We have a whole bunch of trivia questions. Some are easy, some are hard. Especially with the easy ones, I expect many of you will know the answer. So, here is how things will be run. If you know the answer, put up your hand. The first hand I see up will get to answer. If wrong, hands go up again. We continue until either someone gets it right or everyone gives up. I am the sole arbiter of whether the answer is right or not.
As there are some prizes that are better than others, we have randomly identified some of the questions as winning either a t-shirt or a survival card. You only find out after the question if it was for a t-shirt or survival card, so you have to try for them all if you want one of those prizes. All other winners get either a box of "Microsoft Mints" or clips to hold your sunglasses to your car visor.
On with the show!
Survival Card Question
Q. What computing device was invented about 5,000 years ago?
A. Abacus
(Source: Jones Telecommunications & Multimedia Encyclopedia)
Q. What was the model number of the original IBM-PC?
A. 5150. It featured a 4.77MHz 8088, 64KB RAM (very first ones had 16KB RAM),
one 160K 5.25"; floppy and sold for US$3,000.
(Source: Trivial.Net)
Q. Who invented Linux?
A. Linus Torvalds in 1992
Q. When did the Internet start using TCP/IP as the protocol?
A. Jan 1, 1983 (TCP/IP is also celebrating a 20th anniversary!)
(Source: Ben Butler's History of the Internet)
Q. The OPCUG lives by the donation of time and effort by numerous volunteers.
Those members who have given so generously of their time are listed on the OPCUG
web site's "Friends" list. Within 5, how many names are listed?
A. 99 (94 - 104).
Q. In what year was CorelDRAW first released?
A. 1989
(Source: corel.ca)
Survival Card Question
Q. Nov 2, 1988, a famous Internet Worm was unleashed and infected a sizable
portion of the Internet. Who wrote it?
A. Robert Morris Jr.
Q. In 1989, what three letters were we forced to remove from the name of the
Group?
A. IBM. Bell refused to allow us to continue using those letters in our phone
book entry unless we obtained written permission from IBM, who said they
couldn't.
(Source: History page at OPCUG.CA)
Survival Card Question
Q. What was the Internet called before it was called the Internet, and what
does the name stand for?
A. ARPAnet. Advanced Research Project Agency Network
(Source: Ben Butler's History of the Internet)
Q. In what year did the OPCUG become incorporated?
A. 1995 (March)
(Source: History page at OPCUG.CA)
Survival Card Question
Q. What version of DOS introduced the concept of "sub-directories"?
A. DOS 2. Released March 1983
Q. In PowerPoint, what keystroke can be used to start a slide show?
A. F5
Q. It was revealed in court that Microsoft threatened to "cut off the
air supply" of what company?
A. Netscape
T-Shirt Question
Q. What does PCI stand for (as in the PCI bus)?
A. Peripheral Component Interconnect
(Source: Trivial.Net)
Q. How much data could you store on the floppy disk of the first IBM PC?
A. 160K
Q. A standardized method of connecting to imaging devices was developed in
1992 called TWAIN. Where did the name TWAIN come from?
A. The word TWAIN is from Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" -
"...and never the twain shall meet...", reflecting the difficulty, at
the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to
TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym,
and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the
entry "Technology Without An Interesting Name" continues to haunt the
standard.
(Source: Twain.org)
Survival Card Question
Q. Within 25, what is the highest number of members the OPCUG has ever had?
A. 919 (correct answer range: 894 - 944)
Q. What company invented the "Memory Disk", now called the
"Floppy Disk"?
A. IBM, in 1971
Q. What company sold the TRS-80 computer?
A. Radio-Shack
T-Shirt Question
Q. Who is widely considered to be the founder of supercomputing?
A. Seymour Cray
Q. What and where was the first office of Hewlett-Packard?
A. A garage in Palo Alto.
(Source: Trivial.Net)
Q. Within 20 years, in what year was the punch card first used to tabulate
data?
A. 1881 (correct answer range 1861 - 1901), by Herman Hollerith, for The U.S.
Census Bureau. (earlier version for other purpose, early 1800s, by a French silk
weaver called Joseph-Marie Jacquard)
Survival Card Question
Q. What does GNU stand for?
A. GNU's Not Unix (a recursive definition!)
(Source: GNU.ORG)
Q. Clifford Stoll wrote a book about tracking down someone breaking into
computers at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory from the Internet. What was it
called?
A. The Cookoo's Egg.
Q. What was the last version of stand-alone MS-DOS and when was it released?
A. DOS 6.22, June, 1994
(Source http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/reach/435/dos.htm )
Q. What does GUI stand for?
A. Graphical User Interface
Q. What was the first feature film to have been fully generated using 3D
computer graphics?
A. Toy story, released in late 1995 by PIXAR
Survival Card Question
Q. OPCUG membership dues are $25 per year. When were they raised from $20?
A. February 1990, 13 years ago!
(Source: History page at OPCUG.CA)
Survival Card Question
Q. What was the first processor Intel made?
A. 4004
(Source: Intel Museum)
Q. Within 1,000, how many transistors did the Intel 4004 have?
A. 2,300 (correct answer range 1,300 - 3,300)
(Source: Intel Museum)
Q. In what year did Microsoft announce Windows 1.0?
A. 1983 (November 10)
(Source: www.microsoft.com/windows/winhistoryintro.asp)
Q. In what year did Microsoft release Windows 1.0?
A. 1985 (November 20) - 2 years after the announcement!
(Source: www.microsoft.com/windows/winhistoryintro.asp)
Q. What does the "R" in RAM stand for?
A. Random
Q. What keystroke did WordPerfect for DOS use to print?
A. Shift-F7
Q. What comic book character's name was used for a program to search for
files on FTP sites?
A. Archie. Jughead and Veronica were used to search Gopher sites.
Q. Who designed the logo for the OPCUG?
A. Mary Seal, wife of long-time member Chris Seal.
Q. Richard Stallman wrote a book subtitled "Richard Stallman's Crusade
for Free Software". It was titled "Free as in..." what?
A. Freedom
Q. In what year did Dennis Hayes sell his first modem?
A. 1977 (the company was founded the following year)
(Source: IdeaFinder.com)
Q. What meeting topic drew the largest audience ever to the OPCUG?
A. DOS 6 rollout March 30, 1993
(Source: History page at OPCUG.CA)
Q. In the Windows game Mine Sweeper, you can cheat by holding down the shift
key and pressing XYZZY. Where did that secret code come from?
A. The original Adventure game. You were searching an underground cave. At a
certain spot, if you typed in XYZZY, you were transported to another area of the
cave instantly.
Q. What famous program debuted at version 2 because the author knew that
people had an aversion to version 1?
A. dBase II
(Source: foxprohistory.org)
Q. The "Tate" in the company "Ashton-Tate" was George
Tate. Who was "Ashton"?
A. There never was an Ashton. They just thought it sounded better.
Acceptable: There was a macaw at the company that was named Ashton.
(Source: geekt.org)
(Source: foxprohistory.org)
Q. In what year did the Internet surpass 1 million hosts?
A. 1992
(Source: PBS, Triumph of the Nerds)
Q. What year saw the birth of the World Wide Web?
A. 1990
(Source: W3C)
Q. What company originally wrote WordPerfect?
A. Satellite Systems Inc. (SSI became WordPerfect Corporation. It was later
sold to Novel, and is now owned by Corel)
(Source: Almost Perfect by Pete Peterson)
Q. A CD-ROM that has a speed "1x" transfers data at 150KBytes per
second. How many times faster is the data transfer for a "1X" DVD
player?
A. Just over 9x (1.38MBytes per second)
(Source: home.attibi.com)
Q. Who sent the first email and in what year?
A. Ray Tomlinson, in 1971. Up until then, there had been programs designed to
leave messages for others, but only on the same machine. Tomlinson picked the
"@" sign to designate a message that had to go to another computer.
And thus, spam was born.
(Source: http://www.pretext.com/mar98/features/story2.htm - "The 1st
e-mail message"
Q. When was the first computer virus found in the wild?
A. 1981. "Elk Cloner" and it spread on Apple II floppy disks. It
displayed a rhyme on screen.
(Source: CKNOW.COM - Virus History)
Q. What is the term for a virus only found in the lab?
A. Zoo virus
(Source: McAfee)
Q. According to Microsoft's 25th anniversary book "Inside Out -
Microsoft - In Our Own Words", what did the GW in GW Basic stand for?
A. Gee Whiz
Q. How long does it take to compile and link Windows 2003 from source files?
A. 12 hours. Interestingly, all NT kernel-based Windows have taken that long.
As horsepower increases, so does complexity.
(Source: Windows Supersite www.winsupersite.com)
Q. In what year did ARPANET (which is where the Internet came from) go
on-line?
A. 1969
(Source: PBS, Triumph of the Nerds)
Q. In what city did Microsoft get its start?
A. Albuquerque, New Mexico
Q. When did Microsoft move to Redmond?
A. 1979
Q. What company developed the original DOS used for the IBM PC?
A. Seattle Computer Products (Tim Patterson) 86-DOS (previously QDOS - Quick
and Dirty Operating System)
Q. How much did Microsoft pay for the rights to 86-DOS?
A. $50,000.
Q. What does OSPF stand for?
A. Open Shortest Path First. A dynamic routing protocol
(Source: Cisco.)
Q. What operating system did IBM release in 1994?
A. OS/2 Warp
Q. According to Mark Lucovsky, one of the original architects of Windows NT,
what does NT stand for?
A. The name comes from the earliest days of the product's development, when
Microsoft designed NT to use the Intel i860, a RISC processor. In those days,
Intel's chip was behind schedule, so Microsoft had to use an i860 emulator
called the N10. NT was so named because it worked on the "N-Ten."
(Source: Windows & .NET Mag, WinInfo Update 2003-1-24)
Q. When did Microsoft release Windows 3.0?
A. 1 June, 1990
(Source: Microsoft's Product Supprot Lifecycle page)
Q. What was the traffic growth rate for the World Wide Web in it's third
year?
A. 341,634%
(Source: PBS, Triumph of the Nerds)
Q. What company invented the first DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory), the
1103?
A. Intel, in 1970
Q. From what company did Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore came from when they
created Intel in 1968?
A. Fairchild
Q. Who wrote an article on the future development of semiconductor industry
for the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics magazine noting that the
complexity of minimum cost semiconductor components had doubled per year since
the first prototype microchip was produced in 1959?
A. Gordon Moore, Director of Fairchild Semiconductor's Research and
Development Laboratories, in 1965.
Q. What 3 main applications were in Office 4.2 and what were their versions?
A. Word 6, Excel 5, PowerPoint 4
Q. When was the first Comdex held?
A. 1979. One of the "Hot products" was "Wang WP systems"
(Source: Comdex.com)