Section 1 (Part 1)
Established a process called the "method of differences".
Who is Gaspard de Prony?
Considered by many to have been world’s first computer programmer
Area of research is associated with LISP.
What is artificial intelligence?
Decade both FORTRAN and COBOL dominated.
What are the 1970s?
Developed the Entscheidungsproblem.
Who is David Hilbert?
Amount of time it took the 1880 US census to be processed. (Extra Credit: Amount of time it took 1890 US census to be processed in comparison).
What is 7 years (Extra Credit: 2.5 years)?
The two reasons Sholes and Densmore had difficulty finding a manufacturer for mass production of their typewriter.
What are the large number of small moving parts and the variety of materials involved in manufacturing?
What is electronic is when calculations are performed by electricity itself without moving parts and electric is when gears were moved with electric motors (electricity as "the muscle not the brains")?
The amount of vacuum tubes the ENIAC required.
What is 18,000?
Charles Babbage originally received training to become this.
What is a philosopher?
Reason for the invention of the cash register.
Why was James Ritty concerned that salesclerks might be recording purchases incorrectly & pocketing extra money?
Reason Konrad Zuse wanted decided to use binary arithmetic instead of decimal arithmetic in developing his electromechanical computer.
Why was he a civil engineer, not an electrical engineer so he wanted to keep the wiring as simple as possible?
IBM's first three commercial electronic computers.
What are the IBM 701, the IBM 702, and the IBM 650?
Modern technique descended from multiprogramming.
What is multitasking?
The ability of a computer to perform if/then tasks is known as this.
What is conditional branching?
Bombes, developed by Alan Turing and a team of collaborators, served this purpose.
What is to assist in automatically decrypting messages intercepted from Germans (during WWII)?
Name of International Business Machines (IBM) prior to 1924.
What is Computing-Tabulating-Recording (C-T-R)?
The main purpose fulfilled by microprogramming.
What is to allow slower models to run the same programs as high end models?
Most popular languages for software development today are descended from.
What is C?
The “D” in EDVAC stands for this.
What is discrete?
The Harvard Mark I had the ability to perform these 5 operations.
What are addition, subtraction, multiplication, logarithms, and trigonometric functions?
Difference between Babbage's Difference Engine and Analytical Engine.
Why was the Difference Engine specialized to perform just one kind of calculation and the Analytical Engine a general-purpose calculating machine that could be programmed to perform any mathematical operation?
The process by which a delay line works.
What is an electric current is applied to one end of a tube with a thin column of liquid (typically mercury) inside, which causes vibrations in the mercury. The signal is read at the other end of the tube and connected back to the other end. By continuously reading and writing the signals from the mercury line, the information can be stored as long as needed?
The five factors firing tables take into account in the calculations to determine the angle at which artillery guns should be pointed.
What are distance from the target, wind speed and direction, humidity, elevation, and temperature?
Remington Rand fell behind IBM in the electronic computer business for this reason.
What is failure to unify the traditional and modern wings of their business?