Tax Freedom Daythe day each year you stop working for the government and start working for yourselfcame early this year: April 19, with an overall effective tax rate of 30 percent. Of course, that rate is only for the huddled masses, schlepping their way through another workweek. Highly compensated individuals such as CIOs push the envelope of corporate salaries, so their Tax Freedom Day comes later in the year. Probably just about now. You must be in the 35 percent bracket, right? And that is just for the feds. So how do you justify those numbers? By having a wealth of seemingly important knowledge at your fingertips. Let us test a bit of this esoteric information.

1. OK, we all know about C and C++ and C#. What can you tell me about B?
B is a computer language designed by D.M. Ritchie and K.L. Thompson for primarily non-numeric applications such as system programming. Do those names sound familiar? They should. Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs created the C programming language in 1971 to 1972 as he and Ken Thompson worked together to design the UNIX operating system.

And what about A? (For extra credit.)
There actually exists an A programming language. It is a dialect of APL aimed at business applications. It is a predecessor of A+ not B.

2. What is the difference between EBCDIC and ASCII, and what the heck does IBM have to do with all this?
In 1966, a group of American communications companies got together to devise a new binary code, using 7 bits that could represent 128 characters. This is known as the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or the ASCII code. It was immediately accepted by nearly all of the worlds computer and communications companies, except, of course, IBM, which decided to make its own standard. IBMs version is the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code, or EBCDIC. It uses 8 bits and can represent 256 characters, but when you are using a different standard than anyone else, who cares?

3. Who is the original author of DOS?
a. Bill Gates
b. Steve Ballmer
c. Gary Kildall
d. Tim Patterson

Easy one. Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products created the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). Bill Gates bought it and licensed it to IBM; Steve Ballmer (who looks a lot like Peter Boyle) was a hallmate of Gates at Harvard. Unlike his boss, Ballmer actually graduated and now is CEO of Microsoft. Gary Kildall wrote the CP/M (Control Program/ Monitor) operating system.

4. What does ISO stand for?
Another easy one. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has been developing voluntary technical standards over almost all sectors of business, industry, and technology since 1947. This includes telecommunications and information technology standards used in the insurance and financial services industries.

5. OK, how about a four-letter acronymwhat is IDMA?
a. Irish Direct Marketing Association
b. Indian Drug Manufacturers Association
c. Insurance Data Management Association
d. Independent Direct Mail Association

The correct answer is all of the above, but if you answered anything but C, you need to be shopping your resume. The Insurance Data Management Association was founded to promote professionalism in the data management discipline. It works in cooperation with ACORD, RIMS, WISe, and other organizations to implement data standards for the insurance industry. (www.idma.org)

6. Who is Alan Turing, and why do we care?
Alan Turing was a British mathematician whose 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem introduced the world to the Turing Machine, an intellectual exercise in creating a machine that operated in a sequential manner according to a defined set of rules. Discussions about Turing Machines developed into modern computer science.
OK for now. Summers here, and the time is right. Take care. CYAL8R.