Computer Science Trivia Questions
Today we threw the first annual ICS day at UC Irvine. For the event I helped prepare a bunch of computer science trivia questions for a family feud style game. Since it is kind of an interesting list I am going to make it available to everyone here incase someone else is looking for a huge list of CS trivia questions.
Some of the questions were given to me by a classmate and I don’t know where she got them from. The rest I wrote myself. I dumbed down the questions as much as I could because I wanted to make sure people would get them right. Having a trivia game with questions that no one knew that answer to would not have been much fun.
If you need to sort a very large list of integers (billions), what efficient sorting algorithm would be your best bet?
Quicksort
What mega media company merged with AOL at the turn of the century?
Time Warner
What do they call people who register domain names with the hope of selling them for a profit?
Cyber Squatters or Domain Squatters
Name the authors of the book The C programming language. The authors are often referred to as K&R
Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie
Dennis Richie also developed what computer operating system at Bell labs with Ken Thompson and Douglas Mcllroy?
Unix
Name the primary creator of the Java programming language.
James Gosling
In 1914, Thomas J Watson renamed the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR) to what?
International Business Machines (IBM)
Name the famous computer scientist who worked to break Nazi codes at Bletchley Park during WWII.
Alan Turing
Who single handedly built the first Apple computer that launched the personal computing era?
Steve Wozniak
What is the day and time of the Unix epoch?
Midnight, January 1, 1970
What is the name of the recent female CEO who stepped down from HP?
Carly Fiorina
What does the company AMD stand for?
Advanced Micro Devices
Who headed the team that created FORTRAN in 1957?
John Backus
Who developed LISP in 1958?
John McCarthy
Who developed PASCAL in 1968-70?
Niklaus Wirth
Who wrote a BASIC version for the 8080 microprocessor, Altair, in 1975?
Bill Gates & Paul Allen
Who created the C++ programming language?
Bjarne Stroustrup
What is IEEE 1394 refer to?
Technical code for Firewire
Who is the Ada programming language named after?
Ada Lovelace
Which Google vice president co-designed TCP/IP is regarded by some as the father of the Internet?
Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf is regarded as the father of the Internet but who is the person that actually invented the World Wide Web?
Tim Berners-Lee
Which UCI alumni co-authored the HTTP protocol?
Roy Fielding
Into how many zones are DVD’s divided worldwide?
Eight
What was the first computer to have a GUI and a Mouse?
Apple Lisa
Name the founders of Yahoo
David Filo & Jerry Yang
What prolific entrepreneur founded Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Netscape?
Jim Clark
Who founded the Free Software Foundation?
Richard Stallman
Which company is the largest manufacturer of network equipment?
Cisco
Who is famous for developing the Mosaic web browser at the University of Illinois? Mosaic was later renamed to Netscape Navigator.
Marc Andreessen
What was the first OS for Personal Computers?
CP/M by Gary Kildall
What is CE in Windows CE stand for?
Consumer Electronics
What is BSD in BSD Unix?
Berkley Software Distribution
What is the name of the popular free software license written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project?
GNU Public License (GPL)
What was the first codename for the Intel Core 2 Duo line of processors?
Conroe
Who founded Amazon.com?
Jeff Bezos
What year was Google founded?
1998
Who created PERL in 1986?
Larry Wall
What free loving programmer created the GCC compiler and the original Emacs?
Richard Stallman
Who founded Dell Computer Corporation?
Micheal Dell
To which company acquired the ICQ instant messaging computer program?
AOL
What is Error 403 mean on the Internet?
Site Access Forbidden/Password Protected
What company is the world’s largest maker of computer mice?
Logitech
What was the first full-length computer generated feature film?
Toy Story by Pixar and Disney
What does ZDNet stand for?
Ziff Davis network
Which company invented the floppy disk?
IBM in 1971
What is the name of Linux’s Mascot?
Tux (a penguin)
What South African entrepreneur funded the creation of the Ubuntu Linux distribution?
Mark Shuttleworth
A nibble is how many bits?
4
What Apple portable debuted in a choice of two fruity color schemes, Blueberry or Tangerine?
The iBook.
What game system was the first to offer online gaming?
Dreamcast.
What Apple media file format became the basis for MPEG-4 files?
QuickTime.
What does the computer acronym PnP stand for?
Plug and play
What file-sharing software was named for creator Shawn Fanning’s frizzy hair?
Napster
What company, while still called AuctionWeb, registered its first sale when bidding for a busted laser pointer topped out at $14?
eBay.com
What does the “W” stand for on a WAP phone?
Wireless.
What computer accessory did Apple try splitting in two in 1993, in an attempt to reduce injuries?
The Keyboard
How many zeros are in a Googol?
A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Donald Knuth wrote what, still unfinished, multi volume work on programming algorithms and their analysis?
The Art of Computer Programming
What chess-playing computer developed by IBM that defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997?
Deep Blue
Ted Stevens, Republican Senator from Alaska referred to the Internet as what?
A “series of tubes”"
What was the dominant spreadsheet application before Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1-2-3?
VisiCalc
Amazon has recently released a variety of services for web developers. Some of these services are Elastic Compute Cloud (ECC), Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB, and several others. Collectively these services are known as what?
Amazon Web Services
Up until the 1990s, IBM has a very strict public uniform for IBM employees. Describe the uniform.
A dark (or gray) suit, white shirt, and a “sincere” tie
Who was the creator of Lotus Notes that is now the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft?
Ray Ozzie
What is the name of the Movie that documents the rise of the home computer through the rivalry between Apple Computer and Microsoft. In the movie Anthony Michael Hall plays Bill Gates and Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs.
Pirates of Silicon Valley
What geeky TV Network was acquired by G4 in 2004?
TechTV
Before founding the social bookmarking site Digg.com, Kevin Rose was a co-host of what TV show?
The Screen Savers. (Attack of the Show! is also an acceptable answer)
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3 Responses to “Computer Science Trivia Questions”
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What is the name of the recent female CEO who stepped down from HP?
The correct answer is Carly Fiorina.
Cheers, Michele
Nice catch Michele. I’ve updated the post.
“What was the first computer to have a GUI and a Mouse? -> Apple Lisa”
WRONG. The mouse was developed by Xerox PARC and was used in the Alto, several years before Apple created the Lisa.