Technology Trivia: 20 Facts About the Digital World

Technology is one of the fastest-moving quiz categories, but a solid base of facts never goes out of date. Here are 20 to power up your next tech round.

Computing Origins

• The word “bug” for a computer fault dates back to an actual moth found trapped in an early machine.
• A byte is made up of eight bits.
• The first electronic computers filled entire rooms and weighed several tonnes.
• Ada Lovelace is often described as the world’s first computer programmer, more than a century before modern computers existed.

The Internet Age

• The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee around 1989.
• The first message ever sent over the early internet crashed the system after just two letters.
• The “@” symbol became a key part of email addresses thanks to engineer Ray Tomlinson.
• More than half of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices.

Gadgets & Brands

• The first mobile phones were so large and heavy they were nicknamed “bricks”.
• QWERTY keyboards were designed in the typewriter era and are still the standard today.
• Google began as a research project with the working name “BackRub”.

Learn a handful of these and the technology round becomes easy points. Ready to test yourself? Jump into a free Technology quiz and see how high you can score.