program it without manuals, yet their part went unacknowledged for half a century, until they were honoured in 1997.
Q 12The transistor was invented in 1947 at which research laboratory?
Bell Labs
Bell Labs, the research arm of the AT&T phone company, produced a device that did the vacuum tube's job at a fraction of the size and power; 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
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
Larry Sanger was the editor of Nupedia, whose expert review was so slow that it finished only 21 articles in its first year; the wiki he proposed as a side project to feed it soon swallowed it.
Q 23The first text message, sent in December 1992, read what?
Merry Christmas
'Merry Christmas' was typed on a computer by engineer Neil Papworth and sent to Richard Jarvis, who was at a Christmas party; Jarvis never answered, because phones of the day could receive a text but not write one.
Chip pioneer Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that transistor counts were doubling yearly, then in 1975 slowed his forecast to a doubling every two years, the form now known as Moore's law.
Q 14Which Rolling Stones song did Microsoft license for the Windows 95 launch?
Start Me Up
'Start Me Up' was a nod to the new Start button and fronted a launch so lavish that the Empire State Building was lit in the Windows colours; reports of the song's fee ran from $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, shot the ad for the Macintosh launch; Apple's board hated it and the agency was told to sell the Super Bowl airtime, but it resold only the shorter of the two slots and the ad ran anyway.
Q 16The name Google is a play on which mathematical term?
Googol
Googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, is said to have been named by a mathematician's nine-year-old nephew; Google's founders borrowed it to signal how much information they meant to organise.
Q 17Amazon began in 1994 as an online store for what?
Books
Books beat CDs, software and videos on the founder's shortlist because so many titles were in print, far more than any physical shop could stock; the firm began in a garage in Bellevue, Washington.
Q 18Facebook was launched in 2004 by students at which university?
Harvard
Harvard students signed up so fast that more than half the undergraduates had joined within a month; the site then spread from campus to campus and opened to everyone in 2006.
Q 19YouTube's three founders had all previously worked at which company?
PayPal
PayPal alumni Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim first launched YouTube as a video dating site with the slogan 'Tune In, Hook Up'; when that flopped, they opened it to any kind of clip.
Q 20Which company began in 1997 as a service that posted rental DVDs to its customers' homes?
Netflix
Netflix started when DVDs were so new that its founders tested the idea by posting themselves a CD in an envelope; the streaming it is now known for did not begin until 2007.
Q 24The GPS project was started by which US organisation in 1973?
The Department of Defense
The Department of Defense built GPS for its own forces and deliberately blurred the signal civilians received; when that was switched off in May 2000, ordinary receivers became far more accurate overnight.
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 reached an estimated 100 million monthly users how long after its November 2022 launch?
Two months
Two months was the analysts' estimate, a record for a consumer app that fell within the year, when Meta's Threads passed 100 million sign-ups in five days.
Q 27Which company introduced the Roomba vacuum cleaner in 2002?
iRobot
iRobot was founded in 1990 by three MIT roboticists and built robots for the military and for space research before it sent the Roomba out to clean living-room floors.
Q 28The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the development of what technology?
Lithium-ion batteries
Lithium-ion batteries grew out of the 1970s oil crisis: Stanley Whittingham's first version was too explosive to sell, and John Goodenough and Akira Yoshino made it powerful and safe enough for a pocket.
Q 29Who first publicly demonstrated a computer mouse in the 1968 Mother of All Demos?
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart never earned royalties from the mouse: his employer SRI held the patent and, he recalled, licensed it to Apple for about $40,000 with little idea of what it was worth.
Q 30The QWERTY layout comes from the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, sold from 1874 by which American gunmaker?
E. Remington and Sons
E. Remington and Sons, an arms maker looking to diversify, also built sewing machines, and it showed: the first typewriters came painted with flowers and mounted on an iron sewing-machine stand, treadle and all.