Week 1 - Number Systems Flashcards
What early mechanical engine was invented by Charles Babbage in 1822?
The Difference Engine. It was able to perform complex mathematical functions.
What year was Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine invented and what was its main purpose?
- It was capable of complex logic and was a significant step towards a general purpose computer.
What is a “Turing-complete” computer?
Invented by Alan Turing, it can directly or indirectly perform any sort of computational task.
The British defence and intelligence services developed the “Colossus machine” for what purpose?
To help decipher coded German battlefield messages.
Transistors were invented in 1947 by Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley of Bell Labs and were “solid state”. What does this mean?
Contains no moving parts.
What are some advantages of a solid state circuit?
Reliability, resistance to abuse, energy efficiency compared to vacuum tubes.
The integrated circuit was invented in what year and by whom?
1958 by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments.
What is a mainframe?
Expensive computers invented before personal computers which mainly focused on data processing. Was only available to governments and large businesses at the time.
What is a nibble?
Half a byte I.e 4 binary digits together.
How many possible combinations does a byte have?
256
Why does it take more than one byte to store integer and floating point data?
A single byte can only stirrup to 256 combinations.
What is a computer word?
A combination of bytes.
All units of measure have what two properties?
A scale factor and a dimension.
What are some advantages of the metric system?
The scaling factors are factors of ten and are all the same.
If scale factors are all the same and are powers of a base, how can we use this to create a number system?
We can assume the base and simply append the digits. e.g A base 5 number 410 becomes 105 in base 10.
