A Brief History of Computers Quiz | Computers

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. Doing sums is very boring. The same applies to repetitive calculations. The chief Babylonian accountant had a similar problem, so he asked his technicians to come up with something that would help him with his calculations. What was the name of the computing device that first appeared in Babylon?

Answer: Abacus

The abacus is a calculating frame that is used to perform the basic arithmetic functions. The word is Greek and means a board or a piece of wood that has no base. There are many variations of the abacus (Greek, Chinese and Roman among them). The oldest form of abacus comes from Babylon and appeared around 2700 - 2300 BC. It was a lot different from the counting frames that are used today because it used sand on a board.

A succubus is a female demon, the harquebus is an early type of portable gun and an aardvark is an ant-eating quadruped.

2. Who was the world renowned French mathematician who devised what is thought to be the first digital computer in 1642?

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.

3. Charles Babbage, who is also regarded as the "Father of Computing", was fed up of doing boring calculations that were mostly the same thing repeated over and over. He put his thinking cap on and designed a calculating machine that would perform long calculations automatically. What was the name of the first machine that he designed?

Answer: Difference Engine

Babbage's thinking cap worked a treat. He came up with the Difference Engine in 1812. Ten years of hard work later, and at much expense, he managed to produce a working model of the Engine. With financial aid from the British government, and supplemented with his own money, he started, in 1823, work to build the engine.

After ten years on the project, Babbage had had enough of it. He started thinking on something completely different and came up with an idea for what he called the "Analytical Engine".

4. The next major step in the automated computer was the development of something that was widely used for nearly a hundred years. What did Herman Hollerith and James Power develop in 1890?

Answer: Punched cards

Hollerith devised a way of recording data on cards. The data were recorded on cards by making holes into them, with each column and row of a card representing specific values. Hollerith and Power produced machines that could read the information that was punched on them.

Ticker tape was used to communicate stock price information over telegraph lines, confetti are small paper shapes that are thrown in parades or parties and papier mache is a material that consists of paper pulp and glue.

5. War always creates opportunities, and World War II was no exception. There was a need for storing information about new weapons and tests that were performed with them. What was the name of the computer that was built at the Moore school of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania in 1942?

Answer: ENIAC

ENIAC stands for Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator. ENIAC could handle 10 digit numbers and could multiply two of them quite fast. It could do in the region of 300 calculations per second. ENIAC used vacuum tubes and took up a lot of floor space. It was used until 1955 and was the first electronic computer that could work at very fast speeds.

6. The first computer that was used for anything other than military purposes was introduced on June 14, 1951. What was the name of the computer that was designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly?

Answer: UNIVAC

UNIVAC stands for UNIVersal Automatic Computer. The two designers were the same two that designed ENIAC. A total of 46 UNIVAC computers were made available between 1951 and 1958. The computer could handle both numeric and alphabetical characters. Prudential Insurance was the first commercial customer in the USA to utilise a UNIVAC.

The machine was very large (25 x 50 feet), used over 5,500 tubes and had a massive, here you can chuckle, internal storage capacity of 12,000 characters.

7. It wasn't long before IBM stepped into the commercial computer market with the IBM 650 which was described as the "Workhorse of Modern Industry". By the way what does IBM stand for?

Answer: International Business Machines

International Business Machines started life as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) in 1911 at Endicott, New York, following a merger of Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company with two other companies. The company manufactured and sold machinery, tabulators and punched cards. The name IBM was taken in 1924. The other three options are jokes using the initials IBM.

8. In 1958 there was another break-through. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, working separately, came up with the Integrated Circuit. The IC meant that smaller and more powerful computers could be built. What is the IC more commonly called?

Answer: Chip

The IC is commonly known as the chip. The chip helped reduce the cost of computing by something like a million to one. The factor is quite staggering and has no comparisons with anything else done previously in the history of mankind.

9. In 1971 a company announced the first single chip microprocessor. Model 4004 was invented by the company's engineers Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stanley Mazor. What is the name of this company that completely changed the computer market?

Answer: Intel

Intel was formed in 1968 when Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore left the Fairchild Semiconductor Company and formed their own company. The name is a shortened version of "Integrated Electronics".

10. In 1981 IBM introduced the first personal computer (PC) that revolutionised the computer industry. What was the original code name of the product that conjures visions of mightiness, before it was renamed to IBM PC?

Answer: Acorn

From an "acorn" grew, not an oak but a computer that completely changed the market. The computer walked out of air-conditioned rooms and into every house. The first IBM PC used a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor. The PC came with 16K of memory that could be expanded to 256K and one or two 160K floppy disks, used as storage devices.

The original price was 1565 dollars. Compare these specifications with what is available in the twenty-first century!

Source: Author gme24

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A Brief History of Computers Trivia Quiz

A computer is machine that can store and work with large amounts of information. We will take a brief look at the development of calculating machines (computers) through the ages.

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