General Awareness ยท History
Historical Dates and Firsts
2,518 Questions
Historical dates and firsts questions test your memory of significant global milestones in sports, science, technology, and literature. These factual questions appear regularly in SSC, banking, and state PSC general awareness papers. Use these questions to quickly memorize important historical events and their exact years.
Inventions and launchesSports world firstsHistorical prize awardsTechnology milestones
Historical Dates and Firsts Questions
C
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Smalltalk was developed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, and others, with Smalltalk-72 released in 1972. It pioneered pure object-oriented programming where everything is an object.
C
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C++ was created by Bjarne Stroustrup, starting with 'C with Classes' in 1979 and officially named C++ in 1983. It extended C with object-oriented features, becoming one of the most widely used languages.
B
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Erlang was developed by Ericsson in 1986 by Joe Armstrong and others. It was designed for massive concurrency, high availability, and distributed systems, becoming popular in telecommunications.
B
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Perl was created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. The other options (1952, 1975, 1962) are all too early for Perl, which was developed in the late 1980s for text processing and system administration tasks.
B
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The FL (Functional Language) was developed at IBM in the late 1980s, with 1989 being correct. FL was designed as a successor to Backus's FP language and was part of the functional programming research at IBM.
B
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Python was created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991. The other options (1957, 1963, 1964) are all incorrect as Python was a product of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
B
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Ruby was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) in Japan and first released in 1993. The other options (1958, 1971, 1970) are all too early for Ruby.
A
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Autocode was developed by Alick Glennie for the Mark 1 computer at Manchester in 1952, making it one of the first high-level programming languages.
A
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FORTRAN development began at IBM in 1954 under John Backus, with the first compiler released in 1957. The question asks when it was invented (development started), so 1954 is correct.
A
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FLOW-MATIC was developed by Grace Hopper at Remington Rand in 1955-1956, with 1955 being the correct year. It was the first English-like data processing language.
A
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COMTRAN was developed by IBM in 1957 as a competitor to FLOW-MATIC. It was designed for commercial data processing applications and influenced COBOL's development.
A
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The ALGOL 58 programming language, originally called IAL (International Algebraic Language), was designed and proposed in the year 1958.
C
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SQL was developed at IBM in the early 1970s, with the first commercial product (Oracle/RSI) released in 1978-1979. The language itself was designed earlier (1974), but 1978 represents its first commercial availability.
C
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Ada was designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah under contract to the US Department of Defense, with the language standard first published in 1983. It was named after Ada Lovelace.