History of Computing Trivia

1. One of the first electronic computers, located in Philadelphia, occupied 167 square metres, weighed 27 tons and consumed 150kW of electricity. What was it called?

From Quiz The Curious History of Digital Computers

Answer: ENIAC

ENIAC was developed and built by the U.S. Army for the purpose of calculating ballistic firing tables by emulating electronically a hand-operated mechanical calculator. It used a 10-digit decimal system rather than the binary system used by modern computers. It could not store programs, and conditional branching, a basic function of all modern computers, involved clumsy manual programming using wires and plugs. An amusing but false rumour at the time was that the lights in Philadelphia would dim whenever the behemoth was turned on. Only one ENIAC was ever built, and in 1955 it was put out of action by a lightning strike.

From Quiz History of Microsoft Windows

Answer: 1985

Microsoft Corporation released "Windows" a year after the Apple Macintosh was released. It quickly stirred up controversy due to the resemblance it bore to the Macintosh.

From Quiz A Brief History of the Internet

Answer: UNIX

UNIX was first developed in what was knows as 'assembly' language, which restricted its use to the particular type of computer it was written on. In the early 1970s it was written in C, meaning it could now be transported more easily across different computers (and later, networks). UNIX is the precursor to many later internet-based operating systems, including Linux.

From Quiz The Lowly Punched Card

Answer: Controlling French weaving looms (early 18th century)

Bouchon & Falcon replaced paper rolls that had been in use to control looms in France with this much more durable format. Babbage did work with punched cards and his mechanical calculators (pre-cursor to computers). Throughout the 19th and 20th century punched cards were used in many types of player-pianos and fairground organs.

From Quiz Basic BASIC (for Old School Computers)

Answer: It was an acronym

BASIC stood for "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code." It was developed in 1963 at Dartmouth College, but really took hold with the home computer explosion of the late 1970s and early 1980s. One of the first versions of BASIC for a home computer was Altair BASIC, written in 1975 by a couple guys you may have heard of--Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Microsoft.

From Quiz Installing, Configuring, and Upgrading (using DOS)

Answer: Sys A:

This assumes the system files are located on the C: drive.

From Quiz Sinclair Computers

Answer: 3''

Amstrad were convinced that they had a superior disc format - they were however small capacity, slow devices which cost an arm and a leg!

From Quiz The BBC Micro

Answer: Acorn

Acorn beat some strong competition including Sinclair to win the British Broadcasting Corporation's contract.

From Quiz The Real Computer History Quiz

Answer: Cassette Tape IO

The original PC (model 5150) was the only model that had this connector. The only jumper on the motherboard was used to configure this connector for line-level or MIC-level input.

From Quiz Windows 98 Introduction

Answer: Windows Explorer

Windows Explorer is a graphical tool that is found in Start-Programs-Windows Explorer. It shows your computer's files and folders in a tree structure.

From Quiz The Computer Scrapheap Challenge

Answer: Compaq

Founded in 1982, Compaq was the first to go head-to-head with the IBM Personal Computer. But it struggled against the likes of HP and Dell and could not keep up in the price wars. HP bought out Compaq in 2002 and used the name for a few years before it disappeared in 2013.

From Quiz The Curious History of Digital Computers

Answer: Atanasoff-Berry

The validity of the claim that the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was the first electronic computer has been debated by many, for various technical reasons. There is no doubt however, that many of the designer Atanasoff's ideas were seminal in future computer design. A case was brought by the holders of the ENIAC patent, Sperry Rand, against Honeywell, charging them with patent infringement and demanding royalties. At the same time Honeywell sued Sperry Rand for monopoly and fraud, and seeking the invalidation of the patent, on the basis that they had used Atanasoff's designs for the ABC in the building of ENIAC. The decision came down in favour of Honeywell, invalidating the patent and putting the design concepts into the public domain. The decision enabled open competition between manufacturers, and the explosion of the modern commercial computer age.

From Quiz History of Microsoft Windows

Answer: The 9/11 attacks

Microsoft had been using the slogan "Prepare to Fly" in the lead-up to the Windows XP release. When the September 11 attacks occurred Microsoft decided not to use it, and instead used "Yes, you can".

From Quiz A Brief History of Computers

Answer: Blaise Pascal

Pascal came up with the calculator so that he could help his father, who was a tax collector. He used a number of wheels that had ten cogs each and that could be turned by hand. The calculator allowed the entry of numbers and by turning the wheels it gave the total sum of the numbers that were entered. John Napier, who discovered logarithms is Scottish, Isaac Newton was not born until 1643 and is English and French mathematician Descartes gave the world the Cartesian coordinate system.

From Quiz Why 360?

Answer: Over 100,000 in IBM offices

The formal System/360 announcement was a major event. Naturally, IBM's President Thomas J. Watson, Jr, made the announcement at the company headquarters in Poughkeepsie NY. Additionally, simultaneous announcements, conducted at 165 corporate offices around the country, were attended by 100,000 business executives. Within a month, over 1000 orders had been received. The first S/360, a Model 40, was delivered to a customer a year later in April 1965. According to a 1966 article in "Fortune Magazine", Watson bet the entire company on the S/360. Development required a commitment of $5 billion, which was double IBM's annual revenue and 25 times its annual profit. Not only that, but the announcement instantly obsoleted nearly all of IBM's entire products. Jim Collin's book "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't" lists the S/360 as one of the three all-time greatest business products (along with the Model T and the Boeing 707). The gamble paid off handsomely. By some estimates, 25 years later (in 1989) the S/360 and its descendants continued to account for over 50% of IBM's revenues. They also comprised nearly 50% of large systems in use worldwide.

From Quiz A Universal History of (Internet) Infamy

Answer: Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, creator of the HTTP protocol, programmer of the first web client, and called the Father of the Internet for all his contributions to this phenomenon. Credit goes in some way also to Nikola Tesla, because without his pioneering work on the invention of alternate current and many others, the electronic era would have been delayed, if ever existed. Jim Kimsey was founder and CEO of AOL, and Thomas Watson leaded IBM during its golden years.

From Quiz A Mainframe Computing Miscellany

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.

From Quiz Troubleshooting Programs on the IBM 360

Answer: BLL (Base Locator for Linkage) cell and Displacement

The BLL cells each held an address which allowed for relative indexing into memory locations. In your dump you were given which BLL cell to use to reach to the "offending" instruction and the relative "displacement" from the address given in the BLL cell at which to find the instruction. A little quick math (adding the displacement to the address in the BLL cell) and you now could find the offending location in the dump. BTW, the other two terms (AAI and DIE) are fabrications.

From Quiz The Lowly Punched Card

Answer: Record data for the US Census

It was Herman Hollerith who developed the technology to process data using punched cards for the US 1890 Census. The punched card often was referred to as a Hollerith card. These cards and Hollerith's sorting and tabulating machinery reduced census data compilation time from 8 years (for the 1880 census) to just one year (for the 1890 census).

From Quiz IBM S360 Mainframe Computer History

Answer: 7.25 MB on six 14-inch platters in a 10 lb disk pack

40 years later you can hold a typical 500GB disk drive for the PC in the palm of your hand. This would have required approximately 65,000 2311 Direct Access Storage units. Also, the speed of todays drives is about 10x that of this dinosaur (8.5ms vs 85ms average time to find a block of data on the drive). Each of the platters did come with 3 unused tracks which were designated for use only when faults occurred on other tracks on that platter.

From Quiz Basic BASIC (for Old School Computers)

Answer: ?

This shortcut would save some small amount of time, since a large part of any program was indicating what would go onto the screen. Using a ? instead of typing PRINT may have saved only four keystrokes, but for some reason it seemed like so much more. 10 ? "Hello" would do the same as 10 PRINT "Hello".

From Quiz The History of Computing

Answer: It was the standard size of banknotes.

They were designed to be the same size as banknotes and fit into existing banknote boxes.

From Quiz Computer Potpourri I (The Early Decades)

Answer: Green

The "green card" was a must for IBM Assembly programmers and to some extent for COBOL programmers also. It listed all the machine language instructions, data formats, special information and other useful items that a programmer would need to quickly reference while writing a program.

From Quiz Computers Before The PC

Answer: Data General's MV/8000

Tracy Kidder wrote this book about the team at Data General who designed the MV/8000, one of the first super-minicomputers.

From Quiz Installing, Configuring, and Upgrading (using DOS)

Answer: F5

When you see (starting msdos) you would then press F5.

From Quiz The Real Computer History Quiz

Answer: DATE.COM and TIME.COM

DATE.COM and TIME.COM were replaced in DOS 1.1 by the internal DATE and TIME commands. REN, COPY and DEL were always internal commands.

From Quiz Windows 98 Introduction

Answer: Taskbar

The Taskbar has many functions: It has the Start Button that opens the Start Menu, the Clock, sometimes a list of more shortcuts, and sometimes the systems tray.

From Quiz The Computer Scrapheap Challenge

Answer: Acorn

Acorn arose from the ideas of a group of students and researchers at Cambridge University. Their aim was to take computing out of the hands of a few coders like themselves and into everyday homes. Their Acorn Atom was to offer that. Their further development of that, the Proton, was to be the basis for the home computer the BBC was looking for. Branded the BBC Micron, it was to be phenomenally successful and Acorn became a successful public company. But the sharks were circulating and finance was shaky.

From Quiz History of Microsoft Windows

Answer: Interface Manager

"Windows" was originally going to be called "Interface Manager", but an assistant urged Bill Gates to call it "Windows", referring to whenever the user typed a command, it opened a series of tiles, or "windows".

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