Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: B

There are 8 bits in a byte.

Eight bits give \( 2^8 = 256 \) combinations, enough for a character set with letters, digits and punctuation, which is why the byte settled at that size and became the unit of memory.

Answer: C

Intel is headquartered at Santa Clara, California, in Silicon Valley.

Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded it in 1968. Its 4004 of 1971 was the first commercial microprocessor, and the x86 line has dominated personal computing since 1981.

Answer: D

A firewall can be either hardware or software.

A software firewall runs on the machine it protects; a hardware firewall is a separate appliance guarding a whole network. Both filter traffic against a set of rules on address, port and protocol.

Answer: C

A cell comment is viewed by positioning the mouse pointer over the cell.

A cell with a comment carries a small red triangle in its corner, and hovering displays the note. Comments are for annotation and are not printed by default.

Answer: A

WWW stands for the World Wide Web.

Tim Berners-Lee proposed it at CERN in 1989 and built the first server and browser in 1990. It is the system of linked hypertext documents that runs over the internet, not the internet itself.

Answer: A

A direct access storage device is abbreviated DASD.

The term is IBM's, and covers any device on which a record can be reached directly rather than by reading through what precedes it - disks and drums, as opposed to tape.

Answer: B

A spider is a program that catalogues websites.

Also called a crawler or bot, it follows links from page to page, fetching each and passing it to the indexer. It is how a search engine discovers what exists on the web.

Answer: A

DNS stands for Domain Name System.

It translates names people can remember into the numeric IP addresses machines use. It is a distributed hierarchy of servers, so no single machine holds the whole directory.

Answer: B

ROM stands for read only memory.

Its contents are fixed when the chip is made or programmed and survive without power, which is why the BIOS or firmware that starts a computer is held in it.

Answer: A

CRC stands for cyclic redundancy check.

The data is treated as a polynomial and divided by a fixed generator; the remainder is sent with the message and recomputed on arrival. It detects burst errors far more reliably than a simple checksum.