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Computer History Quiz: Ten Most Influential Contributors

By Dennis McCafferty on 2011-11-07


Do you consider your computer history chops to be up to snuff? Then test your smarts with our quiz of the 10 most influential contributors to the history of computers. You’ll find no mention of the usual suspects, such as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, in this quiz, which we compiled based on information from Ranker.com. Instead, we focus on unsung pioneers whose collective work dates back to the War of 1812. We’re presenting this quiz in classic “Jeopardy!” answer-then-question format. Ranker.com is a site dedicated to declaring superlatives within the worlds of film, TV, music, games, sports, automobiles, books and technology. It claims more than 2 million monthly unique users. We work on the honor system here, so take the quiz with no help allowed from your “Internet machine”:

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Answer: He’s the mathematician/mechanical engineer who sprung the concept of the programmable computer in 1812.

Question: Who is Charles Babbage?

Answer: He’s the “father of information theory” who concluded in 1937 that electrical application of Boolean algebra could be used for computation and digital calculation.

Question: Who is Claude Shannon?

Answer: In 1950, he defined artificial intelligence as that in which an exchange with a machine is indistinguishable from human interaction.

Question: Who is Alan Turing?

Answer: He determined in 1945 that programs should be stored in memory, along with data.

Question: Who is John von Neumann?

Answer: This 1956 Nobel Prize winner and reputed “founder of Silicon Valley” co-invented the transistor and created the Shockley Semiconductor.

Question: Who is William Shockley?

Answer: He conducted famous “Mother of All Demos” in 1968, which introduced the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing and other tools we take for granted now.

Question: Who is Douglas Engelbart?

Answer: He co-invented the integrated circuit and co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel in 1968, and was dubbed “Mayor of Silicon Valley.”

Question: Who is Robert Noyce?

Answer: This Apple co-founder created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the 1970s, igniting the PC revolution.

Question: Who is Steve Wozniak? (We had to let you have one easy one.)

Answer: This Rear Admiral served as programming trailblazer, popularizing the term “debugging” and conceptualizing machine-independent programming languages, leading to COBOL in 1959.

Question: Who is “Amazing” Grace Murray Hopper?

Answer: He’s the DARPA program manager who helped develop TCP/IP technology, as well as the first commercial email system in 1980s – emerging as a founding father of the Internet for his efforts.

Question: Who is Vint Cerf?

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