Week 1 Flashcards
What problem was Herman Hollerith helping to solve when he developed the counting machine that eventually gave rise to IBM?
The 1890 Census when the population had gone up 35%
How was data encoded and decoded from punch cards?
The machine could sense where there were holes by having a wire trace over the punch cards and connect with the mercury underneath the holes to make a circuit. By means of switches, operators could program each card for certain characteristics, such as profession, marital status, number of children, etc.
What about the architecture of the Atanasoff-Berry computer made it perform slow?
Slow, unprogrammable and could only do linear equations
How did World War II help spawn the growth of the computer industry?
The building of the ENIAC to make the trajectory of missiles. It was x1000 faster than that era’s machines
What was the purpose of Alan Turing’s Colossus machine?
To decrypt the ‘Enigma’
Explain the benefits of the stored program technique innovated by John von Nuemann.
Jobs could be sent and stored and later brought up from memory to run eliminating the process of putting in a new program after the first ended
What advantages did the transistor have over the vacuum tube?
Small, didn’t take that much power, didn’t overheat
How do vacuum tubes and transistors provide for the same logic operations and encoding as punch cards?
Worked the same as switches with transistors and tubes being hot meaning ‘1’ and off meaning ‘0’
The UNIVAC was the first computer to use the concept of memory buffers. How do memory buffers improve overall system performance?
Greatly freed up processor instead of waiting for I/O increasing the work it could perform
Why did the integrated circuit developed by Jack Kilby have such a profound impact on the computer industry?
This invention laid the foundation for high-speed, large capacity memory computers.
What were registers used for by machine language programmers?
The registers are the places where the values that the CPU is actually working on are located.
Explain how the microcode concept developed for the IBM System 360 in the 1960s helped make software hardware-agnostic.
Microcode layer makes the application independent of model, making hardware transparent to the user applications. The same application could now run on any model
Name at least three innovations brought to the industry by the IBM 360
- Microcode
- All ran the same hardware instruction set and utilized forty common peripherals devices.
- the 8-bit byte, 32-bit words, segmented and paged memory
What is LSI, and how did it benefit the computing industry?
Large-scale integration meaning integrated circuits of thousands to millions of transistors on a single chip. Low energy consumption, faster speed, smaller in size
How was IBM able to develop its Personal Computer (PC) so quickly, and how did the development strategy backfire for them commercially?
They didn’t use proprietary hardware and mixed and matched. Competitors did it cheaper and used Microsoft as well, so failure
