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Old Fart's Quiz [Updated]

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday March 05 2020, @11:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the Memory-Garbage-Collection dept.

isj writes:

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]

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday March 06 2020, @01:19AM (5 children)

    by coolgopher (1157) on Friday March 06 2020, @01:19AM (#967192)

    #4

    Uh, I *think* it's 21h / 00h, but it's been a long time...

    #5

    I never played it, but I'd be surprised if it's not Leisure Suit Larry

    #6

    Iron core matrix memory. Before my time, sadly/fortunately.

    #11

    Probably that the C64 were digital (i.e. on/off for each direction), while the PC joysticks were typically analog, though I thought I'd seen digital PC sticks too.

    #14

    I think you meant eieio, not eioio. And something about I/O write barriers.

    #17

    NT 3.5 from memory. And I think Warp. Didn't use either, but I installed Warp for a friend once. That experience made sure I never installed it again.

    #18

    I never got to use Fidonet. /sadface

    Corrections welcome :)

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 06 2020, @02:27AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday March 06 2020, @02:27AM (#967228)

    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)

    by dry (223) on Friday March 06 2020, @05:02PM (#967525) Journal

    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)

      by coolgopher (1157) on Friday March 06 2020, @09:57PM (#967668)

      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

        by dry (223) on Friday March 06 2020, @11:03PM (#967692) Journal

        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

    by chr (4123) on Saturday March 07 2020, @10:27AM (#967861)

    Some additional details to #11:

    The C64 did indeed used four electrical switches and thus four digital inputs to detect up/down/left/right.

    The PC joysticks, IIRC, used a non-linear analog measuring principle where e.g. the up/down axis controlled a resistance that varies with the position.

    The sane way to do it would be as for e.g. joysticks for an RC aircraft, which I think since a long time back have used electrical wiring and an ADC such that you got a linear (actually affine) mapping from position to voltage to value. Instead, for PC joysticks the mapping from position to numerical value was nonlinear and measured through the discharge time of a capacitance.

    This had an annoying effect: If you did a small joystick movement in the middle, you'd get one change for the numerical value. If you did the same small movement e.g. at the up position, the corresponding numerical change wouldn't be the same as in the middle, nor as if the joystick was at the down position.