CS1 History

Who Said "At each increase of knowledge, as well as on the contrivance of every new tool, human labour becomes abridged"

Charles Babbage

How did Hollerith's machine complete a circuit so that a gear would turn and add 1 in that column?

If a hole was punched a pin would go through and touch a vile of mercury completing the circuit.

When is the first documented use of the word "computer"?

1613

What did the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz build in 1694?

The Step Reckoner

How long did it take Hollerith's machine to complete it's job?

2.5 years

Who wrote hypothetical programs for the Analytical Engine?

Ada Lovelace

What early computing device could be used for more than just one particular computation, could be given data and run operations in sequence, and had memory and a primitive printer?

The Analytical Engine

What requirement did the government that forced them to turn to Herman Hollerith and his tabulating machine

A Census

What early computing device allowed ships to calculate their latitude at sea?

Astrolabe

When and where was the Abacus invented?

2500 BCE in Mesopotamia

Who is considered the world's first computer programmer?

Ada Lovelace

What are computers?

Simple Machines that perform complex actions through many layers of abstraction.

Before the late 1800s what did the term "computer" refer too?

People/ Mathematicians

What is the current day company that Hollerith's original company morphed into?

IBM

What was unique to Herman Hollerith's tabulating machine that stuck around and was used in future computers?

punch cards

How is an Abacus like a hard drive?

It stores the current state of the computation

Which Early computing device assisted with multiplication and division?

Slide Rule

What machine did Charles Babbage propose to be able to calculate polynomials to replace different tables on the battlefield?

The Difference Engine

Who said? "It is beneath the dignity of excellent men to waste their time in calculation when any peasant could do the work just as accurately with the aid of a machine."

Gottfried Leibniz

Before the 20th Century how did most people experience Computing?

Pre-computed Tables

Home computing in 1975 consisted of what?

toggling switches back and forth to get the lights to blink in a series

What machine is considered one of the first programmable computers

A loom for weaving fabrics

How was Jaquard's Loom programmed?

punch cards

The largest program ever punched into punch cards was reported to have how many of the world's computer programmers working on it?

20%

What was the largest program ever punched into punch cards?

The US Air Force's SAGE air defense system

What was the first commercially successful home computer?

The Altair 8800

What type of programming was used that used mainly switches to do the work

Panel Programming

How much data would be needed to store The largest punch card program with all the information carried on its 62,500 punch cards?

5 MB

What physicist and Manhattan Project contributor was responsible for unifying programming data into a single shared memory?

John Von Neumann

What was the nickname of first computer built using Von Neumann Architecture by the University of Manchester in 1948?

"Baby"

Stored Program Computers used what in lieu of plug boards?

electronic memory

What complicated system of wires did the ENIAC use to be programmable?

Plug Boards

What is Considered the world's first general purpose programmable electronic computer that was developed at the University of Pennsylvania ?

The ENIAC

What was one of the largest electro-mechanical computers that was built in 1944 by IBM for the allies during World War II?

The Harvard Mark I

How many additions or subtractions per second could the Harvard Mark 1 perform?

3

Who invented the switch for the vacuum tube to allow it to be turned on and off?

Lee de Forest

How fast could a good electronic relay flip back and forth in 1 second during the 1940's?

50 times

How long did it take the Harvard Mark 1 to perform a division?

15 seconds

How long did it take the Harvard Mark 1 to perform a multiplication?

6 seconds

What was the first computer to be made using transistors rather than vacuum tubes?

The IBM 608

Which of the Following people was NOT one of the team at bell laboratories that was responsible for inventing the transistor?

John Mauchly

Grace Hopper coined a phrase when referring to the Harvard Mark 1 about a literal situation that became a common phrase about computers we still use today. What was that phrase?

"It has bugs in it" then referring to an actual moth and today meaning it has a problem.

What Computer was the first to use a large scale amount of vacuum tubes?

The Colossus Mk I

Who invented the thermionic valve housed inside an airtight glass bulb known as a vacuum tube.

John Ambrose Fleming

The data that makes up the programs that tell the computer what to do is called _____________________

Software

The only language that computers are able to speak is called what?

Machine Language/Machine Code

What programming language was developed by IBM in 1957 that came to dominate computer programming?

FORTRAN

What was one way that they patched bugs in the the code on the original Harvard Mark 1 Computer?

They physically put pieces of tape over holes forming "patches" in the code

The physical components of a computer such as RAM ALUs and CPUs are called _______________________.

Hardware

Who was one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark 1 Computer?

Grace Hopper

What is it called when you can write in a language and it work on different types of computers.

Write Once Run Anywhere

An informal high level of a program written out is called what

Pseudocode

What was the high level programming language that Grace Hopper designed?

A-0

What is a reusable helper program that will read in text based instructions and convert it to binary instructions that the computer can understand?

Assembler

What is a specialized program that transforms source code written in a high level programming language into a low-level language like assembly or binary that the CPU can directly process?

Compiler

In 1959 There was a consortium of people across industry, government, and academia (Advised by Grace Hopper) That came up with a programming language that could be used across all types of computers. What was that language Called?

COBOL