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Quiz about A Mainframe Computing Miscellany
Quiz about A Mainframe Computing Miscellany

A Mainframe Computing Miscellany Quiz


A variety questions ranging from not too difficult to quite obscure from the 50's, 60's and 70's centering around business computers and their peripherals.

A multiple-choice quiz by key_man. Estimated time: 5 mins.
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Author
key_man
Time
5 mins
Type
Multiple Choice
Quiz #
292,501
Updated
Dec 03 21
# Qns
10
Difficulty
Tough
Avg Score
5 / 10
Plays
572
Last 3 plays: Joepetz (10/10), DizWiz (10/10), ZWOZZE (3/10).
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Question 1 of 10
1. Which of the following was manufactured by DEC? Hint


Question 2 of 10
2. What was/is an acoustic coupler? Hint


Question 3 of 10
3. What was/is a TWX-33? Hint


Question 4 of 10
4. What numeric base system was used by the Honeywell-800? Hint


Question 5 of 10
5. WATFOR (Waterloo Fortran), first delivered in 1965 by Waterloo University, Ontario, Canada, for the IBM 7040 was a watershed in programming language development. Who was the original development team? Hint


Question 6 of 10
6. Ferranti-Packard (subsidiary of British ICT) sold a moderately successful computer, complete with compilers and operating system, the Ferranti-Packard 6000 in 1963. The first of these (serial number 0001) was retired in 1982. To whom did they sell this first machine? Hint


Question 7 of 10
7. Early mainframe computers used water cooling.


Question 8 of 10
8. Gene _______ left IBM to open a competing mainframe company.

Answer: (One Word (think pink))
Question 9 of 10
9. Mainframe computers are no longer manufactured.


Question 10 of 10
10. The practice of drawing felt marker diagonal lines in various colours along the top of your computer card decks was done for what reason? Hint



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Oct 06 2024 : Joepetz: 10/10
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Score Distribution

quiz
Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. Which of the following was manufactured by DEC?

Answer: PDP 11/70

The PDP 11/70 was an extremely successful line of computers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which despite great engineering found themselves unable to remain financially viable and have been bought by Hewlett-Packard. The GCOS was the late-model Honeywell (later sold to Groupe Bull) OS that ran on their DSP 8/70 and DPS-90 series.

The S370 was the main line of IBM mainframe computers for over a decade from the late 70s. The UIII (UNIVAC III) predates all of these and used original "core memory" (small magnetized donuts) -- you can see some components of this system in the technology museum in Ottawa, Canada.
2. What was/is an acoustic coupler?

Answer: Suction like cups for attaching a phone handset to computer equipment

Acoustic couplers accepted the handset of the old-style cradle phone (round speaker and mouthpiece style) into a pair of rubber "sockets" and the modem transmitted through the handset. The first of these operated at a blazing 110 bps (BITS not bytes) per second which meant transmitting 1100 bytes (less than 300 ASCII characters) would take between one and two minutes.
3. What was/is a TWX-33?

Answer: A teletype terminal that could be attached to a mainframe

The TWX-33 ("twix thirty-three") was a Teletype 33 terminal that used paper rolls and a teletype keyboard (with round keys) and could be attached to mainframe computers for remote work in the 1960s. The "33" was the lightning fast maximum printing speed of 33 characters per second using a small cylindrical print head which moved up and down and smacked against an ink-impregnated ribbon between it and the paper --- this process caused the whole unit to shake as it printed.

It included an audible bell which could be programmatically rung on IBM RAX time-share systems!
4. What numeric base system was used by the Honeywell-800?

Answer: octal

The Honeywell 800 was an octal (base-8) machine which existed in various forms from late 50s through early 70s. In 1965 Honeywell introduced Easycoder which generated COBOL-60 code from templates greatly accelerating development timelines and reducing number of programmer errors.
5. WATFOR (Waterloo Fortran), first delivered in 1965 by Waterloo University, Ontario, Canada, for the IBM 7040 was a watershed in programming language development. Who was the original development team?

Answer: Gus German, Jim Mitchell, Richard Shirley, Robert Zamke

Other than William Gates and Steve Jobs who were both too young at the time (both only 10). The WATFOR/WATFIV evolution is one of many great examples of the influence and success of academic initiatives in the computing industry as a whole.
6. Ferranti-Packard (subsidiary of British ICT) sold a moderately successful computer, complete with compilers and operating system, the Ferranti-Packard 6000 in 1963. The first of these (serial number 0001) was retired in 1982. To whom did they sell this first machine?

Answer: Saskatchewan Power Corporation (Canada)

The system used an electronic drum to allow dynamic memory management. The sale to the Canadian customer as the first sale was not surprising since Ferranti-Packard was the Canadian subsidiary of Ferranti, an aquisition of ICT. The FP6000 went on to become the basis for ICT's next generations of hardware and software (the various 1900 series with ExBM OS).
7. Early mainframe computers used water cooling.

Answer: True

The vast number of vacuum tubes generated enormous amounts of heat that could only be dissipated using chilled water pipes and forced air. Some mainframe computers (the Univac I of 1951, a walk-in computer, was a little over 12ft x 12ft x 8ft had over 19,000 tubes, weighed about 15 tons, and consumed 125KW of power). It could add about 100,000 pairs of 10-digit numbers per second.
8. Gene _______ left IBM to open a competing mainframe company.

Answer: Amdahl

Gene Amdahl left and formed AMDAHL, and began shipping his Amdahl 470 series in 1975 and made significant inroads into IBM market. The pointed competition between IBM and Amdahl is often cited as a significant factor in pushing forward innovation and keeping downward pressure on prices.
9. Mainframe computers are no longer manufactured.

Answer: False

IBM introduced its zSeries 890 in 2004. At the even larger end of things are the grid and supercomputers offered by various companys such as CRAY. There is speculation that the move to "virtualization" will add more interest in the mainframe commercial market.
10. The practice of drawing felt marker diagonal lines in various colours along the top of your computer card decks was done for what reason?

Answer: To allow for visual sorting if you dropped them

The judicious use of diagonal lines down the top of a deck of cards allowed for the rapid (relatively speaking) manual sorting of a dropped deck of cards back into sequence. In addition, on the IBM-80 cards, columns 71 thru 80 were reserved for sequence numbers which could allow that invaluable piece of equipment, the card-sorter, to restore order to your dropped deck.
Source: Author key_man

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