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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:
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Thank You! --martyb]
(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