Official IS Bowl Questions

1. If you wanted to send an e-mail message to President Clinton, how would you address it?

2. We know that Microsoft won the contract with IBM to write DOS. Whom did they beat out?

3. Salaries in IS seem to be skyrocketing. However, there have been large ones for quite a while. According to Computerworld and other publications, who was the first CIO to receive annual compensation of at least $1 Million dollars and for whom did he (hint!) work?

4. Outsourcing is a major new force in the decade of the 90’s. The key books on outsourcing were written by Rudy Hirschheim and a coauthor who was then at the University of Houston Who is the co-author?

5. Some famous names in the field were project leaders for the schools who won the IBM grants. They include Gordon Davis and Eph McLean on this panel Who wrote the proposal and was the project leader at the University of Texas?

6. Question for the EAST TEAM. Name the three schools in the Big 10 who won the $2 million dollar IBM grants in 1985?

7. Question for the WEST TEAM. Peter G. W. Keen has been associated with MCI and with a number of universities including MIT, Stanford, and the Stockholm Business School. For a number of years he was affiliated with a university in New York City? Which University?

8. Ed Yourdon wrote the book: The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer in 1992. In 1996, Prentice Hall published a follow up to this book. What was its title?

9. APL is an acronym for A Programming Language. It was an implementation of a notation. Whose notation?

10. Microsoft ACCESS today is a standard data base program. Microsoft had used this name before. What did the earlier ACCESS program do?

11. Electronic commerce is a hot buzzword. There is a not-for-profit corporation in Palo Alto that has over 100 companies as its members. What is the name of that corporation?

12. What is the Exact name of the organization that issues standards such as ISO 9000 ?

13. The Delphi technique is a popular way of aggregating forecasts by experts. It can be used with GroupSystems, for example. The technique was invented by two scientists who were then at the Rand Corporation. Who were they?

14. KNOW YOUR OPPONENTS (Question for the EAST TEAM) One of the classic early texts in information systems was written by Gordon Davis, captain of the West Team. In a later edition, he had a coauthor. What the Coauthor’s name?

15. KNOW YOUR OPPONENTS, (Question for the WEST TEAM) Ken Kendall is a Professor at Rutgers University. He also spent a number of years at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Between those two positions, he was a professor at a third University. Which was it?

16. There have been a lot of word processing programs, including Word for Windows, Wordperfect, and more. The number has decreased over the years. For example, one word processing program was associated with the TRS-80. Which was it?

17. We are all familiar with the Norton Utilities developed by Peter Norton. He sold his company and the Norton Utilities are now marketed by a Silicon Valley company? What is this company’s name?

18. Apple computer produced a $10,000 personal computer between the Apple II and the MacIntosh. What is the name of this computer

Bonus: What was the origin of this name?

19. Apple sued Microsoft charging that Windows was a rip-off of the Macintosh interface. Many people however, felt that the Macintosh was a rip-off of the Xerox Star interface. The Xerox Star itself was the commercial successor to a machine used internally in Xerox which was never sold. What was the name of this machine?

20. Doug Engelbart, one of the grand old men of this field, recently won a major prize--the amount of the award was $500,000. What is the name of this prize?

21. One of today’s popular machines in the IBM AS-400. This machine replaced a previous IBM mid-range computer. What was the name of this computer?

22. To the nearest $500 what was the list price of an IBM Model 51 (the original PC) with one disk drive in 1981?

23. Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute wrote a set of Guidelines for Improving the Software Process? What is the name of these guidelines?

24. The Internet is governed by the Internet Society. Who owns the Society?

25. We all know about the Internet. If you met someone and they told you they had an Intranet and an Extranet but were not connected to the Internet. What would they be telling you?

26. The first book on telecommuting appeared in 1976. Published by Wiley. Your moderator was one of four co-authors. Name any ONE of the other three.

27. Question for the EAST TEAM: What was the original color of the cover of MISQ ?

28. Question for the WEST TEAM: Two major books on reengineering appeared at nearly the same time. One by Hammer and Champy and the other by a former MIT professor who was working for Ernst and Young. Name the author and the title of this volume.

29. When he accepted the invitation to be a member of the East, Eph McLean said he did not want to be asked "What does COBOL stand for?" We agreed we wouldn’t ask that question. So we have substituted for it the following: BASIC was the language packaged with DOS. It was invented by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. It is a language in which probably every person in this room has programmed. It is really an acronym. What does BASIC stand for?

30. In 1963, a seminal work on AI was published. A collection of readings, it was called Computers and Thought. Who were the editors of this book?

31. Artificial intelligence software for the PC has existed for many years. One of the earlier ones was VP-Expert from Osborne. The high end of this software came from West Lafayette Indiana by a team headed by Andy Whinston who is now at the University of Texas. What was the name of this high-end software product?

32. AIS has been addressed by a Nobel Prize Winner. Who is he?

33. Project Management has always been difficult for IS. Software projects are known to be late and over budget. A little over 20 years ago, in 1975, an explanation for this phenomenon was published in a small book by Frederick P. Brookes. What was the name he gave to the phenomenon he wrote about?

34. Data warehousing has become a multi-billion dollar industry in the 1990’s, although it is still largely invisible on the academic IS faculty’s radar screen. So, rather than asking a technical question on data warehousing, we’ll ask a question on personalities. The question is: Who is known as "the father of data warehousing"?

35. Data Warehousing and Data Mining are two terms that have come into general use in recent years. Warehousing and mining are words associated with blue-collar rather than white collar work. There is, however, an alternative name for data mining? What is it?

36. Name six of the "Seven Dwarfs" -- the smaller companies competing with IBM in the late 1960’s.

37. What is the result of multiplying two numbers, 11 and 11, expressed in base 34?

38. Ed Roberts ran Altair, the first PC company. He gave Bill Gates his first computer job. What is he doing now?

39. A scientist working in Iowa has been credited with the first electronic computer. Note that this computer could not be programmed. Who was he?

40. For whom was the original punched card named?

41. One of the reasons the punched card made such an impression was that it was used by the U.S. Census Bureau. Which census was the first one to use punched cards?

42. The inventor of the supercomputer was the late Seymour Cray. How did he die?

43. What was the year of the first COMDEX?

44. The ADA programming language was developed for the Department of Defense. Although not widely taught in business schools, it has been the official language of the DoD. Who was Ada for whom the Ada programming language is named?

45. We all know about the Turing test. That is, a computer "thinks" if a judge can’t tell whether answers to questions were obtained by a computer or by a human being (That’s a very simplified statement of the test). Turing was a British mathematician who led the Ultra project during World War II and developed a machine which broke the German codes. Several years ago, there was a play about Turing. What was its name?

Bonus: 5 points: Who starred in it in London and on PBS?

46. A group at IBM invented FORTRAN in 1956, which stands for Formula Translator. It has gone through various versions, usually identified by date and, just as COBOL is the legacy system language of business code, FORTRAN is the legacy system language of engineering. Who lead the IBM team?

47. Forty years ago this year, this professor wrote Syntactic Structures, the first of many important works that would give him the title of "father of modern linguistics" Who was he?

48. Estimate, to the nearest 1000, the number of computers in operation in the United States in 1960.

49. Gordon Moore was one of the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, one of the earliest Silicon Valley startups. He is known today for Moore’s Law. Accurately state Moore’s law.

Bonus: What year did Moore formulate his law?

50. Predictions about computers are notoriously optimistic. For example, in 1965, the statement was made "By 1985 computers will be capable of doing any work that a man can do." Who made that statement?

51. In the 1968 film 2001:A Space Odyssey by Arthur Clarke and Stanley C. Kubrick, HAL the computer regularly travels in space. Airline service is provided on a regular basis. Which airline is shown as providing space travel in the film?

52. We all know the wonders of pocket calculators. The first one was introduced in 1971. What could this calculator do?

53. The killer application for the PC -- that is, the first application which made people other than enthusiasts want to buy a computer -- was the electronic spreadsheet invented by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. What was it called?

54. Kasparov against the computer -- 6 matches and the computer won. IBM customized one of its machines for the purpose and named it Deep Blue. What generic model number was it?

BONUS: The RS 6000 uses the RISC instruction set. How did the specific RS 6000 that beat Kasparov perform its calculations?

55. Question for the EAST TEAM: In the south, and in Indiana, the KKK was a notorious racist organization. For many years, one of the major West Coast Universities was known for its KKK. Which university and what did KKK mean?

56. Question for the WEST TEAM: Computer museums are all the rage. One is opening in Silicon Valley. Where is the largest one located?

Bonus: What is the price of admission to the museum for adults (within 50 cents)?

57. Jay Forrester, a professor at MIT, worked on feedback systems during World War II. After the war, much like the carpenter who find the world is full of nails that need hammering, he found that many systems could be described as feedback systems. He came up with Systems Dynamics and later Urban Dynamics. His ideas were incorporated into a Fortran based language called Dynamo by George Pugh which had such lovely statements in it as:

x_ijk = a_ijk + b_{ijk *} c_ijk

In recent years we have become much more sophisticated both in the use of systems dynamics and the Dynamo concepts have been implemented commercially by High Performance Systems which markets it under two names for both the MacIntosh and the PC. Can you give us ONE of these names?

58. If you go out and buy a full version of Microsoft Office 97, you receive 5 programs. Name them

59. There were a series of DSS meetings, called DSS ’81 to DSS ’92. Where was the first of these held?

60. The year 2000 problem refers to the idea that many legacy computer programs, written when memory was scarce, used 2 digits to refer to the year. When 2000 rolls around, these programs will cause problems when the year is used in arithmetic. However, for many organizations, the year 2000 problem is really a year 1999 problem. Why?

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