Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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]


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by dltaylor on Friday March 06 2020, @03:48AM (3 children)

    by dltaylor (4693) on Friday March 06 2020, @03:48AM (#967269)

    My LaserJet 2P was a great piece to use with the Amiga. I had the PacificPage PostScript cartridge and 4 MB (yes "M", children). The Amiga "spoke" PostScript, so I could let the printer do all the compositing. I built my own "SideCar" to hold a 2 MB memory card and serial card, so I had more memory in my printer than in the computer.

    Had to write my own driver for my OkiData 84 dot matrix, but it did NOT have the problem associated with uni- vs bi-directional printing.

    Still miss that setup, sometimes, specially when fighting some Windows 10 weirdness.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Friday March 06 2020, @06:14AM (2 children)

    by Oakenshield (4900) on Friday March 06 2020, @06:14AM (#967309)

    I got a Pacific Page cartridge second hand. We had an original HP Laserjet in the office. When the fuser heated up the room lights would literally flicker. After a print, the whole room smelled of ozone. And the damn thing must have weighed 100 lbs.

    • (Score: 2) by dltaylor on Friday March 06 2020, @09:08AM (1 child)

      by dltaylor (4693) on Friday March 06 2020, @09:08AM (#967346)

      The 2P (as in "Personal", I s'pose) was much smaller and a bit slower.

      Bought mine when the base price went under USD$1000, then put in/on enough accessories to put it over $1500. Thing lasted until 2011 with few, and relatively inexpensive, repairs (like rollers); finally couldn't get any parts. That sort of service is unlikely with any printer made in the decade, it seems.

      • (Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Friday March 06 2020, @02:51PM

        by Oakenshield (4900) on Friday March 06 2020, @02:51PM (#967424)

        Yes. The old HPs up through the HP 4 were tanks. Replace the pickup rollers and the separation pads every now and then and they ran forever. The new ones, not so much. The 2P and its brother the 3P were rugged, but damn they were slow. What was it? Four pages per minute or something like that? Great print, but slow as molasses.