Computer Awareness GK Questions with Answers – Page 30

Random access memory holds the programs and data the processor is working on at that moment, and it is volatile: the instant the power supply is cut, everything stored in it disappears.

The Intel 4004 placed an entire processing unit on a single chip for the first time in a commercial product, and that step marks the beginning of the fourth generation of computers, built on very large scale integration.

It was the first electronic computer built to be sold to customers rather than used only in a laboratory, and it was famously put to work on census and business data processing.

John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley demonstrated the transistor there in 1947, and the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for it.

Machines such as ENIAC, EDVAC and UNIVAC-I ran on thousands of vacuum tubes, which made them enormous, power-hungry and dependent on constant cooling.

He designed the Difference Engine and then the Analytical Engine, and the Analytical Engine contained the logical parts of a modern computer: a store for holding numbers, a mill for calculating, punched-card input and a printed output.

The 2's complement of a binary number is found in two steps: flip every bit to get the 1's complement, then add 1.

A firewall stands between a trusted private network and an untrusted one such as the internet, and checks the data going in and out.

Static RAM stores each bit in a flip-flop circuit made of several transistors, usually six, so the bit stays put as long as the power is on and never needs refreshing.

A hard disk is a secondary storage device that keeps programs and files permanently, even when the power is off, and it sits outside the processor.

In Microsoft PowerPoint, pressing F5 starts the slide show from the first slide, whichever slide you are working on at that moment.