1. CSE 301 History of Computing
Quiz # 2 – Monday, June 3rd
Computer: A History of the Information Machine, Chapters 3 & 4

2. Take out a sheet of paper
Get in to Teams of 2
On your paper, write:
the name of each team member
Today’s date
Quiz #2
There are 15 questions

3. Question 1
What two organizations combined efforts to create the Mark I computer?
Answer: IBM & Harvard University

4. Question 2
What Lord Kelvin invention did the author call the most important analog computing technology of the 19th Century?
Answer: The Tide Predictor

5. Question 3
What technology did Howard Aiken find in an attic at Harvard University?
Answer: A piece of Babbage’s Difference Engine

6. Question 4
The author emphasized 2 significant flaws with the Mark I computer, name one.
Answer Either:
-too slow
-no conditional branching

7. Question 5
Leslie John Comrie brought two great ideas to the production of the Nautical Almanac. Name one.
Answer Either:
-commercial computing technology rather than special-interest machines
-punch card machines

8. Question 6
Babbage’s 1840 visit to what country was, according to the author, “the high point of his life”?
Answer: Italy

9. Question 7
What Jacquard invention served as the inspiration for inputting instructions into a number of analog and mechanical computers.
Answer: The Loom

10. Question 8
Who, called “The World’s First Programmer” by some (but notably not our author), helped Babbage organize his ideas for the function and usage of his inventions?
Answer: Ada Lovelace

11. Question 9
Our author called The Differential Analyzer “the single most important computing machine developed between the wars”. Who led the project in inventing and building this machine?
Answer: Vannevar Bush

12. Question 10
What is the term used to describe an analog computer that models complex electrical networks?
Answer: Network Analyzer

13. Question 11
Our author notes in Chapter 4 that it has been said that although the bomb (i.e. atomic) ended the war, ___________ won it.
Answer: Radar

14. Question 12
In 1973, a U.S. judge declared the first electronic digital computer to be one developed at Iowa State University in the 1930s. Provide either the name of the inventor or the computer (you may use the abbreviation):
Answer: Atanasoff OR Berry OR
The ABC Computer

15. Question 13
Name one of the two primary engineers for the ENIAC project?
Answer: J. Presper Eckert OR
John Mauchly

16. Question 14
Who is customarily (perhaps unfairly) given credit for the idea of the stored-program computer?
Answer: John von Neumann

17. Question 15
The first two stored-program computers were not actually built in the U.S. Name one of the two educational institutions where they were first built.
Answer: Manchester University or
Cambridge University