What’s MFM?
Question: What does MFM stand for?
Answer: Modified Frequency Modulation
MFM was one of the earlier methods used to encode data onto computer disks.
Add comment December 11th, 2007
Archive for December, 2007
Big name
Question: What was the maximum length of a filename in Windows 95?
- 30 characters
- 100 characters
- 255 characters
- 512 characters
Answer: 255 characters
Add comment December 10th, 2007
Very expensive $100
Question: In 1977, the creators of the RSA-129 encryption scheme encrypted a message with a 430-bit public key, and offered $100 to whomever could decrypt the message. In 1994, an international team successfully factored this public key and recovered the secret message. The message read, THE MAGIC WORDS ARE…
- SALAMANDER OCELOT
- SEGUNDO ORLANDO
- SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
- SYMPHONIC OSCILLATION
Answer: SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
About 1,600 machines took part in the decryption, taking about eight
months and approximately 5,000 MIPS-years of computing time.
Add comment December 9th, 2007
Illegal character
Question: What character can’t be part of a filename in MacOS?
- backslash (\)
- caret (^)
- colon (:)
- open-single-quote (`)
Answer: colon (:)
The colon was used as the directory delimiter in the HFS file system.
Add comment December 8th, 2007
Have you seen me?
Question:
What graphical user interface is shown here?
- DOSshell
- DeskMate
- GEM
- Microsoft Windows 1.0
Answer: DeskMate
DeskMate was sold at Radio Shack and came loaded on many DOS-based Tandy computers.
Source: PC Computing
Add comment December 7th, 2007
Who’s Peter Norton?
Question: The Peter Norton Programmer’s Guide to the IBM PC was also known as the:
- blue book
- green book
- dragon Book
- pink shirt book
Answer: pink shirt book
The cover featured a picture of Norton wearing a pink shirt.
Add comment December 6th, 2007
Quantify this!
Question: What’s a quantum?
- a basic unit of physical matter, esp. within modeling software
- the type of struct one must declare to pass LISP lists into C programs
- the number of slots currently allocated in the process table
- a single slice of the processor allocated to a running process
Answer: a single slice of the processor allocated to a running process
Add comment December 5th, 2007
Alphabet soup
Question: What does TFTP stand for?
- Trivial File Transfer Protocol
- Technical File Transfer Protocol
- Test File Transference Program
- Teknos F=FCr Test Pragmatique
Answer: Trivial File Transfer Protocol
Add comment December 4th, 2007
Some of the news fit to print
Question: Remember Infocom, the company that created those great text adventure games? What was the name of Infocom’s newsletter?
Answer: The New Zork Times and The Status Line
The newsletter was called The New Zork Times, until it was renamed The Status Line after threatened legal action by The New York Times.
Add comment December 3rd, 2007
State-of-the-art Mac OS 8
Question: What was the correct order of menu items in the Macintosh Finder ( System 8 )?
- Apple, File, Edit, Label, View, Special
- Apple, File, Edit, View, Label, Special, Help
- Apple, File, Edit, View, Label, Special, ?
- Apple, File, Edit, View, Special, Help
Answer: Apple, File, Edit, View, Special, Help
Add comment December 2nd, 2007