Sri Lanka Institute of Information TechnologyB. Sc Degree in IT/IS/CN, Diploma in Information Technology

Year 1 – Semester 1 – 2009 Computer Fundamentals (101)

Tutorial 1Attempt following questions in 30 minutes.

1. Computer Organization a. Draw a diagram showing the connection between the CPU and various devices and their

access to memory.b. Describe in brief about the von Neumann Architecture with the aid of a diagram.c. Explain in brief about the functions of each part listed in the von Neumann Architecture.

2. Data Types a. What are the basic data types available to represent data in computers?b. Give some examples for each data type you listed.

3. Number Representation a. What are the different types of number representation methods available?b. Identify mantissa/argument, radix/base and exponent giving an example.

4. Data Representation in Computers a. Why is Binary representation chosen to represent data in computers?b. What are the states that we are concerned in binary representation and how can we map

them to binary numbers?

5. BITS and BYTES Computers are based on bits which have two possible states (0 or 1). Suppose a new computer is invented that is based on "tri-its" (this is a made-up word). A tri-it can have 3 possible states (-1,0,1).

a. How many pieces of information could be stored in a single tri-yte (1 tri-yte = 8 tri-its)?b. 16 bit color provides 216 = 65,536 different colors. How many different colors could be

represented using 16 tri-it color? c. What is the minimum number of tri-its that would be required if you only wanted to

represent the same 65,536 that are available on a bit based machine?

6. ASCII a. How many characters are possible in ASCII?b. If the ASCII code for the letter "A" is 65, what is the ASCII Code for the letter "D"?c. Use the ASCII chart from the lecture/text book to determine what bit pattern is stored for

the following characters assuming an 8-bit byte.i. Z ii. z iii. 8 iv. %

d. Use the ASCII chart from the lecture/text book to determine what character is represented by the following bit patterns?

i. 0011 0000 ii. 0100 0011 iii. 0111 1000 iv. 0010 1010

e. What are other character codes available?f. What was the reason to select Unicode to represent characters?