History of Computers Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The one that is not an Indian supercomputer is Pragyan.

PARAM is the series of supercomputers built by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) from 1991 onwards. Pratyush (at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune) and Mihir (at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, Noida) are the high-performance computing systems of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, used for weather and climate forecasting.

Pragyan is the name of the rover carried by Chandrayaan-3's Vikram lander, which explored the Moon's surface near its south pole in 2023. It is not a supercomputer.

Answer: C

Correct answer: First Generation Computers

All three were built between 1945 and 1951 and all three switched with vacuum tubes, which is the defining feature of the first generation.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Artificial intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence is the field concerned with making machines reason, learn and perceive as people do. Nanoscience and nanotechnology deal with matter at atomic scale, and simulation imitates a system's behaviour without any claim to intelligence.

Answer: D

Correct answer: ENIAC

ENIAC, completed in 1946, was among the earliest electronic mainframes; the other three names are not computers at all. Note the spelling: UNIVAC was a real machine, but UNIC is not.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Technological advancement

The first four generations are each marked by a change of switching technology, and the fifth is marked in the same way - by very large scale integration and parallel processing put to the service of artificial intelligence. Object-oriented programming is a software development and belongs to no generation of hardware.

Answer: A

Correct answer: First Generation

Vacuum tubes are large, run hot and need heavy power supplies and cooling, so first generation machines filled entire rooms - ENIAC weighed some thirty tons. Each later generation shrank the switching element and with it the machine.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Network server

The server holds the shared data and services and answers requests from every other machine, so it needs the most capacity and is the most important machine on the network. Clients, stations and desktops are the machines making those requests.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Hard Disks

A fixed disk is one sealed inside the drive and not meant to be taken out, which is what a hard disk is. Flash drives, Blu-ray discs and DVDs are all removable media.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Both a and c

A wire matrix printer forms each character by firing pins at the ribbon, and a Wang image printer builds the page from dots as well. A band printer carries fully formed characters on a moving band and so prints solid type rather than dots.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Z-80

The TRS-80 was built around the Zilog Z-80, an 8-bit processor; the name of the machine itself echoes it. The Z-8000 is a 16-bit chip, and the other two designations are not real Zilog parts.