Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 43

Fourth-generation computers, from about 1971, were built around the microprocessor, a whole CPU on a single chip. Computer generations are named after the main switching technology of the time.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were research students at Stanford University when they built a search engine that ranked pages by the links pointing to them, and they registered Google as a company in 1998.

The two left a research centre in California and founded Adobe in 1982 at San Jose, naming it after a creek near Warnock's home.

On-Line Transaction Processing is the mode in which a bank counter, a railway booking window or a payment gateway works: each transaction is processed the moment it is entered, so the response to the user is immediate, and every committed transaction is written at once, so the database always reflects…

Clustering is unsupervised because the data carries no labels: the algorithm itself groups similar records, k-means doing so by placing k centres and moving them until each record sits with its nearest centre.

Binary search compares the key with the middle element and throws away half the array at every step, so the number of comparisons grows with the logarithm of the array size; an array of a million sorted items needs about twenty comparisons.

Google Drive, launched in 2012, keeps a user files on Google servers, synchronises them to every signed-in device and opens them in Docs, Sheets and Slides for editing in the browser, which is exactly what cloud storage means.

RSA, named after Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, works with a linked pair of keys and takes its security from the difficulty of factorising the product of two large prime numbers; it is used both to exchange keys and to create digital signatures.

Simula 67, designed by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, introduced the ideas of class, object and inheritance and is therefore treated as the first object-oriented language, from which C++ and Java later borrowed.

Torvalds, then a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, wrote a free kernel for personal computers and released it in 1991 under the GNU General Public Licence, which allowed anyone to study, change and redistribute it.

Tata Consultancy Services was set up in 1968 as a division of the Tata group to provide management consultancy and data processing, and its registered office and headquarters have remained in Mumbai, the home city of the group.

LPT stands for line print terminal, the name by which the operating system knew the parallel port, which used a twenty-five-pin DB-25 connector on the computer and a thirty-six-pin Centronics connector at the printer end.

NoSQL databases drop the fixed table and row structure so that they can hold large and irregular data and spread it over many machines, and MongoDB is the best known document store, keeping records as documents in a format close to JSON.

The technology is named after Harald Gormsson, the tenth century king of Denmark nicknamed Bluetooth, who brought the Danish tribes under one rule.

In this model the provider runs finished software on its own servers and the user simply opens it in a browser, as with Gmail, Google Docs, Microsoft 365 or Salesforce, paying by subscription instead of buying a licence and installing it.

A compiler reads the whole source program written in a high-level language, converts it into machine code in one pass of work and reports all the errors it finds together, after which the compiled program runs quickly without the translator being present.

Recursion is a general programming technique in which a function calls itself, and it works equally well in procedural languages such as C, so it is not a feature of the object-oriented approach.

Apache Hive puts a table-like view over files stored in HDFS and lets an analyst write queries in HiveQL, a language close to SQL, which Hive then turns into jobs that run on the cluster, so that no Java programming is needed.

Google Docs is finished software delivered through a browser; the user installs nothing, manages no server and only works on the document, which is the definition of Software as a Service.

Encapsulation means binding the data members and the member functions that act on them inside one unit, the class, and keeping the data private so that it can be reached only through the methods provided; the standard illustration is a capsule holding the medicine inside it.