Spring Quiz: Try the Easter Brainteaser

Welcome to our Spring Quiz. Here are 20 questions to test your knowledge of IT acronyms, technology in fiction and quotable quotes. A bottle of champagne awaits the winner drawn from the very low-tech hat. Send entries to: linda@e-health-media.com by Thursday 24 April.

Alphabet Soup
Spell out these acronyms from healthcare IT:
ICRS

NN4B
NSTS

ERDIP

NPRAS

HRI
NISP
NKS
OSCAR
SNOMED

Tech Lit
Technology finds itself woven into the plots of our favourite novels these days. Name the authors of the quotes below. There are no tricks – they are all mainstream writers.
a. Ralph snatched the printout from me. He looked at it, then tossed it contemptuously aside. “I have a Palm. You can enter dates after the event – anyone could have typed that in, including you, Vic. To deflect criticism away from your helping yourself to our microfiche.”
“Another thing for technicians to look at,” I snapped. “You can back enter dates, but you can’t fool the machine: it will tell you what day the keystrokes were typed.”

b. Besides the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic and the scripts he had an Electronic Thumb – a short squat black rod, smooth and matt with a couple of flat switches and dials at one end; he also had a device that looked rather like a large electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million “pages” could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters.

c. “I wouldn’t call UNIX an operating system Aunt Kay. It’s like calling it the weather when it’s really the environment, which is comprised of the weather and all the elements and edifices. Are you using A-T an’ T?”
“Good God, Lucy, I don’t know.”

d. “They are calling it Cobra. The first three wheel-settings will be solved in the usual way on the existing bombes – that is, electromechanically. But the fourth – the fourth will be solved purely electronically, using a relay rack and valves, linked to the bombe by this fat cable form, that looks like a – ” Kramer cupped his hands into a circle “- well, that looks like a cobra, I guess. Using valves in sequence – that’s a revolution. Never done before. Your people say it should make the calculations a hundred times, maybe a thousand times as fast.”
Jericho said, almost to himself: “A Turing machine.”
“A what?”
“An electronic computer.”

e. 11 am Office Oh my God. Daniel Cleaver just sent me a message. Was trying to work on CV without Perpetua noticing (in preparation for improving career) when Message Pending suddenly flashed up on top of screen. Delighted by, well, anything – as always am if is not work – I quickly pressed RMS Execute and nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw Cleave at the bottom of the message. I instantly thought he had been able to tap into my computer and see I was not getting on with my work.

Quote Unquote
Match the quotes to their owners:
a."Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.”
b. “If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.”
c. “The nicest thing about standards is there are so many of them to choose from.”
d. “New ideas pass through three periods:
It can’t be done.
It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing.
I knew it was a good idea all along!”
e. “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.”

i Arthur C. Clarke, science writer
ii Robert X. Cringely, computer writer
iii Albert Einstein, mathematician
iv Jef Raskin, interface and systems designer
v Ken Olsen, former president, Digital Equipment