Microsoft ACCESS today is a standard data base program. Microsoft had used this name before. What did the earlier ACCESS program do?
Answer: It was a communications program for sending information via a modem.
Apple computer produced a $10,000 personal computer between the Apple II and the MacIntosh. What is the name of this computer
Answer: LISA
Bonus: What was the origin of this name?
Bonus Answer: An Acronym (accept just that much) which stood for Locally Integrated Software Architecture (may also have been the name of Steve Job's daughter).
Apple sued Microsoft charging that Windows was a rip-off of the Macintosh interface. Many people however, felt that the Macintosh was a rip-off of the Xerox Star interface. The Xerox Star itself was the commercial successor to a machine used internally in Xerox which was never sold. What was the name of this machine?
Answer: ALTO
To the nearest $500 what was the list price of an IBM Model 51 (the original PC) with one disk drive in 1981?
Answer: $4000
The Internet is governed by the Internet Society. Who owns the Society?
Answer: It is a not-for-profit corporation.
Data warehousing has become a multi-billion dollar industry in the 21st century. Who is known as "the father of data warehousing"?
Answer: W.H. (Bill) Inmon
Data Warehousing and Data Mining are two terms that have come into general use in recent years. There are, however, alternative names for data mining? What is it?
Answers: Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) and knowledge management
Ed Roberts ran Altair, the first PC company. He gave Bill Gates his first computer job. What is he doing now?
Answer: He is now a physician in Georgia.
For whom was the original punched card named?
Answer: Hollerith.
One of the reasons the punched card made such an impression was that it was used by the U.S. Census Bureau. Which census was the first one to use punched cards?
Answer:1890.
The inventor of the supercomputer was the late Seymour Cray. How did he die?
Answer: In an auto accident.
Estimate, to the nearest 1000, the number of computers in operation in the United States in 1960.
Answer: 6000 (Source: Kurzweill: The Age of Intelligent Machines)
Gordon Moore was one of the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, one of the earliest Silicon Valley startups. He is known today for Moore’s Law. Accurately state Moore’s law.
Answer: Integrated circuits on a chip will double in complexity each year.(Accept: Number of transistors on a chip instead of integrated circuits; accept 18 months rather than 12.).
Bonus: What year did Moore formulate his law?
Answer: 1964
In the 1968 film 2001:A Space Odyssey by Arthur Clarke and Stanley C. Kubrick, HAL the computer regularly travels in space. Airline service is provided on a regular basis. Which airline is shown as providing space travel in the film?
Answer: Pan American Airways (which no longer flies).
We all know the wonders of pocket calculators. The first one was introduced in 1971. What could this calculator do?
Answer: Add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
The killer application for the PC -- that is, the first application which made people other than enthusiasts want to buy a computer -- was the electronic spreadsheet invented by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. What was it called?
Answer: Visicalc
Kasparov against the computer -- 6 matches and the computer won. IBM customized one of its machines for the purpose and named it Deep Blue. What generic model number was it?
Answer: RS 6000
BONUS: The RS 6000 uses the RISC instruction set. How did the specific RS 6000 that beat Kasparov perform its calculations?
Answer: Parallel computing.
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