CHMquiz2-RonMak.html

from Ron Mak, March 22, 2013
in support of a tour by his class(es) at San Jose State- 


1. Silent 700

	a) Said by Larry Ellison of his first employees at Oracle 
	   who worked hard "without the sound of a bit dropping".
	b) The nickname of an early electronic computer that had 
	   700 transistors instead of clicking mechanical relays.
	c) A group of anti-computer zealots who patterned themselves 
	   after the "Moral Majority" during the 1980s.
	d) A portable computer terminal introduced in 1971 which operated 
	   quietly due to its use of thermal paper.
	
2. A Hollerith card

	a) A printed circuit card with transistors on one side and diodes 
	   and resistors on the other side.
	b) A processing unit in an early blade server.
	c) Was the size of an $10 bill.
	d) Contained a magnetic stripe to store up to 256K bytes 
	   and was automatically picked up and read.
	   
3. "The company lost its leadership" to a company with "34 people, including 
   the janitor" was said by

	a) Charles Babbage after his funding was cut off.
	b) A disgruntled Apple vice president.
	c) A famous Harvard business school professor dicussing 
	   Hewlett-Packard.
	d) The CEO of IBM disappointed by his company's performance.
	
4. Behemoth

	a) "Big Electronic Human Energized Machine, Only Too Heavy"
	b) The nickname for a Control Data supercomputer.
	c) Said of an early Intel chip whose prototype was much larger 
	   than originally specified.
	d) The title of a 1950s horror movie in which a giant electronic brain 
	   terrorizes a computer company.
	   
5. The first so-called computer bug

	a) Inadvertantly created by Ada Lovelace while programming the 
	   Babbage Difference Engine.
	b) A dead moth found inside the Harvard Mark II computer after the 
	   machine had stopped working.
	c) Theorized by Alan Turing during a lecture about his 
	   eponymous Turing Machine.
	d) Debated by John von Neumann and Howard Aiken over who 
	   was responsible.
	   
6. "Death to the mainframe"

	a) The slogan of Cromemco, an early personal computer maker in 1985.
	b) Words literally eaten by Stewart Alsop, technology writer, 
	   in 2002.
	c) Translated from Russian, said by Lenonid Brezhnev in 1979 
	   while claiming Soviet computing superiority.
	d) Proclaimed by mathematician Jan Lukasiewicz while discussing 
	   his treatise on reverse Polish notation in 1955.
	   
7. The first computer game console that was installed in a Sunnyvale bar 
   failed because

	a) It jammed from too many quarters inserted by players.
	b) The cheap CRT display couldn't keep up with the players' moves.
	c) The game controllers would break from overly aggressive playing.
	d) The Sunnyvale Police considered the console to be a gambling device.
	
8. It was designed to have 256 processors, but only 64 were built.

	a) IBM's embarrassing "Stretch" computer.
	b) Apple's ill-fated supercomputer.
	c) The Illiac IV computer at NASA Ames.
	d) The Cray IV supercomputer's floating-point unit.
	
9. $PARK

	a) The facetious new name proposed for Xerox PARC 
	   after they began to develop commercial software.
	b) The term used by the RAMAC instruction manual to indicate 
	   the location of the disk arm in its resting position.
	c) A built-in string variable in an early microcomputer version 
	   of the BASIC programming language.
	d) A software application from Wang Laboratories to perform 
	   inventory control.
	   
10. Pac-Man Fever

	a) A term used to describe the first computer game addicts.
	b) An early computer virus that infected game consoles.
	c) A record album that went gold on the Billboard Hot 100, 
	   based on the computer game.
	d) The name of an advertising campaign to promote the Pac-Man game.
	
11. "Robot Squirrel"

	a) A popular computer game on the original Apple Macintosh.
	b) A robotics term designating a mobile sensor that can 
	   intelligently traverse a network of pipes.
	c) "Hunts its own food", according to a Popular Science
	   magazine article in 1952.
	d) The pseudonym of a notorious hacker who brought down 
	   a major bank's computer system in 1993.
	   
12. SafeType

	a) An ergonomic keyboard, 1998.
	b) A type-safe computer language, 1975.
	c) A keyboard encryption algorithm, 1968.
	d) The class system of a pioneering object-oriented 
	   programming language, 1989.