Fundamentals Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Correct answer: a keyboard and screen

A dumb terminal has only the means to send keystrokes and display what it is sent - a keyboard and a screen, and no processing of its own. All the work is done by the host it is connected to. A terminal with a processor and memory of its own is an intelligent terminal.

Answer: C

Correct answer: 1000th of a seconds

Milli- means one thousandth, so a millisecond is \(10^{-3}\) seconds. The scale continues: microsecond \(10^{-6}\), nanosecond \(10^{-9}\), picosecond \(10^{-12}\) - the units in which memory and processor speeds are quoted.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Dot per sq. inch

Print quality is a matter of resolution - how finely the dots are packed. It is quoted as dots per inch, usually for both directions (600 × 600 dpi), which amounts to a density over the printed area. The more dots in a given area, the smoother the curves and the finer the detail. Speed, quoted in pages per minute, is a separate matter and says nothing about quality.

Answer: A

Correct answer: ABC

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer was built to solve one particular kind of problem - systems of simultaneous linear equations - so it was a special purpose machine, and it was not programmable. ENIAC and EDVAC were general purpose.

Answer: B

Correct answer: ABC

John Atanasoff and his student Clifford Berry built the Atanasoff-Berry Computer at Iowa State between 1937 and 1942. It was the first machine to use binary arithmetic and electronic switching, though it was neither programmable nor fully automatic.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Hard Disk

Of the four, the hard disk holds by far the most - hundreds of gigabytes to many terabytes, against 1.44 MB for a floppy and about 700 MB for a CD. It also has the advantage of being rewritable and fast.

Answer: A

Correct answer: ENIAC

ENIAC (1946) was regarded as the first general-purpose electronic computer until 1973, when a United States court, in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, invalidated its patent on the ground that its ideas had been derived from Atanasoff’s earlier work - and named the ABC as the first electronic digital computer.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Address bus

A bus is the set of parallel conductors joining the processor to memory and to the other units. The address bus carries the location being referred to, and its width sets how much memory can be addressed - 16 lines allow 64 KB, 32 lines allow 4 GB. The data bus carries the values themselves and the control bus the timing signals.

Answer: D

Correct answer: 1.44 MB

A high-density double-sided 3.5-inch floppy held 1.44 MB: 80 tracks a side, 18 sectors a track, 512 bytes a sector, over two sides. The earlier double-density disk held 720 KB.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Digital plotter

A CAD drawing is made of lines, and a plotter draws them as lines - continuously, at large size and with high precision - rather than approximating them with a grid of dots. That is why plotters remained standard for engineering and architectural output long after dot-matrix and line printers had been displaced elsewhere.