End of Chapter
Review Questions
1. According to the author, why is there good reason to
say we are living in the Information Age?
According to the
author, there is good reason to say we are living in the Information Age
because computer and communication technologies have made it easy to collect,
store, manipulate, and distribute vast amounts of information.
2. What can the Amish teach us about our relationship
with technology?
The
Amish demonstrate that people have the ability to evaluate every technology
critically and determine whether its use will improve or degrade their quality
of life.
3. Name three aids to manual calculating.
Three
aids to manual calculating are the tablet, the abacus, and the mathematical
table.
4. Why did commercial mechanical calculators become
practical in the nineteenth century?
Commercial
mechanical calculators became practical in the late nineteenth century because
advances in machine tools and mass-production methods made it possible to
manufacture reliable devices at a reasonable price.
5. Why did the market for mechanical calculators grow
significantly in the late nineteenth century?
Rapid
industrialization, economic expansion, and a concentration of corporate power
in the late 19th century created a growing market for devices that could speed
up accounting.
6. What factors helped the Burroughs Adding Machine
Company to surpass a large number of competitors to become the most successful
calculator company by the 1890s?
The
Burroughs Adding Machine Company surpassed its competitors by combining an
excellent product with excellent marketing.
7. How did the widespread adoption of the mechanical
calculator change the office environment?
The
widespread adoption of the mechanical calculators led to the lowering of wages
of bookkeepers and the transformation of a male-only occupation to an
occupation employing a large number of women.
8. What needs motivated the invention of the cash
register?
The invention of the
cash register was a response to two needs: the need to prevent clerks from
embezzling money, and the need for better sales accounting.
9. Give four
examples of how punched cards were used by large organizations in the early
twentieth century.
o
The
U.S. Census Bureau used punched cards to store census data.
o
Marshall
Field's used punched cards to analyze information generated by cash registers.
o
Railroads
used punched cards to send out bills more frequently.
o
The
Pennsylvania Steel Company used punched cards to do cost accounting on
manufacturing processes.
10. What are the
three principal components of a data-processing system?
The
first component inputs data, the second performs calculations, and the third
outputs data.
11. Name three ways
the development of radar in World War II stimulated advances in computing.
o
Electrostatic
memory
o
Semiconductor
memory
o
Graphical
user interfaces
12. Why did IBM
quickly overtake Remington Rand as the leading computer manufacturer in the
United States in the 1950s?
IBM
quickly overtook Remington Rand as the leading mainframe computer maker because
it had a larger base of existing customers and a much better sales and
marketing organization, and it made a much greater investment in research and
development.
13. What was the
motivation for the creation of higher-level programming languages? How did the
introduction of higher-level programming languages change computing?
The
motivation for the creation of higher-level programming languages was a desire
to make programming less tedious and error-prone and improve programmer productivity.
Higher-level programming languages changed computing by enabling programs to be
moved more easily from one manufacturer's computers to another manufacturer's
computers. It also led to a large increase in the number of people writing
computer programs.
14. How did
time-sharing give more organizations access to electronic digital computers in the
1960s?
Time-sharing gave more organizations
access to electronic digital computers in the
1960s
by allowing them to share the cost of purchasing (or leasing) and operating a
computer system.
15. In what way did
the Cold War accelerate the development of technology needed for the personal
computer?
Between
1962 and 1965, the Minuteman II missile program was the largest single consumer
of integrated circuits in the United States, representing about 20 percent of
total production. In the course of making these chips, manufacturers found ways
to make chips less expensive and more reliable.
16. What was the
principal innovation of the IBM System/360?
The
principal innovation of the IBM System/360 was the creation of a series of
nineteen binary-compatible computers. All nineteen computers had the same
instruction set. That means customers could upgrade from one IBM System/360 to
a bigger, faster computer in the same product line without having to rewrite
their programs.
17. Can you think of
a practical reason why the semaphore telegraph was adopted more rapidly on the
continent of Europe than in the British Isles?
The
semaphore telegraph was adopted more rapidly on the continent of Europe than in
the British Isles because the system only works when atmospheric conditions
allow good visibility between stations. Since fog and rain are more common in
the British Isles, the semaphore telegraph is not as practical.
18. Give two
examples of how the introduction of Morse’s telegraph changed life in America.
Morse's
telegraph put the Pony Express out of business. Morse's telegraph made possible
fire alarm boxes in urban areas
.
19. Briefly describe
three ways in which society changed by adopting the telephone.
The
telephone blurred the traditional boundaries between private life and public
life, between family and business. The telephone eroded traditional social
hierarchies. The telephone enabled the creation of the first “on-line"
communities.
20. What is the
difference between a circuit-switched network and a packet-switched network?
A
circuit-switched network sets up a permanent physical circuit between the
machines that are communicating. The circuit may not be used for other communications
while these two machines are holding the circuit, even when they are not
actually exchanging messages.
A
packet-switched network divides messages into groups of bits called packets.
Network routers transfer packets from a message sender to a a message receiver.
At
one moment a physical wire may be carrying a packet from one message, and at
the next moment it may carry a packet from another message.
21. Why does the
Internet have a decentralized structure?
The
Internet has a decentralized structure because ARPA did not want the ARPANET to
collapse if a single computer were lost. It is widely reported that fear of a
nuclear attack led ARPA to this design decision.
22. How did the
National Science Foundation stimulate the creation of commercial, long distance
data networks in the United States?
The
National Science Foundation stimulated the creation of commercial,
long-distance data networks in the United States by simultaneously:
(1)
Encouraging commercial use of regional NSFNET networks
(2)
Banning commercial traffic on the NSFNET Backbone.
23. Describe two
ways in which the codex represented an improvement over the scroll.
The
codex is more durable than a papyrus scroll, and it makes it much easier for
readers to locate a particular passage in a book.
24. What is
hypertext?
Hypertext is a linked network of nodes
containing information.
25. How is a
hypertext link similar to a citation in a book? How is it different?
A hypertext link is
similar to a citation in a book in the sense that both point to a source of
related information. A hypertext link is superior to a citation in that you can
jump immediately to the related material by clicking on the link.
26. Who invented the
computer mouse?
Douglas Engelbart
invented the computer mouse in the 1960s.
27. The Apple
Macintosh succeeded in the marketplace, while the Apple Lisa failed. Give two
reasons why this happened.
The Apple Lisa was not
commercially successful because it was too expensive and its processor was too
slow. The Macintosh was much cheaper and faster.
28. In what
fundamental way is an Apple HyperCard stack different from the World Wide Web?
An
Apple HyperCard stack is fundamentally different from the World Wide Web
because hyperlinks connect pages (cards) all located on the same computer.
29. Berners-Lee
decided to build the World Wide Web on top of the TCP/IP protocol. Why did this
decision help ensure the success of the Web?
Constructing
the World Wide Web on top of the TCP/IP protocol, rather than one vendor's
proprietary network protocol, helped ensure the success of the Web, because it
enabled the Web to span computers made by different manufacturers running
different operating systems.
30. What was the
first widely used Web browser? Name four popular Web browsers in use today.
The
first widely used Web browser was Mosaic, developed at the National Center for
Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Four popular Web browsers in use today are:
·
Microsoft's
Internet Explorer
·
Google's
Chrome
· Mozilla's
Firefox
· Apple's
Safari
31. What is a search
engine? Describe the two types of search engines.
A
search engine is program that accepts a list of keywords from a user, searches
a database of documents, and returns those documents most closely matching the
specified keywords.
Crawler-based
search engines automatically create the database of information about Web
pages. Google and AltaVista are crawler-based search engines. The other type of
search engine relies upon databases of Web page information constructed by humans.
OpenDirectory is an example of this kind of search engine.
32. What is
information technology?
Information
technology refers to devices used in the creation, storage, manipulation,
exchange, and dissemination of data, sound, and/or images.
33. Name three inventions
described in this chapter that were created for a military application.
· The
ENIAC
· Radar
· The
ARPANET
34. Give four
examples from the book of how a social condition influenced the development of
a new technology.
The
need for large amounts of timely information by corporate managers in the late
nineteenth century fueled the growth of the manual calculator market. The need
to store and manipulate large amounts of data prompted the invention of
punched-card tabulation and data-processing systems. A demand for less
expensive access to computers stimulated the development of time sharing. BASIC
became popular because there was a demand for an easy-to-learn programming
language. An interest in accessing and sharing information led to the rapid
adoption of the World Wide Web created by Tim Berners-Lee.
35. Give four
examples from the book of a social change brought about by the adoption of a
new technology.
·
The
adoption of the telephone erased traditional boundaries between work and home.
·
The
telephone also made possible the first on-line communities, through party
lines.
· Manual
calculators led to the deskilling and feminization of bookkeeping.
·
Time-sharing
systems gave many more people access to computers, which they used for both
educational and entertainment purposes.
·
Television
broadcasts may have influenced the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election of
2000.
