Computing History

All 13 questions

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1. Charles Babbage designed two calculating engines. Which one was the general-purpose, programmable design that anticipated modern computers with a 'store' and a 'mill'?

   • The Arithmometer
   • The Difference Engine
   • The Tabulating Machine
   • The Analytical Engine

2. Ada Lovelace's celebrated notes on the Analytical Engine were written as an annotated translation of an article by which author, originally published in French?

   • Gottfried Leibniz
   • Charles Babbage
   • Luigi Federico Menabrea
   • Blaise Pascal

3. Alan Turing's 1936 paper introduced the abstract 'Turing machine' primarily to settle David Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem (the decision problem).

   • True
   • False

4. At Bletchley Park, Turing's electromechanical machine built to help crack the German Enigma cipher was named the:

   • Colossus
   • Tunny
   • Heath Robinson
   • Bombe

5. Turing's 1950 proposal for judging machine intelligence through conversation was originally called the 'imitation ___' in his paper.

6. ENIAC, unveiled in 1946, used which technology as its primary switching elements for computation?

   • Electromechanical relays
   • Integrated circuits
   • Vacuum tubes
   • Point-contact transistors

7. The three Bell Labs researchers credited with inventing the transistor in 1947 and sharing the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics were:

   • Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley
   • Eckert, Mauchly, and von Neumann
   • Shockley, Noyce, and Moore
   • Kilby, Noyce, and Bardeen

8. Moore's Law, as originally stated by Gordon Moore in his 1965 article, is a proven law of physics rather than an empirical observation about economics and manufacturing trends.

   • True
   • False

9. The famous 1947 logbook entry that helped popularize the word 'bug' involved a moth found inside which machine, in a team associated with Grace Hopper?

   • The Manchester Baby
   • The Harvard Mark II
   • UNIVAC I
   • ENIAC

10. The Intel 4004, released in 1971 as the first commercial single-chip microprocessor, was a processor of what word size?

    • 4-bit
    • 12-bit
    • 8-bit
    • 16-bit

11. The word 'bit', the smallest unit of binary information, is a contraction of the phrase 'binary ___', a term popularized by Claude Shannon crediting John Tukey.

12. In 8-bit two's complement representation, the bit pattern 10000000 represents which decimal value?

    • 128
    • -128
    • -127
    • -1

13. ENIAC was originally programmed by physically setting switches and rewiring plugboard cables rather than by loading stored programs from memory.

    • True
    • False