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It is time for a quiz slightly biased toward older, larger systems giving old farts an unfair advantage.
Remember: googling the answers is cheating but we have no way of enforcing it. But it is less fun.
1. What is the advantage of unidirectional printing on a dot-matrix printer?
2. What is the distance between the black marks on a thick yellow ethernet cable (10BASE5)?
3. Which CPU did the SuperMAX from DDE have? (trick question)
4. How do you exit from a DOS program (interrupt number + subfunction)
5. Which interactive game from 1986 had the settings tame..lewd, and a scratch'n'sniff card was in the box?
6. Why is a memory dump called a "core" dump?
7. Which CPU did the Siemens PC-D have?
8. Which new features were in the file system in DOS 2.x when compared to DOS 1.x ?
9. What is the visual administration tool in AIX called?
10. Name the file server in the Amoeba OS.
11. What is the biggest difference between C64 joysticks and PC-joysticks (we are talking about the original ones that had to connect to a game port)?
12. What is the maximum line length in COBOL? (trick question)
13. Where is the main office of the Sirius Cybernetics Complaints Department located?
14. "eioio" instruction on Power. What does it do?
15. Before Borland introduced their TurboVision, which toolkit was widespread for implementing windows/ISAM-files in Turbo Pascal?
16. Why is the Unix function for creating a file called "creat" and not "create"?
17. When was SMP supported by Windows? And OS/2?
18. Which number did the Fidonet nets have in your country? (bonus point if you remember your matrix address)
19. How do you mark a block in Wordstar?
20. Which came first: Amiga, Norton Commander, or HP Laserjet?
[20200306_005148 UTC; Updated to add:
Please, when posting a reply, bracket your answer in spoiler tags, like so:
<p>My answer to question #n is:</p>
<spoiler>
Write your answer here.
</spoiler>Which, when presented on the site, will look like:
My answer to question #n is:
Write your answer here.
Thank You! --martyb]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @11:34PM
thanks for the memories
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @11:34PM
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Thursday March 05 2020, @11:43PM (4 children)
I guess I'm not an old fart, as I only know one answer without Googling, and I only know it because I worked for a bank from 2003 to 2014. (It's number 12, the COBOL question. And I know why it's a trick question...but I ain't telling.)
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Friday March 06 2020, @12:00AM (1 child)
Well, I must be an even older fart, because I know number 6 (either that or a pervert because I know the answer to number 5). All of the rest of these seem to assume you worked with PCs rather than "real computers" during the mid-to-late eighties. Sadly, I also know the answer to number 16.
That is all.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 06 2020, @12:37AM
Yep, number 6 is the only one I got for sure. And if 5 isn't Leisure Suit Larry then I guess I'm a one-answer pony.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @03:14AM
Ditto. When I read old fart I though I might qualify, but for these I am not fossil enough. I would score just _one_ for :) COBOL :) ... I also know it!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @05:24PM
I can't answer all the Windows/DOS based ones because I'm too old a fart that I was only working with mainframes during those time periods.
And some of the questions I should know the answer to, but because I'm an old fart I just can't remember them any more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @11:46PM (3 children)
Had something to do with clothing and
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @02:11AM (2 children)
And I should have said
A brain fart for an old fart. There's a certain symmetry there. :(
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday March 06 2020, @05:44AM (1 child)
Nope, number five features (depending on which sex you play as) Trent or Tiffany.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @06:35AM
Apparently so. In fact, I'd never even heard of the correct answer until it appeared in the comments here.
That's not surprising for a couple of reasons. In 1986, I was either working to pay rent or living on the street and didn't have regular access to a computer. Also, I likely wouldn't have bothered as I was never really that big into computer games. I'm still not, in fact.
So, when "lewd" and "scratch-n-sniff" was mentioned, I just assumed it was
and not the correct answer.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @11:51PM (2 children)
If you turn on bi-directional printing
alternate lines look
like this.
and then this....
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Friday March 06 2020, @05:55AM (1 child)
Back in the day I can remember turning on NLQ mode (major misnomer) when my worn out printhead resembled nine overlapping wires and the results still looked like shit. I had a professor that wouldn't accept dot matrix papers from students for that reason. Luckily, I had access to a daisywheel at work at the time. Laser printers were only for the 1%ers at the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @06:31AM
Good God, I can still hear the rapid fire banging of the daisy wheel in our office. When I close my eyes during action movies when an actor is using a machine gun, I often see it in my head.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @11:56PM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @01:33AM
and traveled to the moon!
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday March 06 2020, @06:22AM
It was also called "lol memory". Little old ladies made it.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday March 06 2020, @04:52PM (1 child)
This was one of the few I knew, and it was actually way before my time. Many of the others were contemporary to me, but involved things I didn't use, so I think it's more of a *how widely exposed were you* as an old fart test.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday March 07 2020, @06:48AM
a "widely exposed fart" sounds, er, smelly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @11:57PM (8 children)
Number Six:
Was the character played by Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner [wikipedia.org].
Number Nine:
Paul is dead.
Number twelve:
Number 17:
Keith Hernandez [wikipedia.org], of course!
kthxbye
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @12:07AM (1 child)
#9
In graphical mode, describe what the "man" does in smit.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @06:41AM
As I recall, he
.
Which was stupid even back then.
was a useful tool, especially if you were in a hurry or were learning AIX, since it would show you the command lines it generated from the menu choices.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Friday March 06 2020, @12:24AM (2 children)
"Keith Hernandez"
Who's on first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @02:31AM (1 child)
KEITH HERNANDEZ!? I despise him.
I'll tell you why... June 14, 1987.... Mets Phillies. We're enjoying a beautiful afternoon in the right field stands when a crucial Hernandez error to a five run Phillies ninth. Cost the Mets the game.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @07:14AM
Well, you certainly didn't see that on June 14, 1987. The Mets beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 7-3 in Pittsburgh on that day [baseball-almanac.com].
The game you're likely (if you're not just completely full of shit) referring to is the June 28, 1987 [baseball-almanac.com] game at the Vet in Philly, where Ronnie took a no hitter (4-0 lead) into the 8th inning, and the Mets gave up 3 runs in the 8th and 2 in the 9th. Your memory must be failing you, as no errors were recorded by *either* team that day.
According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
You hate him just because you were at that game and he made an error? Except he wasn't charged with an error. That's odd.
Hernandez won a Gold Glove that year, committing only 10 errors in 154 games [baseball-reference.com] that season.
In his seven years as a Met, [baseball-reference.com] Hernandez hit .297, with an on-base percentage of .387 and an OPS of .816.
Keith was likely the best first baseman the Mets every had, and a strong leader on the team. Without him, the Mets *never* would have won the world series in '86.
And you hate him because you mis-remember him making an error at *one* game which you don't remember the date? Damn! I hope you don't mis-remember something about me
Was that the only Mets game you ever attended? Are you even a Mets fan?
Geez, Louise!
(Score: 3, Informative) by isj on Friday March 06 2020, @01:52AM (2 children)
You only get 50% for your answer to #17
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @02:08AM
Yeah. I was thinking it might have been, but I *knew* about the later version.
Thanks for correcting me.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday March 06 2020, @04:33PM
Even the last version IBM put out, Warp Server for Business, aka Warp v4.52 still had components that weren't SMP safe. Things like tcpip32.dll, keyboard.sys and the video system not setting MTTR's on all the CPU's (some BIOSes did though) and others that slip my mind.
Shame that OS/2 2.11 probably wouldn't even start to load the kernel on modern hardware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @12:23AM (19 children)
"1. What is the advantage of unidirectional printing on a dot-matrix printer?"
I'm guessing the bidirectional ones are faster but perhaps the unidirectional ones are cheaper and jam less?
IIRC if the unidirectional one jammed you can often fix it by pushing the header back to its starting position because only the printer can move it in the opposite direction (can't remember if there was a way to move it in the opposite direction with the printer off?). If a bidirectional one got stuck you couldn't easily push it in either direction (did they have a way you can do that, like a lever you can push or pull, can't remember?)?
It's been so long and I was so young when those things were around that I can't really remember.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday March 06 2020, @12:39AM (3 children)
Back then you could double the throughput by printing every other line backwards. You saved the time wasted bringing the print head home.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 06 2020, @02:22AM (2 children)
#1
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by EETech1 on Friday March 06 2020, @03:56AM (1 child)
I guess I never printed enough to wear out a printhead, but I do recall unidirectional printing seemed to print darker because the ribbon advanced continuously, but not as fast as the printhead, so the same section of ribbon printed twice as many characters going bidirectional.
There was also a sight decrease in print quality because the ribbon was advancing in one direction while being impacted by the head in the other direction. The ribbon would be all wrinkled or wavy from top to bottom and a densely printed page would appear stripped and blotchy.
(We used to tractor paper print long ASCII art like graphs with histograms and multiple data sets)
This wave in the ribbon would become especially evident if you reinked your own ribbons, eventually they would start rubbing the paper and create smudges. The unidirectionally printed ribbon could be reinked until it was so worn through it didn't give your acceptable contrast. The bidirectionaly printed ribbons were too wavy to use after a few refills.
I miss the scream of 30 Okidata Microlines in a hallway...
Here's how I get by now...
The Device Orchestra!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDwMh0pu1iSXeKx7qmqjIQA [youtube.com]
Queen's We Will Rock You played by an electric toothbrush, credit card machine, epilator, ladyshave, and three typewriters. Yup!
https://youtu.be/Hh9pm9yjmLs [youtu.be]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 07 2020, @04:08AM
We had the wide carriage printer, I think 17", whatever it was it tractor fed that big green/white paper and when we'd scale "the big spreadsheet" to fit on it (very small print) it was literal murder on the print head. This was back in 640K limit days and the spreadsheet didn't fit in 640K of RAM, so it had chained parts with sub-results that would feed over to the master page to get the final totals. About once a week somebody would want the updated paper copy of the spreadsheet to take to a meeting, but of course they'd be bringing in updates to it like 30 minutes before the meeting, so printing it was always a rush job.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday March 06 2020, @12:45AM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @02:01AM (12 children)
But, I'm not sure if which of those, if any, is what they are going for due to the singular in the sentence.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday March 06 2020, @03:32AM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @05:55AM
With the mechanical tolerances, it wasn't uncommon to get ghosting rather than the nice looking overstrike when printing BiDi.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday March 06 2020, @04:40AM (9 children)
As specified by the ASCII character set in those days.
Unix cheated.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday March 06 2020, @04:38PM (8 children)
Right from the beginning back in the '60's ASCII allowed both \n and\r \n as EOL chars (memory was expensive). Shame they didn't just have an EOL char
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @08:22PM (7 children)
Which is sort of why I see why \n is handled the way it is. \r is sort of ambiguous, as you could literally mean just to return the carriage to allow double or over striking or the like. A \n without an implied \r is less useful as you can just space yourself over again.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday March 06 2020, @08:36PM (1 child)
And, of course, why unicode has a newline character. Which pretty well nobody uses, because \n got used for it first.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday March 06 2020, @09:09PM
I sometimes run OS/2 (actually ArcaOS betas) and port stuff, the different line endings between the Dosish world and *nix world is irritating. At least most of OS/2 doesn't seem to care what you use for EOL or even as a directory separator, another irritant.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday March 06 2020, @08:59PM (4 children)
There's times when a simple linefeed is needed. I learned on an Apple II where most all the control characters were "printable" and could be used for moving the cursor around. Of course just to confuse things, a CR was used as an EOL character, which coming from using a typewriter did make sense. Used to be able to do things like ring the bell (beep actually) by typing or printing CTRL-G too.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday March 06 2020, @10:45PM (3 children)
echo ^G
still works here... :)
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday March 06 2020, @11:06PM (2 children)
Not here,
H:\>echo ^G
^G
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @11:21PM (1 child)
echo -e \\a usually works
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday March 06 2020, @11:32PM
[h:\] echo -e \\a
-e \\a
[h:\] which echo
O:/USR/BIN/echo.exe
[h:\] ver -r
4OS2 3.09 OS/2 Version is 4.50
[h:\] o:\usr\bin\echo -e \\a
\a
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @11:47AM
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday March 06 2020, @01:11AM (9 children)
14. Out of my head. The instruction is not "eioio", but "eieio": "Enforce In-Order Execution of IO". Sets a sequence barrier for superscalar execution of the Load/Store unit, so the loads and stores are guaranteed to come in a determined sequence. Not as much of a performance penalty as "sync" which does a full flush.
For 1, the advantage for me was that the dots were aligned better when printing in "NLQ" (now that abbreviation would be another question...).
Wild and wilder guesses: 5: Larry. 6: because of the little magnetic rings? 7: 80186?! 11: Wasn't the PC joystick analog? (I'd still know the Apple II joystick had 150k pots) 17a: NT4??? 18: Something distant in my head says "234" 20: The Amiga.
I'll have to pass on the others.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rich on Friday March 06 2020, @01:16AM (2 children)
Damn. 1 second after posting, it occured to me: 5 must have been
And sorry for spoiling the others. The update with the request to hide spoilers didn't show when I first loaded the page (or I overlooked it...). But then, who but me would have done PowerPC assembly and kernel driver hacking and could've known anyway... ;)
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 06 2020, @01:41AM
You prematurely ejaculated as I did. You read only the questions and not anything below them before jumping to blurt out your answers, then had that "oh shit" moment.
Modded informative for providing answers tho, nigga.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @02:42AM
Doesn't everybody? I worked on the MC/OS kernel. We were crazy enough to build the software in two versions, one of which would set the LE and ILE bits in the MSR register of an MPC7410 CPU. That should horrify you. It puts the CPU into little-endian mode, with the nasty side effect of swapping all 8 byte lanes on the bus.
Anyway...
You missed something. See my "eieio, joe" comment. If you didn't know that, your kernel was unsafe.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday March 06 2020, @01:22AM (5 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Friday March 06 2020, @03:53AM (4 children)
not exactly: Near Letter Quality
If you had a Daisy Wheel or Selectric printer, then you had actual letter quality.
I had the Daisy Wheel, which was much quieter than the Selectric-as-printer.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday March 06 2020, @04:19AM
We had a Diablo 1620.
It was most certainly NOT quiet. :)
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Friday March 06 2020, @06:03AM
IBM Quietwriter was the bomb back then. It was very wispy quiet and the print was phenomenal for the time. The only issue was the single pass ribbons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @06:40AM
I do not remember daisy wheels being quiet. They were, perhaps the loudest machines I have regularly been exposed to in my life. OSHA literally required hearing protection in our batch printing room.
(Score: 3, Informative) by barbara hudson on Friday March 06 2020, @12:43PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday March 06 2020, @01:16AM (6 children)
So I was still in HS for #5 and I can make a few guesses here and there, but I totally failed:
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday March 06 2020, @02:37AM (4 children)
#5 that was my assumption too but i really don't recall.
yep to #6, and me too.
#8 me too.
Your coco sticks were not spring loaded. I remember hating them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by drussell on Friday March 06 2020, @03:07AM (2 children)
ALT-F4 marks a block. (Alt-F3 is reveal codes, the feature you miss so much... :) )
We still use the old text-mode (well, it does have graphical print preview, and maybe the equation editor?) WordPerfect 5.1 on a daily basis.
Of course, it runs each copy in a dosbox on a FreeBSD machine that you connect to each session using VNC, instead of running on the local machines, but it's still in daily use here.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday March 06 2020, @03:38AM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by SDRefugee on Friday March 06 2020, @06:08PM
And if you use the Linux "joe" editor, you can still use those same WP key combinations. You can keep your nano/emacs/ed etc. Joe is one of the very first programs I install on a fresh Linux install.... Loved me some WP, back in the day..
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday March 06 2020, @03:19PM
19, Word Perfect, Reveal Codes (F5?). Loved that.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Friday March 06 2020, @03:00AM
No googling, but I think it is :
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @01:18AM (4 children)
Wow, I finally found a use for that copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List I have sitting on the shelf here! Now, do I lose quiz points for not knowing the answer, or do I get cool points for still having the book? :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by isj on Friday March 06 2020, @01:41AM
Using a paper copy of the famous Ralph Brown Interrupt List does not count as googling, so it's fine :-)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 06 2020, @02:25AM (2 children)
I think my C compilers handled that exit trivia bit for me, though I did have to rough it for RS-232 Rx and Tx interrupt handlers, especially rough on the Tx side - I later heard that there was a silicon bug in the 8259 chips which is why they were such a bitch to do interrupt driven Tx with.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday March 06 2020, @03:10AM (1 child)
Yeah, for serial, I usually ended up just saying "screw it" and instead used a FOSSIL driver to do the heavy lifting.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 06 2020, @03:03PM
I think we went with a library called Greenleaf around 1996 and never looked back, but from 1990-1994 there wasn't much good choice on the market if you wanted to run a saturated 9600kbps line.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday March 06 2020, @01:19AM (5 children)
#4
#5
#6
#11
#14
#17
#18
Corrections welcome :)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 06 2020, @02:27AM
Fidonet was the first inkling of the power of the internet for 'free' long distance communication. Before that there were actually BBS systems that would shuttle messages across the country on 'free local' hops, not many, but a few.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Friday March 06 2020, @05:02PM (2 children)
OS/2 2.11 had a SMP version. OS/2 demanded good hardware, then it installed fairly easily. I was impressed installing Warp as after copying the first 5 floppies to HD and rebooting, the system was usable enough to read the documentation while the othe 7 or 8 floppies were copied over plus the 12 or so for the bonus pack.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday March 06 2020, @09:57PM (1 child)
Oh, wow, I wasn't aware 2.11 had it, thanks for letting me know.
My experience with Warp was that it was incredibly sluggish compared to Windows on the same hardware. It's possible I failed to configure it properly, but from memory the install didn't ask all that many questions.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday March 06 2020, @11:03PM
Probably swapping, OS/2 really needed 8-16MB's in a time when 4MBs was usual. I ended up stripping it down and it ran fine on 4MBs, funny enough updating to 8MBs slowed it down as only the first 4MBs were cached on my 386. If you'd compared it to NT on the same hardware...
(Score: 1) by chr on Saturday March 07 2020, @10:27AM
Some additional details to #11:
(Score: 2) by arslan on Friday March 06 2020, @01:31AM (1 child)
What is the visual administration tool in AIX called?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @07:19AM
Actually, it was
.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @01:33AM
My answer to question #5 is:
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday March 06 2020, @01:38AM (3 children)
Off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure that these eight are correct:
I still have that phone number and a whole box of USR Couriers, maybe I should put one back up. :)
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday March 06 2020, @01:46AM (1 child)
Shit, I should have done them separately:
1.
2.
4.
5.
6.
8.
11.
18.
I still have that phone number and a whole box of USR Couriers, maybe I should put one back up. :
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Friday March 06 2020, @03:21AM
11:
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday March 06 2020, @02:00AM
Oh, and I forgot to be specific on #4:
...for those who wouldn't already know which BIOS INT those would be in... haha
I wrote lots of disk tool stuff using functions in INT 13h trying to make my poor old pair of Miniscribe 3560s that were on a Perstor (jammed 31 sectors per track instead of the usual MFM 17) live just a little longer, just a little longer, as the magnetic coating on the disks wore out... because disks were freakin' EXPENSIVE!
Ahh, good times.... :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by shortscreen on Friday March 06 2020, @02:13AM
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 06 2020, @02:16AM
Like me.
#1
#5
#11
#20
I'm actually pretty happy that I don't know more of that trivia ;-P
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Touché) by Hartree on Friday March 06 2020, @02:19AM
Go stick your head in a pig!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @02:31AM
My answer to question #1 is:
My answer to question #2 is:
My answer to question #5 is:
My answer to question #6 is:
My answer to question #8 is:
My answer to question #14 is:
My answer to question #19 is:
(Score: 4, Touché) by EJ on Friday March 06 2020, @02:39AM
I'm old enough to understand all of these questions and to know the desired answer to several of them, but the correct answer to ALL of them is, "Who cares?"
Nobody needs to remember any of this information. It's not useful anymore. As Sherlock said, it's just mental clutter.
Triumph said it best below...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKT7bx-fmtk&feature=youtu.be&t=633 [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Friday March 06 2020, @03:02AM (1 child)
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday March 06 2020, @04:02AM
I don't think you're quite right on that one. We got our first LaserJet III in 1990 (currently has over 800,000 pages on the Canon LBP-SX engine!!)
The original CX-engined LaserJet came out in 84, as did the original LaserWriter (also a CX), I assume. My dad's business partner bought one for $4000 to use with his fancy new AT&T PC-6300... and a Hayes SmartModem 2400 when it first came out in '85 (at $800 CAD!) (I only paid something like $650 for my first Courier HST, although that WAS on the USR sysop program. It was the first model that did proprietary 14.4k HST with the 450 baud backchannel, up from the previous max of 9600/300. What a beast that thing is. I remember it uses an Intel 80188 processor.)
I later ended up getting to use that 2400 baud SmartModem at home for several years... Even by that point, I was one of the only callers into the local BBSes that had 2400 baud other than other sysops. Everyone else thought 1200 was still great. It certainly was better than my 300 baud Radio Shack "direct connect" manual modem with the red connect button and the originate/answer switch that replaced the Atari acoustic coupler set we used before... LOL Geez, I still remember downloading pkxarc35 for the first time. Man, I'm old. At least my memorys till works. :)
I still have that Radio Shack modem, I happen to know it's sitting beside one of my servers downstairs.... LOL
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Friday March 06 2020, @03:10AM
Am I the only one who got #5 right? What dude as a teenager could forgetConnection reset by pier
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @03:24AM (5 children)
My answer to question 1 -unidirectional printing is:
My answer to question 2 yellow ethernet is:
My answer to question 3 - SuperMAX DDE is:
My answer to question 4 DOS exit is:
My answer to question 5 Game interactive is:
My answer to question 6 core dump is:
My answer to question 7 Siemens PC-D is:
My answer to question 8 DOS is:
My answer to question 9 AIX is:
My answer to question 10 Amoeba OS is:
My answer to question 11 Joysticks is:
My answer to question 12 COBOL is:
My answer to question 13 Cybernetics is:
My answer to question 14 eioio is:
My answer to question 15 Borland is:
My answer to question 16 creat is:
My answer to question 17 SMP is:
My answer to question 18 Fudinet is:
My answer to question 19 Wordstar is:
My answer to question 20 who came first is:
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday March 06 2020, @03:40AM
LOL... yeah, I don't know that specific machine off the top of my head, but my guess is that it would be something like my Wang 2200 systems:
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Friday March 06 2020, @02:15PM (1 child)
I have the right question for you: what's the acronym for the Norwegian Film Institute?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday March 06 2020, @04:23PM
Why? Did a moose bite your sister? Oh, wait, that's svedish isn't it?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday March 06 2020, @04:25PM (1 child)
No, to answer #13 you really have to know where your towel is and be a hoopy frood.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2020, @10:21AM
but... I do know where my towel is.. and.. I am a hoopy frood..
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @03:47AM (1 child)
My answer to question #18 is:
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday March 06 2020, @04:13AM
Ahh, fun times. :)
I don't think my original "giant" HST has a plate on it, but my 33.6k model from the sysop program does.
Did you ever see or use one of the USR Courier I-Modems? They looked pretty much identical to the analog modems but had green LEDs. Very disconcerting. :)
I had four of those but ended up trading them back in for an RAS-1500.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dltaylor on Friday March 06 2020, @03:48AM (3 children)
My LaserJet 2P was a great piece to use with the Amiga. I had the PacificPage PostScript cartridge and 4 MB (yes "M", children). The Amiga "spoke" PostScript, so I could let the printer do all the compositing. I built my own "SideCar" to hold a 2 MB memory card and serial card, so I had more memory in my printer than in the computer.
Had to write my own driver for my OkiData 84 dot matrix, but it did NOT have the problem associated with uni- vs bi-directional printing.
Still miss that setup, sometimes, specially when fighting some Windows 10 weirdness.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Friday March 06 2020, @06:14AM (2 children)
I got a Pacific Page cartridge second hand. We had an original HP Laserjet in the office. When the fuser heated up the room lights would literally flicker. After a print, the whole room smelled of ozone. And the damn thing must have weighed 100 lbs.
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Friday March 06 2020, @09:08AM (1 child)
The 2P (as in "Personal", I s'pose) was much smaller and a bit slower.
Bought mine when the base price went under USD$1000, then put in/on enough accessories to put it over $1500. Thing lasted until 2011 with few, and relatively inexpensive, repairs (like rollers); finally couldn't get any parts. That sort of service is unlikely with any printer made in the decade, it seems.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Friday March 06 2020, @02:51PM
Yes. The old HPs up through the HP 4 were tanks. Replace the pickup rollers and the separation pads every now and then and they ran forever. The new ones, not so much. The 2P and its brother the 3P were rugged, but damn they were slow. What was it? Four pages per minute or something like that? Great print, but slow as molasses.