The first text message ever sent just said “Merry Christmas.” It was December 3, 1992, sent from a computer to a Vodafone phone, and nobody on the receiving end had any way to reply. That’s the kind of detail that separates people who know technology trivia from people who think they do. The history of tech is full of moments like that, things that feel like they should have happened one way but actually happened another, products that launched to silence before conquering the world, and names everyone gets wrong because the myth is better than the truth.
I’ve been running trivia nights for years, and technology rounds are where the confident people get quiet. Not because the questions are obscure, but because tech has this weird property where everyone has a version of the story in their head that’s almost right. Almost right is where the fun lives. These 150 technology trivia questions are sequenced the way I’d run them in a room: some warmth up front, some that’ll split a table in half, and a few near the end that nobody sees coming.
The Ones You Think You Know
1. What does the “HTTP” in a web address stand for?
I use this as a room-settler. Everyone’s seen it ten thousand times. But watch people try to remember what the T’s stand for.
Show Answer
HyperText Transfer Protocol
2. What fruit is part of Apple’s logo?
Yes, it’s that obvious. But in a trivia context, the obvious ones serve a purpose. They let people feel smart before the floor drops.
Show Answer
An apple (with a bite taken out of it)
3. What does “USB” stand for?
Tables will argue about whether it’s “Universal Serial Bus” or “Universal System Bus.” I’ve seen friendships tested over this.
Show Answer
Universal Serial Bus. The most common wrong answer is “Universal System Bus,” which sounds right because we think of computers as systems. But it’s about the bus architecture, the pathway data travels along.
4. What year was the original iPhone released?
This one sorts a room by age. People who were adults in 2007 nail it. Everyone else guesses a year or two off.
Show Answer
2007. Common wrong answer: 2008. People conflate the iPhone launch with the App Store launch, which came a year later.
5. What programming language shares its name with an island in Indonesia?
The coffee connection throws people. They think of the drink first, the island second, and the programming language third.
6. What company created the PlayStation?
7. What does “Wi-Fi” stand for?
This is one of my favorite early-round questions because almost everyone has an answer ready, and almost everyone is wrong.
Show Answer
It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s not “Wireless Fidelity.” The Wi-Fi Alliance hired a branding firm that came up with the name, and the “Wireless Fidelity” tagline was added after the fact as a kind of backronym, then quietly dropped. Most people will fight you on this.
8. What does “GPS” stand for?
Show Answer
Global Positioning System
9. In what decade was the first email sent?
People anchor to the internet boom of the ’90s and work backwards. They rarely go back far enough.
Show Answer
The 1970s. Ray Tomlinson sent it in 1971. He later said he couldn’t remember what it said, probably something like “QWERTYUIOP.”
10. What does “PDF” stand for?
Show Answer
Portable Document Format
11. What social media platform uses a ghost as its logo?
12. What was the name of the computer that beat chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997?
Everyone remembers a computer beat Kasparov. The name is where it gets fuzzy.
Show Answer
Deep Blue, built by IBM. Common wrong answer: “Watson,” which is IBM’s other famous computer but didn’t come along until 2011.
13. What does “LED” stand for?
Show Answer
Light Emitting Diode
14. What company owns Instagram?
The answer changes depending on what you call the company. I accept both.
Show Answer
Meta (formerly Facebook). They acquired Instagram in 2012 for about $1 billion, which seemed absurd at the time and now looks like the bargain of the century.
15. What animal is the Firefox browser logo?
This one starts arguments because people look at the logo and see a fox. But that’s not the whole story.
Show Answer
A red panda. “Firefox” is actually another name for the red panda. Though Mozilla has acknowledged the logo looks more like a fox, and the current branding leans into that ambiguity.
Where Confidence Starts to Crack
16. Before Google, what was the most popular search engine?
This splits rooms generationally. Older players say AltaVista or AskJeeves. The right answer is more boring than either.
Show Answer
Yahoo! was the most-used search engine before Google overtook it. AltaVista was beloved by the technical crowd, but Yahoo had the mainstream traffic.
17. What was the first commercially available cell phone, released in 1983?
Show Answer
The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. It cost $3,995, weighed about two pounds, and gave you 30 minutes of talk time. People called it “the brick” and they weren’t being affectionate.
18. What does “SIM” stand for in SIM card?
Show Answer
Subscriber Identity Module
19. What year did Wikipedia launch?
People always guess later than the actual year. Wikipedia feels like it arrived with social media, but it predates Facebook by three years.
20. What was the first video uploaded to YouTube?
Show Answer
“Me at the zoo,” uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim on April 23, 2005. It’s 18 seconds of him standing in front of elephants at the San Diego Zoo. Still up. Still underwhelming.
21. What does the “i” in iPhone originally stand for, according to Steve Jobs?
This one gets a lot of confident wrong answers. People say “intelligent” or “interactive” without hesitating.
Show Answer
“Internet.” When Jobs introduced the iMac in 1998, he said the “i” stood for internet, individual, instruct, inform, and inspire. But internet was the primary meaning.
22. What was the name of the world’s first website?
Show Answer
info.cern.ch, created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1991. It was a page explaining what the World Wide Web was. Very meta.
23. What company made the first commercial microprocessor?
Show Answer
Intel, with the Intel 4004 in 1971
24. How many bits are in a byte?
25. What does “CAPTCHA” stand for?
Nobody knows this. I’ve asked it maybe a hundred times and gotten a correct answer twice.
Show Answer
Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It’s a backronym, and it’s a mouthful, which is exactly why nobody remembers it.
26. What color was the original Amazon logo’s swoosh before it became the orange smile?
Show Answer
The original Amazon logo from 1995 didn’t have a swoosh at all. It was a stylized letter A with a river running through it. The curved arrow “smile” logo in orange came in 2000.
27. What was the first handheld mobile phone call made on, and in what year?
Show Answer
A Motorola prototype, in 1973. Martin Cooper, a Motorola engineer, made the call to his rival at Bell Labs. Absolute power move.
28. What does “HTML” stand for?
Show Answer
HyperText Markup Language
29. What was the original name of the search engine Google?
This trips up even the tech-literate crowd. The original name sounds made up, which is why people don’t trust it when they hear it.
Show Answer
BackRub. Larry Page and Sergey Brin called it that because it analyzed “back links.” They changed it to Google in 1997, a play on “googol” (the number 1 followed by 100 zeros).
30. What year did Netflix start streaming video online?
People remember Netflix as a streaming company, but it spent almost a decade as a DVD-by-mail service first.
Show Answer
2007. Same year as the iPhone launch. That year changed more than people realize.
The Ones That Split the Room
31. What was the first computer virus to spread in the wild on personal computers?
Show Answer
Brain, created in 1986 by two Pakistani brothers, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi. They included their names, address, and phone number in the code because they wanted people to contact them for a cure. Different era.
32. What company created the Java programming language?
Show Answer
Sun Microsystems. Not Oracle, though Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 and now owns Java. People who say Oracle aren’t technically wrong about the present, but they’re wrong about the question.
33. What does “LAN” stand for?
Show Answer
Local Area Network
34. What was the first mass-produced personal computer?
This one always generates debate. People say Apple II, Commodore 64, IBM PC. The actual answer predates all of them.
Show Answer
The Commodore PET, released in 1977. The Apple II came out the same year but slightly later. The Commodore 64 didn’t arrive until 1982. I’ve had people argue this for twenty minutes straight.
35. What does “OLED” stand for?
Show Answer
Organic Light Emitting Diode
36. What was Microsoft’s first product?
Not Windows. Not MS-DOS. Most people don’t go back far enough.
Show Answer
A version of the BASIC programming language interpreter for the Altair 8800 microcomputer, called Altair BASIC, released in 1975.
37. What country has the most internet users in the world?
Show Answer
China, with over a billion internet users. India is second. The United States is third. People who answer “India” are closer than they think, and the gap narrows every year.
38. What was the name of Apple’s first digital music player?
Show Answer
The iPod, released in October 2001. “1,000 songs in your pocket” was the pitch. Simple, perfect, and it made every other MP3 player look like a toy from a cereal box.
39. What does “RAM” stand for?
Show Answer
Random Access Memory
40. Who is often called the “father of the computer”?
Show Answer
Charles Babbage, who designed the Analytical Engine in the 1830s. He never finished building it, which might be the most relatable thing about the history of computing.
41. What was the maximum storage capacity of a standard 3.5-inch floppy disk?
Anyone under 25 has never held one. Anyone over 35 has a visceral memory of the sound it made going into the drive.
Show Answer
1.44 megabytes. For context, a single smartphone photo today is typically 3-5 megabytes. You couldn’t fit one selfie on a floppy disk.
42. What does “iOS” stand for?
Show Answer
iPhone Operating System. Originally called “iPhone OS,” Apple shortened it to iOS in 2010.
43. What was the first product sold on Amazon?
Show Answer
A book: “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies” by Douglas Hofstadter, sold on July 16, 1995. Amazon started as a bookstore, which feels like ancient history now.
44. What year was Bluetooth technology introduced?
Show Answer
1999, though it took a few years before devices actually used it widely. Named after Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson, a 10th-century Danish king who united warring factions, because the technology was meant to unite communication protocols.
45. What company developed the Android operating system before Google acquired it?
Show Answer
Android Inc., co-founded by Andy Rubin. Google bought it in 2005 for an estimated $50 million. Rubin originally envisioned it as an operating system for digital cameras.
Deeper Water
46. What does “BIOS” stand for in computing?
Show Answer
Basic Input/Output System
47. What was the first domain name ever registered?
Everyone guesses a big company. Nobody guesses right.
Show Answer
symbolics.com, registered on March 15, 1985. Symbolics was a computer manufacturer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The domain still exists, now owned by a small investment group.
48. What does “VPN” stand for?
Show Answer
Virtual Private Network
49. In what country was the MP3 audio format developed?
People assume America or Japan. The answer surprises almost everyone.
Show Answer
Germany. It was developed primarily at the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen. The format that powered Napster and reshaped the music industry came out of a German research lab.
50. What was the name of the first web browser with a graphical interface?
Show Answer
Mosaic, released in 1993 by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. Marc Andreessen, who helped create it, went on to co-found Netscape. Common wrong answer: Netscape Navigator, which came a year later and was Mosaic’s spiritual successor.
51. What does the “E” stand for in “E3,” the former major gaming expo?
Show Answer
Electronic Entertainment Expo
52. What year did the World Wide Web become available to the general public?
Show Answer
1991, when Tim Berners-Lee made it publicly available on August 6. But most people didn’t encounter it until the mid-’90s when browsers and ISPs caught up.
53. What was IBM originally an abbreviation for?
Show Answer
International Business Machines
54. What was the first smartphone, widely considered?
Not the iPhone. Not the BlackBerry. The actual first smartphone predates both by over a decade.
Show Answer
The IBM Simon Personal Communicator, released in 1994. It had a touchscreen, email, a calendar, and apps. It cost $1,100 and the battery lasted about an hour. Sound familiar?
55. What does “SQL” stand for?
Show Answer
Structured Query Language. And the pronunciation debate (“sequel” vs. “S-Q-L”) has ended more conversations than it’s started.
56. What technology company was originally called “Blue Ribbon Sports”?
This is a trick question in a technology trivia round, and I love using it because it reveals assumptions.
Show Answer
That’s Nike, not a technology company. If you included this in a tech round, you’d watch people try to force-fit it to a tech brand. I sometimes drop a question like this to keep people honest.
57. How many transistors were in the Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor?
Show Answer
2,300 transistors. A modern Apple M2 chip has about 20 billion. That’s not a typo.
58. What does “HDMI” stand for?
Show Answer
High-Definition Multimedia Interface
59. What was the code name for the original Macintosh project at Apple?
Show Answer
Macintosh was the code name, named after the McIntosh apple (Jef Raskin’s favorite variety). It was deliberately misspelled to avoid trademark issues with McIntosh Laboratory, an audio equipment company.
60. What year was the first text message sent?
Show Answer
1992. Neil Papworth sent “Merry Christmas” on December 3 from a PC to a Vodafone phone. The recipient, Richard Jarvis, couldn’t text back because phones didn’t have keyboards yet.
The History Nobody Remembers Right
61. Who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak?
Almost nobody remembers there was a third founder. When they hear the answer, they never forget it again.
Show Answer
Ronald Wayne. He sold his 10% stake in Apple for $800 just twelve days after the company was founded. That stake would be worth roughly $300 billion today. He’s said he doesn’t regret it. I don’t believe him.
62. What was the first video game console to use CDs instead of cartridges?
Show Answer
The Philips CD-i, released in 1991. But if you’re thinking of mainstream success, the answer most people want is the PlayStation (1994). The CD-i was a commercial disaster that’s mostly remembered for its terrible Zelda games that Nintendo didn’t actually make.
63. What does “GIF” stand for?
Show Answer
Graphics Interchange Format. And yes, the creator said it’s pronounced “jif.” And yes, most people still say “gif” with a hard G. And no, this argument will never end.
64. What was the first commercially successful video game?
Show Answer
Pong, released by Atari in 1972. Not the first video game ever made, but the first one that made real money. The prototype was placed in a bar in Sunnyvale, California. It broke down within days because the coin box overflowed.
65. What does “CPU” stand for?
Show Answer
Central Processing Unit
66. What was the name of the first artificial satellite launched into space?
Show Answer
Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. It was about the size of a beach ball and all it did was beep. That beep changed the trajectory of human civilization.
67. What company created the first laser printer?
Show Answer
Xerox, at their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1971. PARC invented about half of modern computing and Xerox commercialized almost none of it.
68. What was the original storage capacity of the first iPod?
Show Answer
5 gigabytes, which held about 1,000 songs. That “1,000 songs in your pocket” line was doing real work.
69. What programming language was created by Guido van Rossum in 1991?
Show Answer
Python. Named after Monty Python’s Flying Circus, not the snake. The documentation is full of Monty Python references.
70. What does “JPEG” stand for?
Show Answer
Joint Photographic Experts Group
71. What was the first message sent over ARPANET, the precursor to the internet?
The intended message was “LOGIN.” What actually transmitted was more poetic.
Show Answer
“LO.” The system crashed after the first two letters. So the first message ever sent on what would become the internet was an accidental abbreviation that sounds like a greeting. October 29, 1969.
72. What does “NASDAQ” stand for?
Show Answer
National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations. It was the first electronic stock exchange, launched in 1971.
73. What company made the Walkman?
Show Answer
Sony, released in 1979. Before the iPod, before streaming, there was a yellow cassette player that changed how people related to music in public spaces.
74. What was the first programming language?
Show Answer
FORTRAN (Formula Translation), created by IBM and first released in 1957. Some argue for Assembly language or even Ada Lovelace’s work in the 1840s, but FORTRAN was the first high-level programming language that was widely used.
75. What does “NFC” stand for in smartphone technology?
Show Answer
Near Field Communication
The Ones That Make People Argue
76. What tech company’s motto was “Don’t be evil”?
Show Answer
Google. It was part of their corporate code of conduct from 2000 until 2018, when parent company Alphabet quietly changed it to “Do the right thing.” Draw your own conclusions.
77. What was the first social media site to reach one billion registered users?
Show Answer
Facebook, which hit the milestone in October 2012.
78. What material is most computer chips primarily made of?
Show Answer
Silicon. That’s why it’s called Silicon Valley. This feels obvious, but I’ve heard people say “copper,” “gold,” and once, memorably, “plastic.”
79. What does “IoT” stand for?
Show Answer
Internet of Things
80. What was the first feature-length film to be entirely computer-animated?
Show Answer
Toy Story, released by Pixar in 1995. Every frame took between four and thirteen hours to render. The entire movie took about 800,000 machine hours.
81. What company developed the first computer mouse?
Not Apple. Not Microsoft. The answer goes back further than people expect.
Show Answer
It was developed at the Stanford Research Institute by Douglas Engelbart in 1964. It was made of wood. The first mouse was literally a wooden box with two wheels inside.
82. What year did Amazon launch its Prime membership service?
Show Answer
2005. It started as just a free two-day shipping program for $79 a year. No video, no music, no Alexa. Just fast boxes.
83. What was the first country to have more mobile phone subscriptions than people?
Show Answer
Luxembourg, which hit that milestone in 1999. Multiple countries have since passed the 100% mark, including many that have more active SIM cards than citizens.
84. What does “RFID” stand for?
Show Answer
Radio Frequency Identification
85. What was the original name of Windows, during its development?
Show Answer
Interface Manager. Marketing pushed for “Windows” instead, and for once, marketing was right.
86. What does “4G” stand for in mobile networks?
Show Answer
Fourth Generation
87. What technology company was founded in a garage in Palo Alto in 1939, often considered the founding moment of Silicon Valley?
Show Answer
Hewlett-Packard (HP). Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started in a garage with $538 in capital. That garage is now a California Historical Landmark. It’s literally called “The Birthplace of Silicon Valley.”
88. What does “AMOLED” stand for?
Show Answer
Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode
89. What was the first video game to be played in space?
This question always gets a laugh because people can’t believe someone actually researched this. But someone brought a Game Boy to space, and yes, there’s a record of what they played.
Show Answer
Tetris, played by Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov on a Game Boy aboard the Mir space station in 1993.
90. What does “API” stand for?
Show Answer
Application Programming Interface
The Ones That Separate the Casual from the Committed
91. What was the “Y2K bug” actually about?
Everyone remembers Y2K panic. Almost nobody can explain the actual technical problem.
Show Answer
Many older computer systems stored years using only two digits (e.g., “99” for 1999), so when the year 2000 arrived, systems might interpret “00” as 1900 instead of 2000. Billions of dollars were spent fixing it. The fact that nothing catastrophic happened isn’t evidence that it was overblown. It’s evidence that the fixes worked.
92. What does “HTTPS” use to secure data that HTTP doesn’t?
Show Answer
SSL/TLS encryption (Secure Sockets Layer / Transport Layer Security). The “S” stands for “Secure.”
93. What was the name of the AI chatbot that Microsoft released on Twitter in 2016, which had to be shut down within 24 hours?
Show Answer
Tay. It was designed to learn from conversations with Twitter users. Within hours, users had taught it to post inflammatory and offensive content. Microsoft pulled the plug in under a day. It was an early, very public lesson in what happens when you let the internet train your AI.
94. What does “SaaS” stand for?
Show Answer
Software as a Service
95. What was the clock speed of the original IBM PC’s processor in 1981?
Show Answer
4.77 MHz. For reference, a modern processor runs at several gigahertz, which is thousands of times faster. But in 1981, 4.77 MHz was enough to change the world.
96. What does “Li-ion” stand for in battery technology?
97. What social network was originally limited to Harvard University students?
Show Answer
Facebook, launched by Mark Zuckerberg on February 4, 2004. It expanded to other Ivy League schools, then all colleges, then everyone. The exclusivity was the marketing.
98. What does “CMOS” stand for?
Show Answer
Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor
99. What was the name of the first computer worm to spread via the internet, in 1988?
Show Answer
The Morris Worm, created by Robert Tappan Morris, then a graduate student at Cornell. He said he didn’t intend it to cause damage. The court disagreed. He was the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He’s now a professor at MIT, which tells you something about how tech culture processes these things.
100. How many websites existed in 1993?
This is one of those questions where the number is so small it feels wrong.
Show Answer
About 130. Not 130 million. Not 130 thousand. One hundred and thirty websites on the entire World Wide Web. There are now nearly 2 billion.
Names, Faces, and the Stories Behind the Screens
101. Who is credited with writing the first computer program?
Show Answer
Ada Lovelace, in the 1840s, for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. She wrote an algorithm for the machine to compute Bernoulli numbers. The machine was never built, but the program was real. The Ada programming language was later named after her.
102. What did Elon Musk co-found before Tesla?
People usually say PayPal, which is half right. But there’s an earlier answer.
Show Answer
Zip2, a city guide software company, in 1995. He and his brother Kimbal started it with money from their father. Compaq bought it in 1999 for $307 million. Then came X.com, which merged with Confinity to become PayPal. Then SpaceX. Then Tesla (which he didn’t technically found but joined very early as chairman and lead investor).
103. What does “CEO” stand for?
Show Answer
Chief Executive Officer
104. Who invented the World Wide Web?
Show Answer
Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working at CERN in Switzerland. He proposed it in 1989 and built it in 1990. He never patented it and never made money directly from the invention. He could have been the richest person on Earth.
105. What was Bill Gates’ SAT score?
People always guess perfect. They’re close.
Show Answer
1590 out of 1600. He’s mentioned this himself. One question away from perfect, and he went on to build the most valuable company in the world. That one missed question probably keeps him up at night.
106. Who founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia?
Show Answer
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger co-founded it in 2001. Sanger left in 2002 and has since become one of Wikipedia’s most vocal critics. Co-founder breakups are a tech tradition.
107. What was Steve Jobs’ annual salary as CEO of Apple when he returned in 1997?
Show Answer
$1 per year. He made his real money from stock options and his Pixar shares. The $1 salary became a tech CEO cliché after that.
108. Who is known as the “father of the internet”?
Show Answer
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn are both given this title for their work developing TCP/IP, the protocols that underpin the internet. Two fathers. The internet is a shared custody situation.
109. What was Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room number, where Facebook was created?
Show Answer
H33, in Kirkland House. If you got that without looking it up, I’m concerned about you in the best possible way.
110. What did Alan Turing propose in 1950 as a test for machine intelligence?
Show Answer
The Turing Test (originally called “The Imitation Game”). A machine passes if a human evaluator can’t reliably distinguish its responses from a human’s. We’re still arguing about whether anything has actually passed it.
Modern Tech, Ancient Confusion
111. What does “5G” stand for?
Show Answer
Fifth Generation. Just the generation number. It’s not an acronym for anything more exotic than that, despite what certain corners of the internet might suggest.
112. What cryptocurrency was the first to be created?
Show Answer
Bitcoin, introduced in a 2008 white paper by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. The first Bitcoin was mined in January 2009.
113. What does “AI” stand for?
Show Answer
Artificial Intelligence
114. What was the first item sold on eBay?
The real answer is so strange that people assume it’s a joke.
Show Answer
A broken laser pointer, sold for $14.83 in 1995. When eBay’s founder Pierre Omidyar contacted the buyer to make sure they knew it was broken, the buyer replied: “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.” The internet was finding its people from day one.
115. What does “QR code” stand for?
Show Answer
Quick Response code. Invented in 1994 by a Japanese company called Denso Wave, originally to track automotive parts. It took a pandemic to make everyone actually use them.
116. What year did SpaceX successfully land a rocket booster for the first time?
Show Answer
2015. The Falcon 9 first stage landed at Cape Canaveral on December 21. Before that, rockets were single-use. Imagine throwing away the airplane after every flight.
117. What does “GPU” stand for?
Show Answer
Graphics Processing Unit
118. What company created the first commercially successful electric car of the modern era?
Show Answer
Tesla, with the Roadster in 2008. Though “commercially successful” is doing some heavy lifting here. They sold about 2,500 of them. The Model S in 2012 is when Tesla became a real automaker.
119. What does “VOIP” stand for?
Show Answer
Voice Over Internet Protocol
120. What was the first app downloaded from the Apple App Store when it launched in 2008?
Show Answer
There’s no verified record of the very first download, but the App Store launched with about 500 apps. The free app “Remote” (an Apple-made iTunes remote control) and the paid app “Super Monkey Ball” by Sega were among the most downloaded on day one.
The Long Tail
121. What does “WYSIWYG” stand for?
Show Answer
What You See Is What You Get. Pronounced “wizzy-wig.” It describes editors where the content looks the same while editing as it does in the final output. If you’ve ever used a website builder, you’ve used one.
122. What was the first video game character to get a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade?
Show Answer
Sonic the Hedgehog, in 1993. Not Mario. Sega got there first. That has to sting.
123. What does “ROM” stand for?
Show Answer
Read-Only Memory
124. What was the name of the computer system used to navigate Apollo 11 to the moon?
Show Answer
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). It had about 74 kilobytes of memory. Your phone has roughly a million times more computing power than what landed humans on the moon.
125. What does “SPAM” originally stand for in the context of the canned meat that inspired the term for junk email?
Show Answer
Shoulder of Pork and Ham (though Hormel has also said it means “Spiced Ham”). The internet term comes from a Monty Python sketch where a café serves SPAM with everything and a chorus of Vikings drowns out conversation by singing “SPAM” repeatedly. That’s the metaphor: unwanted stuff overwhelming the signal.
126. What was Nokia’s original business before it made phones?
Nobody gets this right. Nobody.
Show Answer
Nokia started as a pulp mill in 1865 in Finland. They made paper. Then rubber boots. Then tires. Then electronics. Then phones. Then nothing, for a while. The journey from paper mill to smartphone is one of the wildest pivots in business history.
127. What does “PING” stand for in networking?
Show Answer
It’s named after sonar. The creator, Mike Muuss, said it stands for “Packet Internet Groper,” though some consider that a backronym. The sonar metaphor is the real origin: you send out a signal and listen for the echo.
128. What year was the hashtag first used on Twitter?
Show Answer
2007. Chris Messina proposed using the # symbol to group conversations on August 23, 2007. Twitter initially thought it was too nerdy. They were right. It worked anyway.
129. What does “MIDI” stand for?
Show Answer
Musical Instrument Digital Interface
130. What was the name of the computer that IBM developed to compete on Jeopardy! in 2011?
Show Answer
Watson. It beat champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Jennings wrote on his final answer: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” Best loss in game show history.
The Home Stretch
131. What was the original purpose of the @ symbol before it was used in email addresses?
Show Answer
It was a commercial symbol meaning “at the rate of,” used in accounting and commerce. As in: “10 widgets @ $5 each.” Ray Tomlinson chose it for email in 1971 because it was already on keyboards and nobody was using it for anything in programming.
132. What was the first ever emoji?
Show Answer
The first set of 176 emojis was created by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999 for Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo. They were 12×12 pixel images. The heart emoji was in that original set. So was a pile of poop, because of course it was.
133. What does “FTP” stand for?
Show Answer
File Transfer Protocol
134. What was the first country to grant legal rights to a robot?
Show Answer
Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to Sophia, a humanoid robot by Hanson Robotics, in 2017. It was widely seen as a PR stunt, and people pointed out that the robot had more rights than many human women in the country.
135. What does “DNS” stand for?
Show Answer
Domain Name System. It’s essentially the phone book of the internet, translating domain names into IP addresses.
136. What was the most expensive domain name ever sold?
Show Answer
Cars.com, which sold for approximately $872 million in 2014 as part of a business acquisition. If we’re talking pure domain sales, Voice.com sold for $30 million in 2019.
137. What year did Google go public with its IPO?
Show Answer
2004. The stock opened at $85 per share. Adjusted for splits, that’s the equivalent of about $2.13 per share in today’s terms. If you’d bought $1,000 worth, you’d have over $40,000 now.
138. What does “LIDAR” stand for?
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Light Detection and Ranging
139. What was the first consumer product to have a barcode scanned at a checkout?
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A 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum, scanned at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974. That pack of gum is now in the Smithsonian.
140. What is Moore’s Law?
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The observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every two years while the cost halves. It’s not a law of physics. It’s a prediction that held true for decades and is now starting to slow down.
141. What does “DRAM” stand for?
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Dynamic Random Access Memory
142. What was the first website to reach one billion daily active users?
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Facebook, which announced hitting one billion daily active users in 2015. Google Search likely hit the number earlier but doesn’t report the metric the same way.
143. What does the “Fn” key on a laptop keyboard stand for?
144. What company produced the Blackberry phone?
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Research In Motion (RIM), a Canadian company later renamed BlackBerry Limited. In 2009, they owned nearly 50% of the US smartphone market. By 2016, they’d stopped making phones entirely. The speed of that fall is staggering.
145. What does “IMAP” stand for in email?
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Internet Message Access Protocol
146. What was the first programming language used on the World Wide Web?
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HTML, though it’s technically a markup language, not a programming language. If you want a true programming language, it was likely C, which was used to build the first web server and browser. But in terms of what made the web work as a readable medium, HTML is the answer most people mean and the answer I accept in a room.
147. What was the name of the first successfully cloned mammal?
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Dolly the sheep, born July 5, 1996, at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. She was named after Dolly Parton because the cell used for cloning came from a mammary gland. The scientists had a sense of humor about it.
148. What does “ENIAC” stand for, the name of one of the first general-purpose electronic computers?
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Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. Built in 1945, it weighed 30 tons and filled an entire room. Six women programmed it, and for decades their contributions went largely unrecognized.
149. What is the name of the effect where technology that seems revolutionary at the time of its invention is taken for granted within a generation?
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The Amara Effect, named after researcher Roy Amara. His quote: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” It explains why people mocked the iPhone in 2007 and can’t imagine life without it now.
150. What was the last message ever sent by Morse code as an official communication by the French Navy, and in what year?
I save this one for last because it’s not really about technology trivia at all. It’s about what happens when a technology dies. The French Navy was one of the last institutions on Earth still using Morse code for official communications. When they finally retired it in 1997, the last message they transmitted was three words. And those three words are the reason this question closes the night.
Show Answer
“Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.” Sent on January 31, 1997. It’s a quote adapted from a 1920s French novel. A 150-year-old technology, signing off with the most human sentence a machine ever carried. Every piece of technology we’ve talked about tonight will have its last message too. We just don’t know what it’ll say yet.
I came to trivia writing through science communication, spending 12 years in Rome, Italy trying to make complex topics accessible. The best science questions I write are the ones where the real answer is stranger than anything someone would guess. I've written for JetPunk trivia, and I take the same care with every set I write.
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