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A Mainframe Computing Miscellany

Created by key_man

Fun Trivia : Quizzes : Hardware
A Mainframe Computing Miscellany game quiz
"A variety questions ranging from not too difficult to quite obscure from the 50's, 60's and 70's centering around business computers and their peripherals."

15 Points Per Correct Answer - No time limit  



1. Which of the following was manufactured by DEC?
    PDP 11/70
    S370
    GCOS 8
    UIII


2. What was/is an acoustic coupler?
    The earliest voice input device for computers
    Suction like cups for attaching a phone handset to computer equipment
    A sound distortion cancellation device for early mainframes
    Noise resistant cable union to connect reel-to-reel tape drives to the CPU


3. What was/is a TWX-33?
    A Telecommunication Wide-area eXpander for IBM S360
    A teletype terminal that could be attached to a mainframe
    The first mainframe based airline reservation system for TWA
    An obsolete character encoding system for UIII systems


4. What numeric base system was used by the Honeywell-800?
    hexadecimal
    octal
    decimal
    binary


5. WATFOR (Waterloo Fortran), first delivered in 1965 by Waterloo University, Ontario, Canada, for the IBM 7040 was a watershed in programming language development. Who was the original development team?
    William Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Isermann, Peter Torque
    Gus German, Jim Mitchell, Richard Shirley, Robert Zamke
    George Best, John Peters, William Roberts
    J.P. (Jean-Paul) Bourque, Terrance Franks, Arthur George


6. Ferranti-Packard (subsidiary of British ICT) sold a moderately successful computer, complete with compilers and operating system, the Ferranti-Packard 6000 in 1963. The first of these (serial number 0001) was retired in 1982. To whom did they sell this first machine?
    Saskatchewan Power Corporation (Canada)
    Sheffield Miners Association (UK)
    Leeds Council Housing (UK)
    United States Corps of Engineers (USA)


7. Early mainframe computers used water cooling.
    True
    False


8. Gene _______ left IBM to open a competing mainframe company.
    Answer: (One Word (think pink))


9. Mainframe computers are no longer manufactured.
    True
    False


10. The practice of drawing felt marker diagonal lines in various colours along the top of your computer card decks was done for what reason?
    To differentiate your card decks from other programmers (signature)
    This was never done, the felt marker would make the card unreadable
    Practice started in universities as an artistic expression
    To allow for visual sorting if you dropped them


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Compiled Jun 28 12