Computer Fundamentals Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Correct answer: Kilobyte

The units run kilobyte → megabyte → gigabyte → terabyte, each a thousand-and-twenty-four times the one before: \( 1\ \text{KB} = 1024 \) bytes, \( 1\ \text{GB} = 1024^3 \) bytes and \( 1\ \text{TB} = 1024^4 \) bytes. The kilobyte is therefore the smallest of those offered.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Steve Jobs

Apple Computer was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, with Wozniak designing the Apple I and Jobs driving the venture commercially. Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft, and John McCarthy created LISP and coined the term artificial intelligence.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Operating System

Linux is an operating system kernel, released by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and distributed with the GNU utilities as Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian and others. It manages the processor, memory, files and devices, which is exactly what an operating system does.

Answer: A

Correct answer: segmentation

Segmentation allocates each segment a contiguous block of exactly the size it needs, so as segments come and go the free memory is left as scattered holes - enough in total but no single hole large enough. That is external fragmentation. Paging uses fixed-size frames, so it suffers internal fragmentation instead.

Answer: B

Correct answer: An operating system

System software manages the machine itself and provides the platform on which other programs run; operating systems, device drivers and utilities all belong to it. Excel, Photoshop and browsers are application software, written for the user’s own tasks.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Local Area Transport

LAT is Local Area Transport, a Digital Equipment Corporation protocol that connected terminals to hosts over an Ethernet local network. It ran directly over Ethernet rather than over IP, which kept it fast but confined it to a single LAN.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Bit manipulation

Working on single bits or small groups of bits inside a word - testing, setting, clearing, shifting or masking them - is called bit manipulation, and it is done with the AND, OR, XOR and shift instructions. A bit slice is a hardware technique for building wide processors from narrow ones.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Writing tablet

A writing tablet, or graphics tablet, senses the position of a stylus on its surface, so it captures both the character being written and where on the surface it was written - the coded character and the positional coordinates the question asks for.

Answer: C

Correct answer: RAM

RAM loses its contents the moment power is removed, which is why work must be saved to a disk. ROM, hard disks and flash storage are all non-volatile and retain data without power.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Multiplexer

A multiplexer channel interleaves the traffic of several slow peripherals onto one path to the processor, taking a byte or a burst from each in turn, so a single channel serves many devices instead of one channel each. A selector channel, by contrast, gives its whole capacity to one fast device at a time.