History of Computers Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Correct answer: 1642

Pascal built his mechanical adding machine, the Pascaline, in 1642, at the age of nineteen, to help his father with tax accounts.

Answer: B

Correct answer: 1940

The first digital electronic computer, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, was built at Iowa State between 1937 and 1942, which places it in 1940 among the options given. ENIAC, often called the first, came later, in 1946.

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: B

Correct answer: Electronic Numeric Integrator and Calculator

ENIAC stands for Electronic Numeric Integrator and Calculator. The first word is Electronic, not Electrical, which is what distinguishes it from the two rejected options that begin that way.

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: 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: C

Correct answer: Data is collected in the form of source documents, placed into groups and then input

Batch processing means accumulating transactions and running them together at a later time. Processing data as soon as it arrives is the opposite arrangement, online or real-time processing, and source documents are precisely what batch input relies on.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata

India's first computer, an HEC-2M, was installed at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta in 1955.

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: Digital Computer

Mainframe, mini and micro are the classes defined by size and capacity. Digital describes how a computer represents data - as against analogue - and says nothing about how big it is.