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WorksheetsCrash Course Computer Science #19 - Memory & Storage
Total questions: 25
Worksheet time: 21mins
In general, computer memory is
non-permanent
permanent
Any data written into (a) , like your (b) , will stay there until it's over-written.
By the 1940s, punch cards had largely standardized into a grid of (a) columns and (b) rows.
The largest program ever punched onto cards was the US Military's SAGE in 1958. The main program was roughly equivalent to 5 megabytes of data, which is about the size of modern
text messages
photos
game apps
web browsers
J. Presper Eckert invented Delay Line Memory in the 1940s. How does it work?
it's a tube filled with mercury
it used sound waves to store data
it wrote binary onto circuits using light waves
it's a slab of silicon
How many bits of memory could the EDVAC store?
(a)
A big drawback with delay line memory is that you could only read data in order, on a loop called
continuous memory
sequential memory
cyclic-access memory
revolving memory
It proved challenging to (a) the density of the memory, packing (b) together meant they were more easily mixed up. In response, new forms of delay line memory were invented, such as (c) delay lines.
What type of memory surpassed delay line by the 1950s?
metal cone memory
metallic core memory
magnets in coils memory
magnetic core memory
The real, physical example of magnetic core memory that Carrie Anne holds has yellow squares that can hold (a) bits each.
How many boards did MIT's Whirlwind 1 use?
(a)
Using the costs of creating bit storage from the 1970s, how much would it cost to store a modern smartphone photo?
$250,000
$400,000
$500,000
$650,000
What was magnetic tape?
long, thin and flexible strip of magnetic material
reels that could move forward or backward
tape that has rows for storing bits of 1s and 0s
tape that had a magnetic charge that was stored in large cubes
The main drawback of magnetic tape is
access speed
long term stability
how expensive it is
it was unwieldy and hard to use
Magnetic Drum Memory was a metal (a) coated in a magnetic material for recording data. The (b) was rotated continuously, and positioned along its length were (c) of read and write heads. These would wait for the right spot to (d) underneath them to read or write a bit of data.
Magnetic Drums directly lead to the development of
hard disk drives
solid state drives
RAM
GPUs
What was the first computer to use a disk drive?
IBM Ramac 305
Harvard Mark 1
Intel Atlas
Yale Skybird 45
While great for storage, the hard disks were not fast enough for memory, so the Ramac 305 also had
drum memory
punch cards
magnetic core memory
magnetic tape
A hard disk drive can easily hold how many terabytes?
(a)
Modern drives have an average seek time of under __ of a second.
1/10th
1/100th
1/1000th
1/10,000th
What does the save icon on some applications look like?
hard disks
solid state drives
floppy disk
magnetic tape
More popular cousins of the laser disc from 1972
floppy disk
compact discs
zip disks
DVD
Optical disks aren't magnetized. Instead they use
small bumps, like braille
divots in the disk, like craters
etched lines, like canyons
a zigzag pattern
Solid states drives, like hard drives and USB sticks...
have no moving parts
are magnetic
are ineffeciant and slow
use integrated circuits
Hard disk drives are being replaced by solid state drives. SSD access time is typically under 1/ (a) th of a second.
