Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 1

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.

A touchscreen accepts a finger tap or a stylus stroke as input and displays the result on the very same surface, so the one piece of hardware performs both jobs.

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.

Ubuntu is a free, open-source operating system built on the Linux kernel and based on the Debian distribution. It was first released in 2004 by Canonical, and its name comes from a Nguni Bantu word of southern Africa meaning humanity towards others.

In MS-Word 2016 the button marked 'Aa' in the Font group of the Home tab opens the Change Case menu, which rewrites the selected text without retyping it.

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

HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol and it is the set of rules by which a browser asks a web server for a page and the server sends it back, which is how data on the World Wide Web is reached.

A LAN joins computers and devices inside a small area such as one room, one building or a campus.

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.

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 built the first mouse, a small wooden box with a pair of wheels underneath, at the Stanford Research Institute, and the patent describes it as an X-Y position indicator for a display system.

A memory card keeps data in flash memory, a semiconductor chip with no moving parts, so it is solid-state storage and not magnetic.

An operating system is the system software that loads when a laptop starts and then runs the machine: it shares out memory, decides which program gets the processor and for how long, keeps files and folders in order on the disk, talks to the keyboard, screen and printer through device…

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

Its print head carries a column of tiny pins that strike an inked ribbon against the paper, forming each character out of dots.

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.

MICR stands for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition. The line of characters printed along the foot of a cheque is set in magnetic ink in the E-13B font, and the reader identifies each character from its magnetic signal, so the cheque is sorted correctly even when it has been folded, stamped…

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.

The word is a contraction of picture element. A screen image is a grid of these points, and the number of them across and down the screen is what is quoted as the resolution of the monitor, so a higher pixel count means a finer picture.