Five Questions (with answers) asked at the 1994 Computer Bowl

The Computer Bowl is an annual fundraiser for the Computer Museum of Boston, Massachusetts. It's a contest that pits the nerdiest of the nerds from the East coast (the guys who brought us mainframes and minicompters) against the nerds from the West coast (who brought us silicon chips and personal computers). There they are names like Bob Frankston (the creator of VisiCalc), Mitch Kapor (of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), and Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft) answering the most trivial of computer trivia. (By the way, the East cost nerds won the 1994 game. The two top scorers each received memory cores from MIT's Whirlwind computer, the machine that started the museum's collection.) For more information, call the Computer Museum at (617) 426-2800.
  1. I can think of at least three programming languages which were named after real people. Can you name three?
    Ada, Pascal, and Euclid.
  2. A recent report on computers in public schools rated the fifty states on how many computers are availale in school per student. Of these four states, which one ranked number one? Alaska, California, Minnesota or Massachusetts?
    Alaska.
  3. According to the book The Green PC, what is the annual cost for generating the electricity it takes to run all the world's personal computers?
    $4.6 billion
  4. What is the result of the multiplication of these two numbers: 11 and 11, expressed in base 89?
    121 (It's always 121, except in base 2.)
  5. One of today's well-known computer trade magazines used to be called the Intelligent Machines Journal. What is that magazine called today?
    Infoworld.


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Copyright © 1994, 1995, 2004 by Kevin Savetz. The information in this book was collected in 1994-1995 and has not been updated since.