Q 01/05

When Charles Babbage started designing calculating engines in the 1820s, what did the word 'computer' mean?

A) A wooden counting frame

B) A person who did sums

C) A book of tables

D) A clerk's ledger

Answer · why

B) A person who did sums

A person who did sums by hand was called a computer, and the errors such people left in printed tables are what drove Babbage to hand the work to mach...

Q 02/05

Which part of Charles Babbage's body is kept in two halves at the Hunterian Museum and the Science Museum in London?

A) His heart

B) His skull

C) His right hand

D) His brain

Answer · why

D) His brain

His brain was removed after he died in 1871, and the autopsy report lay undiscovered until 1983, when it turned up and was later published by his grea...

Q 03/05

Which retail chain began in Dallas in 1984 as a software store named Babbage's after Charles Babbage?

A) GameStop

B) Best Buy

C) RadioShack

D) Blockbuster

Answer · why

A) GameStop

GameStop only took that name in 1999; the first Babbage's opened in a Dallas shopping mall with the businessman Ross Perot as an early investor.

Q 04/05

Charles Babbage waged a long public campaign in Victorian London against which kind of street musician?

A) Penny whistlers

B) Bagpipers

C) Organ grinders

D) Ballad singers

Answer · why

C) Organ grinders

Organ grinders enraged Babbage so much that he logged 165 street nuisances in 80 days, arguing that the noise robbed intellectual workers of their tim...

Q 05/05

Which daughter of the poet Lord Byron published detailed notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in 1843?

A) Mary Somerville

B) Ada Lovelace

C) Sophie Germain

D) Florence Nightingale

Answer · why

B) Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace wrote notes about three times longer than the paper she was translating, and Babbage called her 'The Enchantress of Number'.