Test what you know about the internet, computers and the games and gadgets that grew up around them. Press Another for a fresh question; the answer comes with a short explanation each time.
The trivia comes in four flavours: multiple-choice questions, a head-to-head 'which came first?', a guess-the-year challenge and a real-or-fake game about dot-com-era startups.
Further down is the full list of quiz questions with answers hidden until you open them, which is handy for running your own pub quiz or quiz night.
All the quiz questions
76 questions with answers. Open a question to reveal the answer and the story behind it.
Which was the first .com domain ever registered?
Answer: symbolics.com. Symbolics, a maker of AI-research computers, registered it on March 15, 1985.
What was the first message sent over ARPANET supposed to say before the system crashed after two letters?
Answer: LOGIN. Only 'LO' arrived on October 29, 1969, so the first ARPANET message was, accidentally, 'lo'.
Who sent the first networked email and chose the @ symbol?
Answer: Ray Tomlinson. Tomlinson picked @ in 1971 because it almost never appeared in people's names.
In what year did Tim Berners-Lee write his proposal for the World Wide Web?
Answer: 1989. He circulated the proposal at CERN in March 1989; the first website went live in 1991.
Which early browser, released in 1993, helped popularize images shown inline with text?
Answer: Mosaic. Mosaic, from the University of Illinois, made the web look appealing to ordinary people.
What was Google's original name for its search project?
Answer: BackRub. The project began as BackRub because it analyzed the web's 'back links'.
What was the first video uploaded to YouTube?
Answer: Me at the zoo. It's a 19-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo, uploaded in April 2005.
Which company bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion?
Answer: Google. Google paid in stock less than two years after YouTube was founded.
In what year did Facebook introduce the Like button?
Answer: 2009. It arrived on February 9, 2009.
Why did Twitter originally cap posts at 140 characters?
Answer: To fit within SMS text messages. SMS allowed 160 characters, and Twitter reserved 20 for the username.
Bluetooth is named after a king of which people?
Answer: The Vikings (Harald Bluetooth). The technology's name honors a 10th-century Scandinavian king said to have united tribes, as the tech unites devices.
What was the first real-world purchase made with Bitcoin?
Answer: Two pizzas. In May 2010, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas.
Which video game character began life as 'Jumpman'?
Answer: Mario. Mario debuted as Jumpman in the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong, as a carpenter.
Which game came bundled with the Game Boy in North America in 1989?
Answer: Tetris. Tetris helped sell the handheld to people who had never owned a console.
Where was the prototype of Atari's Pong tested in 1972?
Answer: In a bar. The prototype was installed at Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California.
Which feature was missing from the original 2007 iPhone?
Answer: The App Store. The App Store opened in July 2008 with roughly 500 apps.
What did the original iPhone lack until 2009?
Answer: Copy and paste. Copy and paste arrived with iPhone OS 3.0 in 2009.
On January 1, 1983, ARPANET switched to which set of protocols?
Answer: TCP/IP. The change, known as 'flag day', is when the modern internet's foundation was adopted.
What was the first website's purpose?
Answer: To explain the World Wide Web itself. The first site, from CERN, described the web project and how to use it.
Who built the first computer mouse, famously made of wood?
Answer: Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart demonstrated it in 1968 in what became known as 'the mother of all demos'.
What was the original 'computer bug' discovered in 1947?
Answer: A moth. Operators of the Harvard Mark II taped a moth into their logbook, popularizing the term.
In what year was the first SMS text message sent?
Answer: 1992. Engineer Neil Papworth sent 'Merry Christmas' on December 3, 1992.
What does 'Wi-Fi' stand for?
Answer: Nothing — it's just a brand name. The name was invented by a branding agency; 'wireless fidelity' was only a tagline later.
What was Amazon's original company name?
Answer: Cadabra. Jeff Bezos incorporated it as Cadabra before changing it to Amazon.
What was Yahoo! originally called?
Answer: Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web. Stanford students Jerry Yang and David Filo started it as a list of links in 1994.
In what year did Netscape go public in a famously successful IPO?
Answer: 1995. Shares more than doubled on the first day, helping start the dot-com boom.
Which dot-com became famous for its sock-puppet mascot and collapsed in 2000?
Answer: Pets.com. The company went public in February 2000 and announced its closure that November.
What was the first webcam pointed at?
Answer: A coffee pot. Researchers at Cambridge built it so they could check whether the coffee pot was empty.
Who coined the term 'weblog' in 1997?
Answer: Jorn Barger. Barger used it for his log of links; Merholz later shortened it to 'blog'.
What did the Domain Name System replace?
Answer: A single shared HOSTS.TXT file. DNS, designed by Paul Mockapetris in 1983, spread name lookups across many servers.
Which computers did the 1982 virus Elk Cloner infect?
Answer: Apple II. Written by a teenager as a prank, it spread through floppy disks.
The 1986 'Brain' virus, the first for the IBM PC, came from which country?
Answer: Pakistan. It was written by two brothers in Lahore, who put their contact details in the code.
Which Nokia phone first included the game Snake in 1997?
Answer: Nokia 6110. The 3310 made Snake even more famous, but it debuted on the 6110.
Which company bought Mojang, the maker of Minecraft, in 2014?
Answer: Microsoft. The deal was valued at about $2.5 billion.
Who created Tetris?
Answer: Alexey Pajitnov. Pajitnov, a Soviet computer engineer, created it in 1984.
Who invented Ethernet at Xerox PARC in 1973?
Answer: Robert Metcalfe. Metcalfe's May 1973 memo described networking computers over a shared cable.
In its creator's words, what was Linux when he announced it in 1991?
Answer: 'Just a hobby'. Linus Torvalds wrote it 'won't be big and professional like GNU' — he was wrong.
The first Google Doodle in 1998 told users the founders were at which event?
Answer: Burning Man. A stick figure behind the logo served as an out-of-office note.
Who posted the first tweet in 2006?
Answer: Jack Dorsey. Dorsey's first tweet read 'just setting up my twttr'.
In what year did Wikipedia launch?
Answer: 2001. Wikipedia launched on January 15, 2001.
In what year was Gmail launched, with a then-huge 1 GB of storage?
Answer: 2004. It launched on April 1, 2004, and some people thought it was a joke.
Which company's CD-ROM add-on project eventually became the PlayStation?
Answer: Nintendo's (Super Nintendo's). Sony had been working on a disc add-on for the Super Nintendo before the partnership collapsed and it built its own console.
What does the 'U' in URL stand for?
Answer: Uniform. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, the address of a page or file on the web.
Which company created the JavaScript language in 1995?
Answer: Netscape. Brendan Eich created JavaScript at Netscape in just ten days, originally under the name Mocha.
What was Instagram's predecessor app called?
Answer: Burbn. Instagram grew out of Burbn, a check-in app whose photo feature turned out to be the part everyone liked.
Which messaging company did Facebook buy in 2014 for about $19 billion?
Answer: WhatsApp. WhatsApp's acquisition was announced in February 2014 and was one of the largest tech deals ever.
What was the name of the Microsoft Office paperclip assistant?
Answer: Clippit (Clippy). Clippit, better known as Clippy, arrived in Office 97 and was retired as a default in later versions.
Which country's code domain is .tv?
Answer: Tuvalu. The tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu earns money by licensing .tv to video and streaming sites.
Which territory's country-code domain, .io, became popular with tech startups?
Answer: British Indian Ocean Territory. The .io domain belongs to the British Indian Ocean Territory, and startups like it because 'io' also means input/output.
What did Google originally call its search engine project at Stanford?
Answer: BackRub. Larry Page and Sergey Brin's early project was named BackRub because it analysed backlinks.
What was the first popular graphical web browser called?
Answer: Mosaic. Mosaic, released in 1993 from the University of Illinois, helped make the web easy for ordinary people.
Which social network made 'Tom' everyone's first friend?
Answer: MySpace. Co-founder Tom Anderson was automatically added as the first friend on every new MySpace profile.
What was the first search engine for finding files on public FTP servers?
Answer: Archie. Archie, created in 1990, predated the web and searched file listings on FTP servers.
Which service had a 'Like' button before Facebook, launching it in 2007?
Answer: FriendFeed. FriendFeed introduced the Like in 2007, two years before Facebook's version in 2009.
How long were Vine videos?
Answer: Six seconds. Vine clips looped after about six seconds, which pushed creators to be inventive in a tiny space.
What is the programming language Python named after?
Answer: Monty Python. Guido van Rossum named it after the comedy group Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Which company created the PDF format?
Answer: Adobe. Adobe released the Portable Document Format in 1993, aiming for documents that look the same everywhere.
What was the original name of the Firefox browser?
Answer: Phoenix. It was first called Phoenix, then Firebird, before being renamed Firefox in 2004.
What was the app that grew into Slack originally built for?
Answer: A video game called Glitch. The team made an internal chat tool while building the game Glitch and turned it into Slack.
Which video game console launched in 2006 with motion-controlled play as its main selling point?
Answer: Nintendo Wii. The Wii's motion controls made it popular with casual players and families.
In which country was Skype's software mostly developed?
Answer: Estonia. Skype was founded by a Swede and a Dane, but its developers were largely in Tallinn, Estonia.
What did Jack Dorsey's first tweet say?
Answer: just setting up my twttr. The first tweet was posted on March 21, 2006.
What does RSS commonly stand for?
Answer: Really Simple Syndication. RSS lets people subscribe to updates from websites in a feed reader.
Which mobile game, pre-installed on the Nokia 6110 in 1997, became hugely popular?
Answer: Snake. Snake was written for Nokia by Taneli Armanto and became one of the most-played games in the world.
What did Netflix primarily send by mail when it began?
Answer: DVDs. Netflix began as a DVD-by-mail rental service in 1997.
Which web browser did Google launch in 2008?
Answer: Chrome. Chrome launched in September 2008 and became the most used browser in the world.
Which Japanese virtual pet toy, launched in 1996, had to be fed and cleaned to survive?
Answer: Tamagotchi. Tamagotchi was released by Bandai in 1996 and sold in huge numbers.
What is the name of Reddit's alien mascot?
Answer: Snoo. Snoo is the name of the site's mascot, which appears around Reddit's design.
Which co-founder of Apple built the Apple I computer by hand?
Answer: Steve Wozniak. Wozniak designed and built the Apple I in 1976, and Jobs helped sell it.
What was the famous worm that spread by email in 2000 under the subject line 'ILOVEYOU'?
Answer: The Love Bug. The Love Bug spread in May 2000 and infected millions of machines.
Which video game character was originally called Jumpman?
Answer: Mario. Mario first appeared as Jumpman in Donkey Kong in 1981.
What does HTTP stand for?
Answer: HyperText Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the protocol your browser uses to fetch web pages.
Which online service mailed out vast numbers of free trial CDs in the 1990s?
Answer: AOL. AOL mailed enormous numbers of free trial discs during the 1990s.
Which website was originally named AuctionWeb?
Answer: eBay. Pierre Omidyar launched AuctionWeb in 1995; it was later renamed eBay.
What was Amazon originally going to be called?
Answer: Cadabra. Bezos considered 'Cadabra' until a lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver'.
Which technology company is associated with the slogan 'Don't be evil'?
Answer: Google. It was an informal early motto at Google.
Frequently asked questions
How many trivia questions are there?
More than seventy multiple-choice questions, plus hundreds of dated events that power the other games.
Can I use the questions for a quiz night?
Yes, the full list below is there for exactly that.
Are the answers explained?
Yes. Every answer includes a short explanation.