Questions for Week 1

  1. What is computing? What is data?
  2. What is a computer? What is hardware? What is software?
  3. What is random access memory? What is sequential access memory? How is memory organized in a computer? How are files organized?
  4. How is the flow of information in a computer organized?
  5. How much can a CPU really do? What are its limitations? What is a clock cycle and why are clock cycles used to measure processing power?
  6. What is the memory pyramid?
  7. What happens when a computer is turned on and off?
  8. What is an operating system?
  9. Which problems are easy to solve and which are hard? How can we tell?
  10. What is a program? What is an algorithm?
  11. What are some of the most common programming languages? What are their distinguishing characteristics?
  12. What are the essential elements common to all useful programming languages?
  13. How can information be organized?
  14. What is Moore's Law? What is its significance? How long will it last?
  15. What are the most important principles of software design? How can we write useful, reliable code?
  16. How can we best attempt to solve a hard problem?
  17. What do analog and digital mean? What are the advantages and disadvantages of digital technology compared to analog technology?
  18. Consider files accessed by the "Windows Explorer" Graphical User Interface (GUI). If you organize your N files in height-balanced subdirectories (folders), at most how many (double-)clicks will it take you to open any arbitrary file on your system (approximately)?
  19. How are plain-text documents typically represented in binary?
  20. Find the binary representation of 0.1 (one tenth). Does it terminate? Explain the significance of your answer to engineering computation.
  21. What is programming? Give examples.