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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: 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]