After Hours: The Information Technology Quiz (The Answers)

Programming and Languages

1. Modern programming languages are usually object orientated, unlike older languages (athough some of these have been updated by adding object orientated extensions). What is "object orientation" and how is it defined?. Real-world entities comprise objects (which embody both data and procedures). 1 point Key concepts are encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism. Encapsulation: the ability of an object to hide its data and methods. Inheritance: any object subclass can inherit the definitions of one or more general classes. Polymorphism: means allowing a single definition to be used with different classes of object. 1 point 1 point 1 point 1 point

2. Probably the oldest procedural programming language is FORTRAN (Formula Translation), which was designed for scientific and engineering computing. Who/where was FORTRAN developed, and when did it first hit the streets? The FORmula TRANslator System, or FORTRAN0 was designed by an IBM team lead by John Backus. Backus made many contributions to IT, including the Backus-Naur form. FORTRAN0 was developed in 1954 1 point

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3. Everone knows that computers are, binary (base 2) devices. Other number bases used in Information Technology are Octal (base 8) and hexedecimal (base 16). What is pental (apart from a pen) and what would the pental number 21 be if expressed in base 2, 8, 10, and 16? Pental is base 5. 10112 138 1110 0B16 1 point 1 point 1 point 1 point 1 point

Networking and Connectivity

4. At one time the "@" symbol was a poor and lonely keyboard key. With the invention of Email it is no longer, being the delimiter between the username and location part of the Email address. Who first put the "@" into your address? Ray Tomlinson of Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) sent the first network Email message. He also defined the classic format of the E-mail address (username@hostname), including the use of the @ symbol . 1 point

5. The letters HTTP are seen by every Internet user just about every day, What do they stand for? Hyper Text Transfer Protocol 1 point

6. Well known IEEE standards are 802.3 (Ethernet) and 802.5 (Token Ring), both are local area network technologies. What is IEEE 802.4? Token Bus 1 point

Hsitorical Hardware and Companies

7. Back in the 1980s, when IBM started producing desktop systems, it legitimised the new industry. The IBM PC XT had an 8088/6 processor, with 16 bit addressing internally but only an 8 bit address bus (giving the system's segmented architecture). How fast was the processor clocked? 4.77 Mhz (Compare with present processor clock rates.) 1 point

8. Back in the 1970s Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) brought 32 bit computing to minicomputer systems, taking the computer out of the data centre and putting it into the engineering department. These were the VAX computers (the 11/780, is fondly remembered in many engineering departments). What do the letters VAX stand for, and what is the plural of VAX (hint, it isn't VAXs)? Virtual Address eXtension VAXen 1 point 1 point

9. Back in the 1960s the industry was dominated by mainframe computer systems. At the time the companies building these systems were referred to as "IBM and the BUNCH". Who were the BUNCH? Burroughs UNIVAC NCR CDC (Control Data Corporation) Honeywell 1 point 1 point 1 point 1 point 1 point

Movers and Shakers

10. Moore's Law is often referred to in the IT industry. Who was Moore, and what is his law? George Moore was a cofounder of Intel. In 1965 Moore observed that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every 18 months. This means higher performance for about the same manufacturing cost. 1 point 1 point

11. Charles Babbage designed a mechanical computer, his machine was never built but it was truly innovative. What was Babbages machine called, and why was it so important? Babbage designed a number of machines, but only the Analytical Engine can be 1 point considered as the true forerunner of the modern computer. His Difference Engine is more akin to a simple calculator. The design of the Analytical Engine included concepts and ideas seen in modern computing devices. There was the mill (analagous to the CPU), the store (memory), punched cards and a printer (input/output devices), and, most significantly, the device was designed to be programmable with decisions as to what to do depending upon the results of previous calculations. 12. Who is Linus Torvalds, and why is he important to the IT industry? Linus Torvalds is, of course, the Finnish software engineer who, as a student, developed the Linux kernal. 1 point 1 point

The Linux kernal, still under active development, when used with the free 1 point software foundation's GNU software forms the basis for a wide variety of Unix like operating system releases (e.g. Red Hat Linux, Suse Linux, etc.). It is probably the most serious competitor to the dominence of Microsoft's Windows. 13. Seymour Cray's contribution to the development of computing is almost legendary. Who was he, and what did he do? Seymour Cray was a computer engineer who developed very high performance 1 point computer systems (supercomputers). Cray developed some of his first supercomputers for Control Data Corporation, 1 point they were largely aimed at large scale, computer intensive, science and engineering work . His first supercomputers, were the CDC 6600 and 7600 systems. Later he founded Cray Research which developed the Cray supercomputers, including the legendry Cray 1 (a vector processor) and the CrayX-MP (a four processor system). 14. Who said "640 K should be enough for anyone", and why might this comment be seen as somewhat amusing nowadays? Bill Gates, who company will soon be releasing the latest version of Windows, called Vista. Vista, will require slightly more than 640K to run, it will need 1GB. 1 point

15. Who invented the first electronic computer? This is a very difficult question, the answer being shrouded in debate based on 1 point terminology and technology. For a time ENIAC (USA, 1946, John William Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert) was the number one contender for the title. More recently, however, there have been challenges to this assertion. Colossus (UK, 1944, Tommy Flowers) is earlier; it was an electronic device used for code breaking purposes. Even earlier, if we assume electronic to include devices using relays rather than valves as logic elements, the title might go to the Z1 (Germany, 1938, Konrad Zuse).

16. Who is generally considered to be the Father of the World Wide Web, that is who initially defined and developed the Web? Sir John "Tim" Berners-Lee, KBE is the inventor of the World Wide Web. 1 point

Mixed Bag
17. Security is important for everyone, not just for people in the IT industry. Classically security is defined as comprising three components (sometimes referred to in shorthand as CIA). What are these components? Confidentiality Integrity Availability 1 point 1 point 1 point

18. In IT the Halloween Memos have an almost legendary status. What are they, who issued them, and why are they important? The Halloween Memos are a set of leaked Microsoft documents allegedly from 1 point senior company staff. The documents outlined an assessment of the threat that open-source software (OSS) and the Linux operating system represent to Microsoft's market. They are important because they implicitly acknowledge the increasing competativeness of open source software. 1 point 1 point

19. There is a mammal called a Gnu (pronounced "gunew"); for same strange reason it tends to be considered as something of a figure of fun (there is even a comic song about Gnus). In software you will also find a GNU - where? GNU is not Unix. GNU is a library of software (largely for Linux/Unix systems) developed under the GPL, the General Public Licence (sometimes called copyleft). 1 point

Humour
20. It has been said that Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal. What is a real programmer and why doesnt he use Pascal? It is too long to explain here, just look at one of the references and award yourself the point anyway. http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/quiche.htm http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html http://www.codeproject.com/scrapbook/realprog.asp A real programmer doesnt use Pascal because he is not a quiche eater. A real programmer uses FORTRAN. 1 point

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Scoring
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