CS101 Midterm Exam #1 Topics

The midterm exam is closed book and closed notes.  Calculators are allowed although you should be able to complete the problems without one. 

There will be a number of problems to work through (no multiple choice) that are similar to the homework.  Consequently, the best way to study for the test is to understand your homework questions and be able to answer the questions at the end of the chapters in the book.

Computer Science Overview

• What an algorithm is and the role of algorithms in computer science
• Transition of computers based on physical switches to vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits
• Clock speed and computer performance
• Moore's Law
• Scale of components that are on an integrated circuit

Data Representation

• Concept that data can represent many things (sound, instruction, number, picture, text)
• How text is stored (ASCII, UNICODE)
• Be able to represent and convert between decimal, unsigned binary, hex, two's complement, and sign magnitude
  • Negative number representation using sign magnitude and two's complement
• Be able to convert a floating point number from decimal to the format defined in class and vice versa

Computer Arithmetic

• Know how to add and subtract numbers using two's complement representation
• Concepts of carry (final carry is ignored) and overflow

Computer Architecture

• Basic components of a computer (e.g. disk, primary memory, secondary memory, input units, output units)
• Memory and memory addressing
• Concept of the bus
• Components of the CPU
  • Registers (special registers like the PC and IR)
  • ALU
  • Control Unit
• Instruction Cycle, what it is
• Increasing performance: Caching, Pipeline, faster clock rates, parallelism

Machine Language

• Given a hypothetical machine language, such as that given in the textbook, you should be able to:
  • Write a simple program
  • If given a program, be able to describe what it will do

Operating Systems

• How today's modern OS evolved from batch processing systems
• Difference between Application, System software
• Role of the kernel and the shell
• What happens when you turn the computer on to boot the system
• Major roles of the kernel
• Managing memory
• Managing files
• Device drivers
• Process scheduling and dispatching
• Concept behind virtual memory
• How multi-tasking works to give time slices to each process; tasks the OS needs to do to switch between different processes
• Problems that can arise with multiprogramming/multitasking
• Race conditions
• Deadlock
• Three conditions for deadlock to occur and how to break one to avoid deadlock
• Competition for nonsharable resource
• Resources requested are allocated on a partial basis
• Allocated resource can't be retrieved
• Common security problems with operating systems
• Passwords, virtual computer, patches to fix bugs, privileged vs. non-privileged modes