quiz

 

Trivia Quiz

Here are some questions to see just how much of a "DG Head" you really are. 

  1. How many "DOS"-type systems did DG develop before AOS?
  2. AOS was originally informally called "Casper - The Friendly Ghost".  Do you know why?
  3. AOS originally required extended floating point instruction set.  Why?  (Hint: it tried to do something on time.)
  4. What was the original name of AOS?
  5. Who was the primary developer of RDOS?
  6. Who was the primary developer of RDOS' predecessor, DOS?
  7. Data General created a great virtual machine system called "Easy Basic System" in 1975, which  was remarkably similar to today's Java system.  It was never officially released to customers.  Do you know why?
  8. What is the difference between the Nova 830 and Nova 840 computer?
  9. What is the difference between the Eclipse S/20 and Eclipse S/120 computer?
  10. What was/is the most unusually Nova or Eclipse computer application?
  11. What are the two main design differences between the Nova 840 and Nova 3 memory map?
  12. What computer architectures were considered for the original AViiON computer series?
  13. What was the "NovaDisk"?
  14. What was "So Hairy It Is a Pig"?
  15. What DG operating system was called "the operating system you can understand"?  (Okay, smarty, why?)
  16. What is "Ostrich" in the context of a Nova computer?
  17. What was the first "open system" processor (chip) considered by Data General?
  18. What was "The Andrews Tapes"?
  19. Who had "bourbon balls", where and when?
  20. When did SSI come out with Word Perfect, and what did SSI stand for?
  21. What is NMORT X and what does it test?
  22. What basic instruction set incompatibility do some Nova "lookalike" machines exhibit?  (hint:  think indexing)
  23. What was Point 4's original name?
  24. What was the last 16-bit Eclipse model created?  And when?
  25. What was the RTIOS package?
  26. What was the DCU/200?  What processor did it use?
  27. When the 4100 asynchronous multiplexor was originally announced, how many 9600 baud lines did DG claim it could support?  What was the real number?
  28. What was the slang name for the 4026?
  29. If you asked someone in SBS engineering in 1977 what he was working on and he said "Not Much", what was he talking about?
  30. What kind of device was a "woody"?
  31. The Minimum Equipment Configuration for an RDOS license was a CPU, memory, disk controller and disk, basic I/O controller and a Teletype.  What could be substituted for the Teletype and how much did it cost?
  32. What two products shared the name "Dataprep"?
  33. What is the next logical board model number in this series: 4007, 4008, 4010, 4011, 4012,...?
  34. What was DEVIOS?
  35. The code name for the 32-bit Eclipse was "Eagle", but what were the codenames for the original 16-bit Eclipse?
  36. Did anybody ever really load RDOS successfully from paper tape using the reader on an ASR-33?
  37. What is NMORT?

 

Do you have a trivia question you think could "stump the Nerd"?  Send it to "Ask the Nova-Head" and see if you win a prize!

 

reNOVAte is a trademark of SimuLogics.
All other trademarks are acknowledged as belonging to their respective owners.
No electrons were harmed in the creation of this web site.
Send e.mail to WebLackey@SimuLogics.com with questions or comments about this web site.

Copyright © 1999- 2005 SimuLogics
All rights reserved worldwide.
Last modified: Friday April 15, 2005.