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 Difference Engine
- The Analytical Engine
- The Arithmometer
- The Tabulating Machine
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?
- Luigi Federico Menabrea
- Charles Babbage
- Blaise Pascal
- Gottfried Leibniz
Alan Turing's 1936 paper introduced the abstract 'Turing machine' primarily to settle David Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem (the decision problem).
- True
- False
At Bletchley Park, Turing's electromechanical machine built to help crack the German Enigma cipher was named the:
- Colossus
- Bombe
- Heath Robinson
- Tunny
Turing's 1950 proposal for judging machine intelligence through conversation was originally called the 'imitation ___' in his paper.
ENIAC, unveiled in 1946, used which technology as its primary switching elements for computation?
- Vacuum tubes
- Electromechanical relays
- Point-contact transistors
- Integrated circuits
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
- Shockley, Noyce, and Moore
- Kilby, Noyce, and Bardeen
- Eckert, Mauchly, and von Neumann
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
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 Harvard Mark II
- ENIAC
- The Manchester Baby
- UNIVAC I
The Intel 4004, released in 1971 as the first commercial single-chip microprocessor, was a processor of what word size?
- 4-bit
- 8-bit
- 12-bit
- 16-bit
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.
In 8-bit two's complement representation, the bit pattern 10000000 represents which decimal value?
- -128
- -1
- -127
- 128
ENIAC was originally programmed by physically setting switches and rewiring plugboard cables rather than by loading stored programs from memory.
- True
- False