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Free Computer quiz: 84 trivia questions and answers — pioneers, inventions & the Internet. Easy to hard, with explained answers. No sign-up.
Start this quiz →🖨️ Printable version (20 questions + answers)
From the ENIAC to modern microprocessors, this quiz traces the major milestones of computing history: pioneering machines, foundational inventions and technology trivia. A fun way to measure how far we've come since the earliest computers.
This quiz currently has 84 questions, ranging from easy to hard, available in French, English and Spanish when the Spanish translation is available.
Warm up before the quiz with these 16 trivia questions and their explained answers: click a question to reveal the answer.
Answer: The ENIAC. Put into service in 1945 in the United States, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) is considered the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.
Answer: 1981. Launched in 1981, the IBM PC established an open architecture that was copied by many manufacturers, giving rise to the 'PC compatible' standard.
Answer: The Pascaline. Invented by Blaise Pascal in 1642 to help his father, a tax collector, the Pascaline performed additions and subtractions using toothed wheels.
Answer: 2007. Unveiled by Steve Jobs in January 2007, the iPhone revolutionized the mobile market by combining a phone, an iPod, and touchscreen Internet browsing into a single device.
Answer: Apple. The iPad, launched by Apple in 2010, popularized the mainstream touchscreen tablet market, building on the success of the iPhone launched three years earlier.
Answer: 2022. ChatGPT was made public on November 30, 2022 by OpenAI. According to estimates, it passed 100 million users in about two months, one of the fastest adoptions ever seen for a consumer application.
Answer: Its source code is public, viewable and modifiable. Firefox, VLC, Linux and Wikipedia are built on this principle: anyone can check, fix and improve the code. Open-source software can perfectly well be sold.
Answer: CSS. HTML structures the content, CSS dresses it up and JavaScript makes it interactive: the basic trio of the web.
Answer: About 30 tons. The ENIAC weighed about 27 tons and filled a room of 167 m², requiring several operators to run it.
Answer: Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947, an invention that earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956.
Answer: The Osborne 1. The Osborne 1, released in 1981, weighed about 11 kg and packed a small screen, a keyboard, and floppy drives, despite being about the size and weight of a suitcase.
Answer: 8 inches. The first floppy disk, introduced by IBM in 1971, was 8 inches across, before being replaced by the more compact 5.25-inch and later 3.5-inch formats.
Answer: The Cray-1. Designed by Seymour Cray, the Cray-1 was one of the most powerful supercomputers of its time, recognizable by its cylindrical C-shape that helped with cooling.
Answer: HyperText Markup Language. HTML describes the structure of a page (headings, paragraphs, links, images) using tags such as <p> or <a>. It is complemented by CSS for styling and JavaScript for interactivity.
Answer: Nothing specific: it is a trade name invented by an agency. The name was created in 1999 by a marketing agency to replace the dry 'IEEE 802.11b'. The 'Wireless Fidelity' reading was added afterwards, as a nod to Hi-Fi.
Answer: Larry Tesler. Larry Tesler campaigned for software without complicated "modes". His licence plate read "NO MODES".
68 more questions are waiting for you in the quiz!