Catalysts for Change - Ethics for the Information Age - page 41

Review Questions
1. According to the author, why is there good reason to say we are living in the Information
Age?
2. What can the Amish teach us about our relationship with technology?
3. Name three aids to manual calculating.
4. Why did commercial mechanical calculators become practical in the nineteenth cen-
tury?
5. Why did the market for mechanical calculators grow significantly in the late nineteenth
century?
6. What factors helped the Burroughs Adding Machine Company to surpass a large num-
ber of competitors and become the most successful calculator company by the 1890s?
7. How did the widespread adoption of the mechanical calculator change the office envi-
ronment?
8. What needs motivated the invention of the cash register?
9. Give four examples of how punched cards were used by large organizations in the early
twentieth century.
10. What are the three principal components of a data-processing system?
11. Name three ways the development of radar in World War II stimulated advances in
computing.
12. Why did IBM quickly overtake Remington Rand as the leading computer manufacturer
in the United States in the 1950s?
13. What was the motivation for the creation of higher-level programming languages? How
did the introduction of higher-level programming languages change computing?
14. How did time-sharing give more organizations access to electronic digital computers in
the 1960s?
15. In what way did the Cold War accelerate the development of technology needed for the
personal computer?
16. What was the principal innovation of the IBM System/360?
17. Can you think of a practical reason why the semaphore telegraph was adopted more
rapidly on the continent of Europe than in the British Isles?
18. Give two examples of how the introduction of Morse's telegraph changed life in America.
19. Briefly describe three ways in which society changed by adopting the telephone.
20. What is the difference between a circuit-switched network and a packet-switched net-
work?
21. Why does the Internet have a decentralized structure?
22. How did the National Science Foundation stimulate the creation of commercial, long-
distance data networks in the United States?
23. Describe two ways in which the codex represented an improvement over the scroll.
24. What is hypertext?