Just spotted this is Sci.electronics.design
We can argue about the answers later...
Steve



Topic of this particular trivia quiz was "general, pre-microprocessor
electronics" when posted verbatim to sci.electronics in 1988 -- the
newsgroup was then several years away from fractioning into its current
seven subgroups. (Answers appeared a month later.) This quiz also
circulated to some undergrad EE students at a respected school and it was
hard to find any who could answer even one question completely, unremarkable
because subject matter is not taught in nor prerequisite to contemporary EE
training but reflects practical practice, some of it well obsolete in 1988.
Obsolete but not unworthwhile and besides, as Jim W'ms would say, cool. (I
feel certain that students of Tom Lee, at least, would do well with this
quiz.) It provoked exchanges among constructive sci.electronics regulars in
1988 -- of those, I espy none today but Bob Myers KC0EW -- Bob, please be
so gracious as to email if you see this, your postings are prominent in my
archives, along with those of D. Tutelman, B. Niland, R. D. Pierce and his
analectic Anecdotes; Scott Dorsey despite remarks on transistors in
<4124@pyr.gatech.edu>, 1987; several constructive audio contributors
including Francis Vaughan of Adelaide U. who with others kindly archived my
online notes "Oversampling for the curious, the furious, and the damned"
(accessible now by direct Google search or at, for instance,
http://members.chello.nl/~m.heijli...auser.txt),
and finally Norm Strong, whom you'd all best be nice to, and not just
because he knows many different ways to blow things up should the need
arise, of course for entertainment purposes only -- Just Like This Quiz.


1. Assuming that you are acquainted with the "cascode" configuration, do
you know where the term came from?

[Note! My 1988 answers had this wrong, reflecting a popular myth of which I
was later disabused, but a myth that also made it into the current revision
of a venerable analog-IC text, despite my efforts by sending the accurate
reference to those revising the text, upon their request to me at the time
for historical information. Enough About That.]

2. What is a reflex amplifier?

3. What is the basic principle of a superhet receiver? Of a regenerative
receiver? Difference between a mixer and a converter (in RF)?

4. Who developed the op amp, and when?

[2004 Note: Question 4 preceded George Rostky's excellent recent historical
articles in the trade press, which I recommend, and which themselves have
now achieved misquotation elsewhere. That and plagiarism may be today's
"sincerest form of flattery."]

5. What is the "purple plague?"

6. What is a class-C amplifier and where is it typically used?

7. Can you describe a tunnel diode? A unijunction transistor? An SCS?
(What is the basic principle of each and what are they used for?)

8. Traditional op-amp ICs were made whenever possible to run on +- 15
volts. Why that voltage?

9. What do the following acronyms stand for: PDP, VAX, ASCII, EBCDIC, PRV,
BFO, RTTY, CW, VSB, VOR, Conelrad?

10. What was revolutionary about the 741 op amp?

11. Can you specifically describe the US semiconductor products known by
the following terms: 1N34, CK722, 2N107, 2N998, 2N1304, 2N2222, 2N3055,
U222, uL900, uL958, uA703, uA709, SN7300 series, SUHL, CCSL, HTL, ECCSL,
Utilogic, COSMOS, Intel 1101, Intel 1702.

12. Identify the following trademarks: Nixie, Pixie, Numitron?

13. What is a thyratron? A magic-eye tube? A compactron?

14. What magnitudes of voltages are required for operating the following
devices: Neon bulb, Xenon flashtube, Geiger-Mueller tube, Esaki diode.

15. What IF frequencies are traditional in the US for AM broadcast, FM
broadcast, TV sound, TV picture?

[2004 aside, for any who haven't heard this: European engineers have
quipped for decades that TV signal format acronyms stood in the US for
"Never The Same Color" and in France for "Système Envelloper Contre les
AMéricains."]

16. What is a Hartley oscillator? A Colpitts oscillator? A Pierce
oscillator? A Wien-bridge oscillator? A blocking oscillator?

17. Quick, without calculation: What voltage corresponds to zero dBm in a
600-ohm circuit?

18. What is an Eccles-Jordan circuit? A polyflop? A switch-tail ring
counter? A Johnson counter? An AC-coupled flip-flop?

19. In the context of filters, what, formally, does "biquad" mean? (1988
note: Most engineers get this wrong.)

20. What does it mean when a resistor is marked with bands
red-yellow-green-silver? A capacitor with "104K?"

21. If an aluminum electrolytic capacitor is rated for "working voltage" of
10 volts, in what range of voltages is it designed to operate?

22. Roughly compare ceramic, polystyrene, and polycarbonate capacitors.

23. What is a "2 1/2 D" core memory plane? (You could not open a computer
trade magazine in, say, 1968 without seeing incessant references to them.)

24. What is a couplate? A micromodule? Difference between thin-film and
thick-film hybrid circuits?


[1988 questions 25 and 26 concerned memory of the Ovonic Devices publicity
and business acronyms and were pretty far afield even in 1988; omitted now.]


Registered trademarks mentioned herein are identified indirectly by context,
for clarity and because this is a trivia quiz.

Copyright 1988, 2004 by Max W. Hauser. All rights reserved. Past shameless
exploitations of author's 1979 MIT "Bag of Tricks" notes and other
engineering writings do not preclude copyright enforcement for this or other
work.