Test Your Nerd Knowledge — March 29, 2022
Here’s a review of the questions:
- What home computer system is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “the biggest selling computer of all time”?
- In computer technology parlance, what does RAID mean?
- What is described as “a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the internet in a decentralized manner?”
And here are the answers:
- The Commodore 64. Introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1982, the Commodore 64 was an inexpensive and popular home computer. It used a 1 mHz processor and had 64 kilobytes of random-access memory, which is how it got its name. The initial retail price was $595, but by May 1983, it dropped to $250. In the eleven years it was manufactured, between 17 and 30 million were sold worldwide, making it the most popular early home computer. It made instant computer geeks out of millions of people in the 80’s and early 90’s.
- Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. The term RAID was coined in 1987 by David Patterson, Randy Katz and Garth A. Gibson. In their 1988 technical report, “A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID),” the three argued that an array of inexpensive drives could beat the performance of the top expensive disk drives of the time. By using redundancy, a RAID array could be more reliable than any one disk drive. It revolutionized enterprise data storage technology, building in the peace of mind of redundancy (from RAID 1 & above), which can greatly minimize downtime suffered due to individual drive failures.
- BitTorrent. To send or receive files, a person uses a BitTorrent client on their internet-connected computer. A BitTorrent client is a computer program that implements the BitTorrent protocol. As of January 2012, BitTorrent is estimated as being utilized by more than a quarter of a billion people monthly. BitTorrent may sometimes be limited by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), on legal or copyright grounds.