History of Computing

Following which military conflict, did the MIT AI Lab had to seek increased commercial sponsorship?

• World War I

• The Korean War

• the Vietnam War

• World War II

• the Gulf War

Although interactive computers did exist in the 1950s, they were not commonplace due to which of the following?

• their extremely high cost to produce

• restrictions on production parts

• the rare nature of batch-oriented computing

• the lack of government funding for research

• their limited utility to perform functions

Charles Babbage proposed automating calculations used for

• manufacturing pins

• telegraphy

• navigational tables

• codebreaking

• the United States census

"second system effect" refers to which of the following?

• reduced time-to-completion for a second novel product

• increased popularity of a second-generation machine

• likelihood that a devoted customer will purchase another machine

• overdesign and excessive frills of a second system

• compatibility issues between first and second generation machines

All of the following are true EXCEPT the ENIAC

• was a general-purpose computing machine

• was proposed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert

• was faster than previous computers

• required thousands of vacuum tubes to operate

• was a primarily electromechanical machine.

Linux was a major revision of Minix and was developed by a college student in which country?

• Finland

• Greece

• Brazil

• Germany

• Japan

The UNIVAC correctly predicted the outcome of the United States presidential election of:

• 1936

• 1944

• 1952

• 1964

• 1980

The Altair 8800 was significant because it demonstrated which of the following?

• Private scientific labs would become dedicated customers.

• The general public craved an affordable household computer.

• The federal government would fund research into minicomputers.

• University students were leading the field of computer processing.

• Programming languages could be made compatible across machines.

Project Whirlwind was commissioned by which branch of the military at the end of WWII?

• The Navy

• The Coastguard

• The Army

• The Airforce

• The Marines

The major problem that Grace Hopper solved while worked on the Mark I Project was

• its lack of a “plan preparation machine” using mathematical notation

• its lack of human interface when running complicated evaluations

• its use of conditional branching made processing times extremely slow

• its inability to automatically run a sequence of instructions multiple times

• its requirement that a new code be written for each kind of processing task