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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: 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.