Inside the Computer

What this quiz asks

• What number does 1010 stand for when it is written in binary?
• The high-density 3.5-inch floppy disk, standard in the 1990s, held about how much data?
• A solid-state drive (SSD) stores your files without any moving parts.
• What is the largest whole number that a single byte can hold, counting from zero?
• What is the job of a processor's cache?
• In hexadecimal, the base-16 system programmers use, what value does the digit F stand for?
• Moore's law, first set out by Gordon Moore in 1965, predicted that what would keep doubling at a steady pace?
• Was a real moth once found trapped in a relay of the Harvard Mark II computer?
• What does the firmware on a motherboard chip, known as the BIOS or UEFI, do when you switch the computer on?
• Select ALL of these processor families that were made by Intel.
• Order these places where a computer keeps data, from fastest to reach to slowest.
• Strictly speaking, a kilobyte is 1,000 bytes, and 1,024 bytes should be called a kibibyte.
• ASCII, the classic code that turns letters into numbers, originally used how many bits for each character?
• The ARM processor design, now found in almost every smartphone, was created in the 1980s by which British company?
• Select ALL of these that are instruction set architectures, the basic 'language' a processor understands.
• What is the central idea of the 'von Neumann architecture' described in 1945?
• Some high-capacity hard drives are sealed and filled with which gas, so the platters spin with less drag?
• ENIAC, the giant American computer unveiled in 1946, contained roughly how many vacuum tubes?
• The 'x86' family of processors takes its name from which Intel chip, launched in 1978?
• The Manchester 'Baby', which ran the first stored program in 1948, kept its memory as dots of charge on what?