Trivial Net – Computer and Tech Trivia for Geeks

How much?

Question: What was the first IBM computer system that had a monthly rental price less than the machine's model number?

• The 360
• The 1401
• The 1620
• The 7094

Answer: The 1620

When the IBM 1620 was first announced, Datamation magazine commented that it was the first IBM computer system which had a monthly rental price less than the machine's model number.

June 30th, 2008

Bright lights, big city

Question: All the fonts on the early Macintosh computers were named after cities. Which of these cities was not a Mac font name?

• Boston
• London
• Los Angeles
• San Francisco

Answer: Boston

June 29th, 2008

Exercise

Question: Stanford University exercise expert Dr. William Haskell calculated that if you spend just two minutes an hour of each workday sending e-mail to officemates rather than walking down the hall to talk with them, you will accumulate the caloric equivalent of 11 pounds of body fat in a …

• week
• month
• year
• decade

Answer: decade

June 28th, 2008

URI

Question: Any Web surfer worth his chips knows what URL stands for. But do you know what URI stands for?


Answer: Uniform Resource Identifier

A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a compact string of characters for identifying an abstract or physical resource.

June 27th, 2008

PDP-1

Question: Who bought the very first Digital Equipment PDP-1 computer?

• The Advanced Research Projects Agency
• Bolt, Beranek and Newman
• The National Air and Space Administration
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Answer: Bolt, Beranek and Newman

June 26th, 2008

IBM PC

Question: IBM expected to sell 100,000 IBM PCs from the day it was announced — August 12, 1981 — through the end of that year. How many computers did it actually sell during that time?

• 48,000
• 65,000
• 100,000
• 125,000

Answer: 65,000

June 25th, 2008

Email

Question: According to the Internet Movie Database, what was the working title of the 1998 movie “You've Got Mail”?

• E-mail Is Forever
• Cyberlove
• The E-mail Files
• You Have Mail

Answer: You Have Mail

June 24th, 2008

Flowchart

Question: On a computer programming flowchart, what symbol represents a decision?

• the diamond
• the circle
• the triangle
• the parallelogram

Answer: the diamond

June 23rd, 2008

I'm Blue

Question: Following its epic chess match with Gary Kasparov, IBM's Deep Blue computer took a job during the Atlanta Olympics. What did Deep Blue do?

• forecasted the weather
• predicted traffic congestion
• aided in apprehension of a bombing suspect
• real-time statistical analysis of athletes for television

Answer: forecasted the weather

June 22nd, 2008

It's all in code

Question: How is this question encoded?
begin 664 foo
>2&]W(&ES('1H:7,@<75E `
end

• BinHex encoding
• ROT-13
• tar
• Uuencoding

Answer: Uuencoding

June 21st, 2008