Review Materials for Quiz 2

Tom Kelliher, CS14A

Feb. 22, 1997

The purpose of these materials is to clarify that material which will be covered by the upcoming quiz which you might not be very sure about. Some areas will not be mentioned here, because I was clear in my coverage; nonetheless these areas are covered by the quiz. Two examples of this:

  1. PC software will not run on a Macintosh and vice versa.

  2. The differences between computer ``boutiques,'' superstores, and direct mail outlets.

Here are the clarifications:

  1. From class on Feb. 19, you should be able to identify PC components that are standard on a PC today and understand that they will be replaced with better components in the near future. So, for instance, if I asked you what you thought of a new system with an 8X CD-ROM drive and a 1GB disk drive, you should tell me that's an out-of-date PC. Check here for information on a fairly standard, current PC.

    You should be able to tell me how to decide if a given piece of software (MS Works or Broderbund's Myst, for instance) will run on a given PC.

  2. See this for the important terminology from Feb. 21's class.

  3. See this for an important summary of the video Inventing the Future.

  4. Important ideas from Chapter 2 of Computers in Your Future:
    1. Input devices: keyboard, pointing devices (mouse, trackball, joystick), digitizing scanners.

    2. Output devices: monitors (be able to identify all the boldfaced terms), sound card and speakers, and printers (impact, laser, and inkjet).

    3. Data representation: ASCII code for storing characters, parity.

    4. The CPU: control unit, arithmetic-logic unit, data bus, system clock, address bus.

    5. Memory: RAM, virtual memory, cache, ROM.

    6. The motherboard.

    7. Secondary storage: magnetic disks (hard and floppy), optical disks.

    8. Classes of computers: supercomputers, mainframes, minicomputers, workstations and microcomputers.

  5. Important ideas from Chapter 10: We covered this material in class when we took our ``virtual'' shopping trip.

  6. Important ideas from Unit 1C:
    1. The Jacquard loom and punched cards.

    2. Babbages's difference and analytical engines.

    3. The Turing test.

    4. ENIAC.

    5. Technology: vacuum tubes (1st gen.); transistors, magnetic core memory, disks (2nd gen.); integrated circuits (3rd gen.)

    6. The fourth generation, computers today (GUIs), the fifth generation.

  7. Important ideas from Unit 4A:
    1. The document production process: writing, editing, formatting, saving, printing.

    2. Word wrap, paragraph.

    3. Cut and paste.

    4. Justification, underlining, boldface, point, font.

    5. Additional features: spell checker, thesaurus, grammar checker, mail merge, macro.

    6. Graphics: clip art, frames, anchor, crop.

    7. Style sheet.

  8. Nothing on Word Essentials will be covered on this quiz.



Thomas P. Kelliher
Sat Feb 22 09:58:18 EST 1997
Tom Kelliher