Computer History, Real and Imagined

In the 1983 Cold War drama War Games, one of the protaganists is a computer/AI responsible for handling the US missile defense.

What is its name?

• Noah

• Joshua

• Jericho

• Jarvis

Computers have been designed and manufactured in many countries, also in Sweden. You see one example above of a Swedish designed and built computer, the ABC80, which was the first computer yours truly started with back in the Computer Stone Age.

Which of the following companies have designed and commercially sold computers? Select all that apply.

• Ericsson

• Datasaab

• Luxor

• Facit

Computer games has almost as long a history as computers themselves. The image shows a typical view of one of the iconic games ever, Elite, the spiritual ancestor of games like EVE Online, Grand Theft Auto and No Man's Sky.

Created by Cambridge students Ian Bell and David Braben, the game was a giant success in 1984 and ported to nearly all 8-bit microcomputer at the time.

However, David Braben is today perhaps more known as the one of the Godfathers of one of the most popular computing devices today, found in many homes.

Which one?

• Xbox

• Nintendo Switch

• Raspberry Pi

• Netgear Wireless Gateway

Paula, Agnus and Denise were the stars that made this computer perform faster and better than anything else in 1985. Accompanying the main Motorola 68000 processor they performed graphics marvels and sound effects, runnning at whooping 7.14 MHz, with an ease that was hard to believe in those days.

What computer featured these leading ladies?

• Amiga

• Ataris ST

• IBM PC

• Silicon Graphics Iris

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that." is the response given from this computer/AI to Dr. David Bowman in Stanley Kubrick's classic sci-fi movie 2001.

What is the name of the computer who utters this famous line?

The image illustrates a property that differentiates CPU architectures: Endianess

Endianess refers to how the CPU lays out longer values in memory.

Intel is famously little-endian, Motorola big-endian and ARM can't decide so it is configurable.

What famous 18th century classic novel coined the term endianess, but in the novel refering to which end of an egg one should cut off to eat it?

• Candide

• Tristram Shandy

• Gulliver's Travels

• Robinson Crusoe

In the excellent tv-show Halt and Catch Fire about the birth of the personal computer industry, the main characters can be seen to reverse engineer the IBM PC BIOS chip.

This was the start of the mass produced PC as it created competion around a standard platform, and it a milestone in creating the modern computer industry.

What is the name of the company that reversed engineered and sold the first IBM PC clones?

• Hewlett Packard

• Compaq

• Toshiba

• Dell

This is a picture of the second computer built in Sweden. It was constructed by researchers at Lund University in 1955 and was in use until 1970.

One of my lecturers in Lund would tell my class about working with the machine. It was very slow and mostly used for numerical analysis. They would connect a tone generator to one of the CPU registers, which allowed the researchers to sit on the porch outside the computer room and hear on the pitch of the tone if the number sequence being computed was convergent or not.

An elegant weapon for a more civilized time.

What was the name of this machine?

• SMIL

• BESK

• GASQUE

• BARK

The computational power of computers have increased enormously. The left image shows Pixar's render farm of 100 state of the art Sun workstations from 1995, delivering 8 GFlops, used for creating Toy Story, the first fully computer animated feature movie.

The image on the right is the A14 processor used in iPhone 12, delivering 227 GFlops in your pocket.

What are the two CPU types used in these two compute monsters?

• SPARC

• ARM

• Intel

• PowerPC

Apple introduced the Macintosh computer with a revolutionary Super Bowl ad in 1984.

Invoking Orwell's 1984 and casting IBM in the role of the main villain, this ad is considered an advertising masterpiece.

Who directed the now legendary ad?

• George Lucas

• Ridley Scott

• Steve Jobs

• Steven Spielberg