Computer Awareness GK Questions with Answers – Page 17

In his report on the EDVAC design in 1945 John von Neumann set out a computer in which a single memory holds both the program and the data it works on, with a control unit, an arithmetic and logic unit and input and output; that layout is still called the…

Herman Hollerith built an electric tabulating machine that read holes punched in cards, and it cut the time needed to process the United States census of 1890 from years to months.

In 1936 the British mathematician Alan Turing described an abstract machine, now called the Turing machine, that defines what it means for a problem to be computable, and in 1950 he proposed the Turing test, by which a machine is judged intelligent if its answers cannot be told from a…

Intel released the 4004 in 1971, putting a complete central processing unit on a single chip for the first time and beginning the fourth generation of computers along with the age of the personal computer.

The Scottish mathematician John Napier published his work on logarithms in 1614, which turned multiplication into addition, and he then devised a set of numbered rods, Napier’s bones, with which products could be read off mechanically.

ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was completed in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly and used some eighteen thousand vacuum tubes; it was a first generation machine, filled a large room and consumed a great deal of power.

Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, worked with Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine, and the notes she published in 1843 include a step by step sequence for computing Bernoulli numbers on it, which is recognised as the first computer program; a programming language, Ada, is named after her.

The French mathematician Blaise Pascal built the Pascaline in 1642 to help his father with tax calculations; it worked with toothed wheels and could add and subtract, and the programming language Pascal is named in his honour.

Babbage designed the Difference Engine in 1822 and then the Analytical Engine, a general purpose mechanical computer with a store for numbers, a mill for arithmetic, punched card input and printed output, which is the plan of a modern computer drawn a century before one could be built; for that…

The IBM System/360, announced in 1964, was built around integrated circuits, and the integrated circuit is exactly what defines the third generation of computers; the series is also remembered for introducing a single compatible family of machines of different sizes.

The generations of computers are named for the switching device they use, and the second generation, running from the late 1950s into the early 1960s, replaced the bulky vacuum tube with the transistor, which had been invented at Bell Laboratories in 1947.

In the consumer-to-business model the consumer names the price or the terms and the business then accepts or declines the offer, so the usual direction of an offer is reversed.

MeghRaj is the name given to the Government of India Cloud, usually shortened to GI Cloud, under which government departments obtain their computing and storage from a common set of government managed data centres rather than each building its own.

The three terms sit one inside the other like circles. Artificial intelligence is the whole field of making machines behave intelligently, and it includes approaches that use no learning at all, such as rule based expert systems and search algorithms.

A classical computer stores information in bits, each of which must be either zero or one at a given moment.

Entries on a blockchain are grouped into blocks, and every block carries the cryptographic hash, a short fixed length fingerprint, of the block immediately before it.

An RFID system has a tag carrying a tiny chip and an antenna, and a reader that sends out radio waves; the tag answers with its stored identity, so an object can be recognised without being seen or touched and without a line of sight, unlike a barcode that must…

The British technologist Kevin Ashton used the phrase Internet of Things in 1999 while working on radio frequency identification tags for tracking goods through a supply chain; his point was that if every object could report its own position and state, the internet would no longer depend on people typing…

A hypervisor is a piece of software, also called a virtual machine monitor, that divides one physical server into several virtual machines; it is the tool that makes cloud computing possible, not a way of deploying a cloud.

In this model the provider runs the finished application on its own servers and the user simply opens it in a browser, managing nothing but the data and a few settings; a web mailbox, an online office suite and a hosted customer records system all work this way.