The Internet, Web services, corporate intranets, distributedcomputing, globalization of the economyall these have helpedelevate the humble information systems guru to a corporate god: theChief Information Officer. No longer just a service departmentnowwe have a voice in determining the strategic goals of ouremployers. We are part of the corporate mainstream.

Listen up, CIOtime for truth or dare: Do you have the rightstuff? Are you an effective Chief Information Officer, or are youjust another suit with an attitude? We present here a simple quiz,designed to determine if you have the right stuff to be a CIO. Mostof the questions are technical (duh!), some of them may have morethan one right answer, some may be multi-part, and there might evenbe a trick one in there. See if you stack up. OK, lets play(turn upthe dramatic music, please; dim the lights for effect)Who Wants toBe a CIO?

1. What was Gary Kildall doing when IBM officialsvisited his home with the intention of buying C/PM as the operatingsystem for their yet to be built Personal PC?

Legend has it that he purposely decided to go flying in hisprivate plane, thus snubbing IBM and losing out on the opportunitythat then went to Microsoft. (Since this is probably apocryphal, wewill also accept anything about his wife or business associatesbeing unwilling to sign a non-disclosure agreement without Garypresent.)

2. Who is the father of Java?
Part 2Has he ever been spotted in a shirt with acollar?

James Gosling, who is also the chief geek at Sun Microsystems.Part 2 No.

3. What is the difference between Little Endian and BigEndian?

This is a real geeker. Little Endian means that the low-orderbyte of a number is stored in memory at the lowest address, and thehigh-order byte at the highest address. Big Endian means that thehigh-order byte of the number is stored in memory at the lowestaddress, and the low-order byte at the highest address. Veryimportant when writing machine code.

4. Who would you rather have for a neighbor, Bill Gatesor Larry Ellison?

Bill Gates is probably a better neighbor. Larry Ellisonreportedly made a lot of people in San Jose unhappy by using hisprivate jet after hours.

5. What is SEMCI? Part 2Is it dead?

SEMCI stands for Single Entry Multiple Company Interface. Itmakes no sense for data ever to be entered more than one time. Part2Yes, although SEMCI has been replaced by Straight ThroughProcessing systems.

6. Do you spend more money on geek tools (PDA, two-waypagers, handhelds, portable devices, GPS, etc.) than yourcompanyspends on those toysum tools for your use?

This is an automatic qualifier. If you are on your third pocketPC device and your corporate budget only allows a Palm Pilot with acalendar and address book, you are probably a geek scholar. (Bonuspoints if you ever owned a Timex Data Link watch.)

7. What is the MITS Altair 8800?

The first commercially available personal computer, based on theIntel 8080 processor. It was featured in a 1975 issue of PopularElectronics and was sold as a kit for about $400. It had nooperating system. (I wanted one so badly I almost sold my car toget the money. Bill Gates got onedoes that tell you something?)

8. Who invented the mouse?

Xerox (along with a graphical interface and a WYSIWYG display).Sorry Apple, nice try.

9. What is XMLife?

Looks like another insurance question. XMLife is essentially anXML DTD developed by ACORD to standardize data transactions for thelife and health side of the industry. XMLife evolved from a verycool COM object model that was developed by ACORD (with a littlehelp from Microsoft) to standardize data transaction for clientserver models.

10. What is JCL?Part 2Why is IBM JCL soweird?

JCL is Job Control Languageit tells the hardware and theoperating system of a mainframe what to do with the data you aresending. JCL essentially controls the I/O for a particular job orprogram. Back in the days of punch cards we would also save our JCLcards because the chances that we could get them right again wereinfinitesimal. Part 2Legend has it that IBM programmers working onthe same projects were scattered all across the world. Eachprogrammer would develop his own particular naming conventions.Thus there was no consistency in the ways things were done. Thereal reason is probably just because.

OKan even 10 questions. How did you do? World-classgeek or pretender? Let your conscience be your guide. Maybe youbetter order that C# from Amazon. Maybe you should write your own.Anyway, these were pretty simple because we didnt want to scareyou. Next time they just might be a little tougher. See yathen.