Fundamentals Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Correct answer: Dot per sq. inch

Print quality is a matter of resolution - how finely the dots are packed. It is quoted as dots per inch, usually for both directions (600 × 600 dpi), which amounts to a density over the printed area. The more dots in a given area, the smoother the curves and the finer the detail. Speed, quoted in pages per minute, is a separate matter and says nothing about quality.

Answer: C

Correct answer: CPU

The central processing unit fetches each instruction, decodes it, performs the arithmetic and logic, and directs every other unit - so it is the part that does the thinking, and is called the brain of the machine. The ALU and the control unit are components within the CPU, and memory only holds what the CPU works on.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Terminal

Several people share one central machine by each having a terminal - a keyboard and screen connected to it, with the processing done centrally. A light pen, mouse or digitiser is an input device attached to a single workstation; none of them lets an extra user onto the system.

Answer: C

Correct answer: EDSAC

EDSAC, built at Cambridge by Maurice Wilkes and first run in May 1949, was the first practical computer to work on the stored-program principle - instructions held in memory alongside the data, so that a new job needed only new data rather than rewiring. ENIAC had to be reconfigured by hand, and UNIVAC came later.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Third

Operating systems in the modern sense - multiprogramming, time-sharing and job scheduling - belong to the third generation, with IBM’s OS/360 and the time-sharing systems of the late 1960s. Earlier machines had at most a simple batch monitor, and were often run one job at a time by hand.

Answer: D

Correct answer: All of above

Capacity is the product of all three: how closely the tracks are packed across the surface, how densely the bits are written along each track, and how many surfaces the disk pack contains. Improving any one of them increases the total, and the history of the hard disk is largely the history of packing all three more tightly.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Control section

The control unit fetches and decodes each instruction and then tells the ALU what operation to perform on which operands. The ALU has no decision-making of its own - it responds to the control signals. The two together make the CPU.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Mainframe computers

EBCDIC is IBM’s 8-bit code, and it belongs to the world of IBM mainframes. Minicomputers, microcomputers and almost everything else settled on ASCII, and later on Unicode.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Binary codes

Everything inside the machine - instructions, memory addresses and data alike - is held as binary codes, patterns of 0 and 1, because that is what a two-state electronic circuit can represent. What a given pattern means depends only on how it is used.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Infallible

Computers are extremely reliable - they do the same thing every time - but that is not the same as being infallible. A machine given wrong data or a wrong program produces wrong answers with complete consistency, which is what “garbage in, garbage out” means. The fault lies with the input or the program, but the output is wrong all the same.