Chapter 1--the Big Picture Flashcards
(46 cards)
Who built the first gear-driven machine that did addition and subtraction?
Blaise Pascal
Who built the first machine that did addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division?
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
who designed the first machine that included memory?
Charles Babbage
Who was considered the first programmer?
Ada Lovelace
Who proposed that a punch card be used for counting the census?
Dr. Herman Hollerith
Who edited Babbabe’s work?
Ada Lovelace
Who was Ada Lovelace’s father?
Lord Byron
Who would have been mentioned in the book “the Code Breakers”?
Alan Turing, for breaking the Enigma code
Who developed the concept of punched holes used in weaving cloth?
Joseph Jacquard
Who is associated with IBM?
Dr. Herman Hollerith
why was Mosaic important?
It was the first web browser that supported graphics
Discuss the browser wars
Netscape Navigator and IE were the two browsers available in the mid-to-late 90s. NN grew from Mosaic, but IE was bundled with all copies of Windows, so IE won out.
Describe how the Web changed after 2002.
user-generated and -edited content became more important, through social networking, blogs, forums, wikpedia, etc..
what are the 4 areas in which computer programmers must be proficient? Define those areas
Algorithmic thinking–representing progems as step-by-step procedures to solve them, representation–in which one is able to store data in a way that it can be processed efficiently, programming–in which one combines algorithmic thinking and representation into software, Design–in which the software serves a useful purpose
Distinguish between computing as a tool and as a discipline
computing is a discipline in terms of low-level programming, and a tool in terms of higher-level applications
compare and contrast FORTRAN nad COBOL
FORTRAN was designed for numerical applications, and grew slowly from simpler to more complex. COBOL was designed almost in its entirety first, and changed little over time after it was written. It was designed for business applications
Distinguish between an assembler and a compiler
compilers translate text-based code in a higher-level language into binary machine language or a lower-level language, whereas assemblers translate low-level mnemonic-based code into binary machine language.
what constitutes systems software?
loaders, linkers, the OS, assemblers, and compilers
What was the reason for the development of OS, and what are they?
they are software that determines what software is run when, and they were developed to allow the computer to continue processing while the human was preparing the next command
Define linkers, loaders, and editors.
linkers link pieces of large programs together, and loaders load programs into memory. Editors are text-based programs in which high-level programms are written
How was SPSS different from the programs that came before it?
it was a general-purpose application, in which non-programmers could describe data and the statistics to be computed on that data
name the layers of a computing system, from inner to outer.
information, hardware, programming, operating systems, applications, communications
what is Miller’s Law?
a human can actively manage about 7 (plus or minus 2, depending on the person) pieces of information in short-term memory at one time.
what was the first commercial computer?
the UNIVAC I, delivered to the Bureau of the Census. it was the first computer used to predict the outcome of a presidential election
