Who is known as the Father of the Computer?
- A.Blaise Pascal
- B.Charles Babbage
- C.Alan Turing
- D.Herman Hollerith
Correct answer
Explanation
The correct answer is B, Charles Babbage. 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. He never finished building it, but the design is the reason he carries the title.
Option A, Blaise Pascal, built the Pascaline in 1642, the first mechanical adding machine, so he belongs to the earlier age of calculators rather than computers. Option C, Alan Turing, gave the theory of computation and the Turing machine and is called the father of computer science and of artificial intelligence, which is a different title from the one asked here. Option D, Herman Hollerith, built the punched-card tabulating machine used for the American census and founded the firm that later became IBM. Examiners rotate these four names in the options, so fix one phrase to each.
Read the full article: Basics of Computers and Generations: Parts, Memory and MCQs
Practice Questions
View allVacuum tubes were used as the main electronic component in which generation of computers?
- A.First generation
- B.Second generation
- C.Third generation
- D.Fourth generation
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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.
Read the full explanation →The transistor, which defined second-generation computers, was invented at which laboratory?
- A.Texas Instruments
- B.Intel Corporation
- C.Bell Laboratories
- D.IBM Research
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John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley demonstrated the transistor there in 1947, and the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for it.
Read the full explanation →Which of the following is regarded as the first commercially available electronic computer?
- A.ENIAC
- B.EDVAC
- C.Harvard Mark I
- D.UNIVAC-I
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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.
Read the full explanation →In which year was the Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, introduced?
- A.1964
- B.1971
- C.1975
- D.1981
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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.
Read the full explanation →Which of the following is a volatile memory?
- A.ROM
- B.Hard disk
- C.RAM
- D.EPROM
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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.
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