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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]

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday March 06 2020, @04:17PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Friday March 06 2020, @04:17PM (#967482) Journal

    1. What is the advantage of unidirectional printing on a dot-matrix printer?

    It allows time for the carriage return to advance the feed as the head is doing the return travel, thus "greater efficiency". And it allows for simpker engineering in advancing the ribbon (rather than needing a ribbon that will continue to advance as the head prints the next line backwards. Do I get bonus points for remembering when there were no bidirectional DMPs? How about for "band printers" - my first paid student job in computing was pulling and sorting high speed printer output at Arizona State University - wouldn't want to think about how many reams we went through in 8 hours.

    2. What is the distance between the black marks on a thick yellow ethernet cable (10BASE5)?

    Thought it was 12 inches, could be wrong. 3 feet? 1 meter? Only ever saw it once in the late 80s along with some Token Rings.

    4. How do you exit from a DOS program (interrupt number + subfunction)

    00H for straight, 31H for TSR

    5. Which interactive game from 1986 had the settings tame..lewd, and a scratch'n'sniff card was in the box?
    I don't remember the title... remember it vaguely though.
    6. Why is a memory dump called a "core" dump?

    Because when this was first done it was magnetic core loop memory (or rope core). Thin wires around magnets. You were sampling/copying the core states if you 'dumped' the core, which would reset it as part of the process.

    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)?

    PC was analog. C64 was digital.

    12. What is the maximum line length in COBOL? (trick question)

    Cobol doesn't have lines, it has words. In Pascal (well, Turbo Pascal for the TRS-80 MIII,) one had infinite characters to define strings - friend and I one typed a string name for twenty minutes straight on our machines, differing in the middle of the string, then C/P'd the work. Lines were separated by semicolon and didn't need a CR. Program compiled fine and knew the difference.

    13. Where is the main office of the Sirius Cybernetics Complaints Department located?

    Doesn't matter. They were the first mindless jerks up against the wall when the revolution came.

    19. How do you mark a block in Wordstar?

    ^KB to start, ^KK to end. I still run WordStar 3.3 in a DOSBox implementation and want to figure out how to start using it again on a regular basis. Or build a parallel version. So simple, so clean, so who cares about WYSIWYG?

    20. Which came first: Amiga, Norton Commander, or HP Laserjet?

    Pretty sure it was HP LaserJet, Norton, Amiga, in that order.
    --
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