History of Computers Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Correct answer: Mathematical intensive scientific applications

Supercomputers are built for problems that need vast numbers of arithmetic operations - weather modelling, molecular simulation, nuclear physics. Data retrieval and heavy input-output are the work of mainframes, which are designed for throughput of transactions rather than for raw floating-point speed.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Byte

Eight bits make a byte. Four bits make a nibble, and a word is whatever width the particular processor handles at once - 16, 32 or 64 bits on modern machines.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Artificial Intelligence

The fifth generation is defined by the goal rather than by a single component: machines able to reason, understand natural language and learn. VLSI belongs to the fourth generation, and the other two options are not established terms.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Vacuum tube processors

The vacuum tube was the switching device of the first generation. Transistors, integrated circuits and microprocessors define the second, third and fourth.

Answer: B

Correct answer: IBM 1401

The IBM 1401 is a transistor machine of the second generation. The IBM 360, PDP-8 and HP 2115 all use integrated circuits and belong to the third.

Answer: A

Correct answer: integrated circuits

Jack Kilby, working at Texas Instruments in 1958, built the first integrated circuit - several components formed on a single piece of semiconductor. The transistor had been invented at Bell Labs a decade earlier, and the microprocessor came from Intel in 1971.

Answer: A

Correct answer: milliseconds

First generation machines worked in milliseconds - thousandths of a second. Microseconds came with transistors, nanoseconds with integrated circuits, and picoseconds are faster than any of the five generations achieved.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Fourth Generation

The fourth generation is defined by the microprocessor, which put the whole central processing unit on a single chip. The first three generations used vacuum tubes, transistors and integrated circuits respectively.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Param

PARAM was developed by C-DAC in Pune, the first Indian supercomputer, in 1991. Cray, Blue Gene and Sequoia are American machines.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Screen size

Resolution is the number of distinguishable picture elements, which is set by the bandwidth of the signal, the raster scan rate and the count of horizontal and vertical lines. Making the screen larger spreads the same number of elements over more area - the picture gets bigger and coarser, but its resolution is unchanged.