Shared quiz
The Machines That Made Computing
Ten questions on the hardware and the ideas computing was built on, from punched cards to the machine in your pocket.
- Questions
- 10
- Time to play
- about 6 min
- Category
- Technology
- Language
- English
- technology
- computing
- history
- science
How to use this quiz
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- Players join from any phone browser, answer on their own device, and the scores update live.
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The questions
Correct answers are shown below, so you can check the quiz before you use it.
The first computer "bug" was recorded in a logbook in 1947. What was it?
- A moth caught in a relaycorrect
- A miswired vacuum tube
- A typo in the punched tape
- A cracked solder joint
Why
In 1947 operators of the Harvard Mark II found a moth trapped in a relay and taped it into the logbook as the "first actual case of bug being found". Engineers already used "bug" for faults; the moth made it famous.
20 seconds to answer
A byte is eight bits.
- Truecorrect
- False
Why
A bit is a single 0 or 1. A byte is a group of eight bits, which can hold 256 different values. Early computers used other sizes, but eight became the standard.
15 seconds to answer
In "RAM", what does the R stand for?
Accepted answers
random
Why
RAM stands for random-access memory: the computer can read any location directly, in any order, rather than working through the data in sequence.
30 seconds to answer
Order these by when they first appeared, earliest first.
Correct order
- The punched card
- The transistor
- The World Wide Web
- The smartphone
Why
Punched cards controlled Jacquard looms in the early 1800s and stored data by 1890. The transistor was invented in 1947, the Web in 1989, and the smartphone arrived in the 1990s and 2000s.
45 seconds to answer
What does a compiler do?
- Turns source code into instructions a machine can runcorrect
- Compresses files to save space
- Collects and files error reports
- Arranges running programs in memory
Why
A compiler translates source code into another form, often machine code or bytecode, so it can be executed by a processor or a runtime. Many compilers run before execution; others compile during it.
20 seconds to answer
Moore's law was a prediction about the number of transistors on a chip, not about processor speed.
- Truecorrect
- False
Why
In 1965 Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would keep doubling at a steady rate; in 1975 he revised it to about every two years. Speed gains were a consequence, not the prediction.
15 seconds to answer
Which piece of old technology do you miss the least?
Poll — no right answer, players just vote.
- Dial-up modems
- Floppy disks
- Paper jams
- Rewinding a cassette with a pencil
20 seconds to answer
What does it mean for software to be open source?
- Its source code is available under a licence allowing anyone to use, modify and redistribute itcorrect
- It is always free of charge
- Nobody holds the copyright to it
- Anyone can edit the program while it runs
Why
Open-source software publishes its source code under a licence that lets anyone study, use, change and share it, within the terms that licence sets.
20 seconds to answer
Which British mathematician described, in 1936, the theoretical machine underlying modern computing?
Accepted answers
Turing · Alan Turing
Why
In his 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers", Alan Turing described an abstract machine that reads and writes symbols on a tape. It defines what any computer can, in principle, compute.
30 seconds to answer
Roughly how many transistors are on a modern high-end processor?
- Tens of billionscorrect
- Tens of thousands
- Hundreds of millions
- Hundreds of trillions
Why
High-end processors now hold tens of billions of transistors: Apple's M3 Max (2023) has 92 billion, and some chips exceed 100 billion. Counts vary by processor. Intel's 4004 of 1971, the first commercial microprocessor, had about 2,300.
20 seconds to answer