Date: Mon Nov 15, 1999 8:02 am
Subject: [quiznet] Fiche n' Chips Part 1
Hello,
The following is a sampling of the elims questions of a computer quiz I conducted back in college. The quiz was called Fiche n' Chips - Be there or get XORed. FYI, fiche is of the micro-fiche storage device fame.
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The scores and answers to Fiche n' Chips Part 1 follow...
8.5: Gaurav Lochan
6.5: Kalilur Rahman
6: Suresh Ramasubramanian
5: Srikant
4.5: Rushi Anandan
3.5: Madhav Nair, Shivakumar B.K
3: Vikas Kedia, Arun Krishnaswamy Simha
2.5: Sankalpa Bhattacharjya
2: Ramacharan Sundararaman, Avi Subu
1.5: Subhadeep Ghosh
1: Lalitha Raman, Rajesh B, Siddhartha Sinharay
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1. The 9th century Persian author Abu J'affar Mohammad ibn Musa
al-Khowrarizmi wrote a superhit book, which gave rise to a word. What word
or better still which "best-seller" are we talking about? Clue: No, the word
was not algorithm, which was a corruption of his surname (?) al-Khowrarizmi.
## Algebra
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was born sometime before 800 A.D. in an area
not far from Baghdad and lived at least until 847. He wrote his Al-jabr wa'l
muqabala (from which our modern word "algebra" comes) while working as a
scholar at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. In addition to this treatise,
al-Khwarizmi wrote works on astronomy, on the Jewish calendar, and on the
Hindu numeration system. The English word "algorithm" derives from the Latin
form of al-Khwarizmi's name. Some scholars think that his parents were from
Persia and others think they came from Iraq. Hence the Persia, Baghdad
confusion.
2. What is a take-off on "Deep Throat", a 1973 porno movie by Pop
artist Andy Warhol?
## Deep Thought of "Kasporov Vs Deep Thought" fame. Somebody pointed out that
Deep Thought was named after the computer in Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy.
Does anyone have info on this?
3. It was started first in Vienna then New York, London, Singapore,
Bombay and then a host of other places. The Bombay wala is the world's
fifth, Asia's second and India's first, and is at Leela Kempinski Hotel,
Bombay. What are we talking about and who created and conceived the Bombay
wala?
## Cyber Cafe and Pritish Nandy.
4. Why was the Lotus spreadsheet marketed as the Lotus1-2-3?
## They wanted to market it by saying using it is as easy as 1,2,3.
5.Founder and Director of the Bootstrap Institute, he has an
unparalleled 30-year track record in predicting, designing, and implementing
the future of organizational computing. From his early vision of turning
organizations into augmented knowledge workshops, he went on to pioneer what
is now known as collaborative hypermedia, knowledge management, community
networking, and organizational transformation. Well-known technological
firsts include the display editing, windows, cross-file editing, outline
processing, hypermedia, and groupware. His most famous invention came in
1964 when he was at Stanford Research Institute.
## Douglas Engelbart, his most famous invention being the mouse.
6. If (:-) is a smiley what is (^ . ^) ?
## This is the Japanese smiley ;-)
7. What is a weak pun on Multiplexed, Information and Computing
Service?
## UNIX was a poke at Multiplexed, Information and Computing Service (MULTICS)
During the l960s, General Electric, MIT, and Bell Labs worked on a time-
sharing operating system (MULTICS). Ken Thompson (Bell Labs), who worked on
the MULTICS project, during the early 1970s, created the UNIX (UNICS)
operating system to run on a PDP7
8. At the age of 12 he had become so skilled in Latin that he
translated an ode by the Latin poet Horace. He was appointed to the chair of
mathematics at Queens College, Cork in 1849. He taught there for the rest of
his life, gaining a reputation as an outstanding and dedicated teacher. His
career, which was started rather late, came to an unfortunately early end
when he died at the age of 49. The circumstances were as follows: One day in
1864 he walked from his residence to the College, a distance of two miles,
in the drenching rain, and lectured in wet clothes. The result was a
feverish cold. His wife (Mary - niece of Sir George Everest, after whom the
mountain is named) believed that a remedy should resemble the cause. She put
him to bed and threw buckets of water over the bed since his illness had
been caused by getting wet.
Who is he?
## George Boole, after whom Boolean Algebra is named.
9. The word was used as early as 1878, when Edison is recorded to have
used it. Another version credits Grace Murray Hopper with coining the word,
when she discovered the reason the MARK 2 electronic calculator she was
working on, at Harvard in 1945, crashed. What is the word?
## Bug. Picture of that insect at this site.
http://www.lewhill.com/FirstComputerBug.html
10. Visual: A graduate of Oxford University, England, he now holds the
3COM Founders Chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In March 1989 what project did this
man propose?
Sorry forgot to attach pic last time.
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
## Tim Berners Lee, while working at CERN proposed a project (which blossomed
into the WWW) to enable his scientist colleagues to exchange documents He
invented the World Wide Web, defining HTML (hypertext markup language), HTTP
(HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators).
Answers and Scores in a week. I request you not to embed the answers among
the questions...as it becomes difficult to "fiche" them out. Prefix each of
your answers with a ##.
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Iftikhar Ahamath B.
Honeywell India Software Operation Pvt. Ltd.
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