Computer Awareness Quiz: History of Computing and Its Pioneers

The correct answer is B, second. 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. Transistor machines were smaller, cooler, cheaper and far more reliable, and IBM 1401 and IBM 7094 are the usual examples. Option D is wrong because the first generation used vacuum tubes or valves, as in ENIAC and UNIVAC-I. Option C is wrong because the third generation moved on to integrated circuits, many transistors on a single chip, as in the IBM 360. Option A is wrong because the fourth generation is defined by the microprocessor and very large scale integration, which began with the Intel 4004 in 1971.

The correct answer is C, third generation. 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. Option B is wrong because the first generation used vacuum tubes, the era of ENIAC, EDVAC and UNIVAC-I. Option A is wrong because the second generation used discrete transistors, the era of the IBM 1401 and IBM 7094. Option D is wrong because the fourth generation is the age of the microprocessor and the personal computer, which began after the Intel 4004 of 1971 and gave us the IBM PC of 1981. Integrated circuits were invented in 1958 by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce.

The correct answer is B, Charles Babbage. 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 he is called the father of the computer. Option A is wrong because Blaise Pascal built the Pascaline of 1642, a mechanical adding machine but not a programmable computer. Option C is wrong because Alan Turing is called the father of computer science for the theoretical Turing machine of 1936. Option D is wrong because John von Neumann gave the stored program concept and the architecture named after him, a later contribution.

The correct answer is C, Blaise Pascal. 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. Option A is wrong because Gottfried Leibniz built the Stepped Reckoner in 1673, an improvement that could also multiply and divide, and he gave the binary number system. Option B is wrong because John Napier published logarithms in 1614 and devised the calculating rods called Napier’s bones. Option D is wrong because Joseph Marie Jacquard built a punched card loom in 1801; his cards influenced computing but his machine wove cloth rather than doing arithmetic. Pascal was only nineteen when he built the machine, and its wheels carried a tooth that passed the carry on to the next digit.

The correct answer is A, Ada Lovelace. 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. Option B is wrong because Grace Hopper came a century later and is remembered for the first compiler, for COBOL and for popularising the word debugging. Option C is wrong because Dennis Ritchie created the C language and co-created Unix in the 1970s. Option D is wrong because Konrad Zuse built the Z3 in 1941, a machine rather than a program. Lovelace also saw that such an engine might one day work on symbols and music and not on numbers alone.

The correct answer is C, vacuum tubes. 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. Option A is wrong because the transistor was invented only in 1947, a year after ENIAC was finished, and defines the second generation. Option B is wrong because integrated circuits came in 1958 and define the third generation. Option D is wrong because the microprocessor arrived with the Intel 4004 in 1971 and defines the fourth generation. The heat and failure rate of tubes is why each later component mattered. ENIAC was also set up by throwing switches and plugging cables rather than by a stored program.

The correct answer is B, John Napier. 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. Option A is wrong because William Oughtred used logarithms to make the slide rule in 1622, a development of Napier’s idea rather than its origin. Option C is wrong because George Boole gave the algebra of logic in 1854, the basis of digital circuit design, not a calculating aid. Option D is wrong because Herman Hollerith built the punched card tabulating machine used in the United States census of 1890 and founded the company that became IBM. Logarithms turned long multiplication into simple addition and ruled scientific calculation until the pocket calculator arrived.

The correct answer is C, 1971. 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. Option A is wrong because 1947 is the year the transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories by Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, which opened the second generation. Option B is wrong because 1958 is the year of the integrated circuit, invented independently by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, which opened the third generation. Option D is wrong because 1981 is the year IBM launched its personal computer, an important fourth generation product but a decade after the microprocessor itself. The 4004 was a four bit processor built on an order from a Japanese calculator company.

The correct answer is A, Alan Turing. 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 human being’s. He is called the father of computer science and of artificial intelligence, and his codebreaking work on Enigma shortened the Second World War. Option B is wrong because John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence in 1956 and made LISP. Option C is wrong because Babbage is the father of the computer, the machine. Option D is wrong because Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975. Note that a Turing machine is an abstract model, a tape and a reading head, and not a physical computer.

The correct answer is B, IBM. 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. He founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which through later mergers and a change of name in 1924 became International Business Machines, that is IBM. Option A is wrong because Intel was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore to make semiconductor memory and then microprocessors. Option C is wrong because Hewlett-Packard was founded in 1939 in a garage in California. Option D is wrong because Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to write software, not tabulating hardware. The census of 1880 had taken close to eight years to tabulate by hand, and that delay is what prompted his machine.

The correct answer is A, John von Neumann. 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 von Neumann architecture, and almost every ordinary computer follows it. Option B is wrong because Howard Aiken built the Harvard Mark I in 1944, which kept instructions separate and gave its name to the rival Harvard architecture. Option C is wrong because Clifford Berry helped build the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. Option D is wrong because Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989. A stored program lets a machine treat its own instructions as data, and that is what makes a computer general purpose.

The correct answer is C, TIFRAC. TIFRAC, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator, was the first computer designed and built within India; it was commissioned in 1960 and Jawaharlal Nehru gave it that name. Option B is wrong because the HEC-2M, installed at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata in the mid-1950s, was the first computer in India but was imported from Britain rather than built here. Option A is wrong because PARAM 8000 of 1991 was India’s first indigenous supercomputer, built by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing under Vijay Bhatkar, three decades later. Option D is wrong because SIDDHARTH was an early Indian minicomputer of the 1970s, not the first machine. Remember the order of the Indian firsts: HEC-2M imported, TIFRAC built here, PARAM 8000 the first supercomputer.