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

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]


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @02:01AM (12 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @02:01AM (#967216)

    Unidirectional printers were cheaper (not as much memory or processing needed), had higher quality output, many didn't smudge as badly, and they could double strike bold and do other text effects because they handled the \r and \n seperately.

    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)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Friday March 06 2020, @03:32AM (#967262) Journal
    Bidirectional printers could do bold just fine since the return stroke wasn't exactly over the left-to-right.
    --
    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @05:55AM (#967303)

      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)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 06 2020, @04:40AM (#967284) Homepage Journal

    they handled the \r and \n seperately

    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)

      by dry (223) on Friday March 06 2020, @04:38PM (#967500) Journal

      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)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @08:22PM (#967624)

        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)

          by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 06 2020, @08:36PM (#967639) Homepage Journal

          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

            by dry (223) on Friday March 06 2020, @09:09PM (#967656) Journal

            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)

          by dry (223) on Friday March 06 2020, @08:59PM (#967652) Journal

          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)

            by drussell (2678) on Friday March 06 2020, @10:45PM (#967687) Journal

            Used to be able to do things like ring the bell (beep actually) by typing or printing CTRL-G too.

            echo ^G

            still works here... :)

            • (Score: 2) by dry on Friday March 06 2020, @11:06PM (2 children)

              by dry (223) on Friday March 06 2020, @11:06PM (#967695) Journal

              Not here,
              H:\>echo ^G
              ^G

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @11:21PM (1 child)

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @11:21PM (#967700)

                echo -e \\a usually works

                • (Score: 2) by dry on Friday March 06 2020, @11:32PM

                  by dry (223) on Friday March 06 2020, @11:32PM (#967703) Journal

                  [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