We’re 80s obsessed since reading Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. So we want to have a little fun…are you ready to LEVEL UP? Try your luck at our 80s tech quiz and match your wits against our Quiz Master for your chance to win a prize pack featuring a copy of the book and a Spark bag to put it in. We have five to give away – which we’ll draw from whoever got a perfect score.
Are you ready, player one?
There is a glitch, it is changing the answer on one of the questions, I should have got 100%. I even did the test twice and confirmed I selected the right answers and it still switched answers
Man, sorry to hear that! Can you tell us which questions it was switching the answers on you?
We've checked several times, and can't find any glitch. But we'll keep our eye on it and let you know.
I got 100% but I know I can't win it anyway… fun though!
thanks Nora & gang it was fun. I too lived thru the 80's however was raising 4 children so didn't have alot of time for 80's games….so that's the one question I got wrong was the name of one of the games from the 80's.
Technically, it was the Apple Lisa was the first affordable home computer that had the first graphical user interface (1983), not the MacIntosh, which came out a year later. The MacIntosh was the first "successful" affordable computer with a GUI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa
I guess affordability depends on the home … Lisa was expensive and marketed as a design station; I remember drooling over one at the time.
Depends if you consider $9,995 affordable
It's true Brent, the Apple Lisa was the first computer with a GUI, but the reason we had the Macintosh as the answer was because as far as we could tell, the Lisa was marketed primarily to business users/companies. Also, it came out in the late 70s and it cost $10,000 – probably not be considered affordable for most home users. I purposely did not put the Lisa as one of the multiple choice answers so as not be a trick question, but I guess I could have worded the question differently! Apologies.
Thanks Michelle. Just to clarify: the Lisa came out in 1983 and 1984, not the 70s (although development may have started in the 1970s). I understand the inclusion of the Mac. The Lisa may have been too obscure for the quiz. Anyway, it's all for fun.
We had a TRS-80 III which had 2 drive bays built-in for 5 1/4" floppy drive but they were too expensive so we used an external tape cassette player to save/load files. My older brother and I had to write our own games using its block graphics and Greek character sets. Man, things have changed since then.
100%, proving that I'm OLD (and my memory is, perhaps, better than I realize).
I thought the quiz was to be on what the TRS-80 name meant, and was reminded of my time spent studying Z-80 CPU programming charts so that I could write games that had acceptable performance — on a 1.77MHz 8-bit processor!
Loved that interview with Ernest Cline. I didn't win (got one wrong) but I think I may end up picking up his book anyway. It sounds like a good read.
The quiz definitely is switching answers, I too, got 100% but was given one answer wrong. I hit my back button and returned to the screen where I entered the right answer and took a screenshot, if you're interested in seeing it. The answer I selected was the one with Pole Position, and the survey results returned the second choice.
Michelle was right to exclude the Lisa as it cost $9,999 USD hardly affordable for individuals or families. For me, even the Mac was a challenge at $3,800 CAD. Instead we bought a pair of Atari STs with larger monitors and extra floppy drive for about $2500 taxes in.
TRS-80
I had a trash-80 Model 1. 16K of Ram — saved to audio cassette, took forever to load!
First game I ever played was "Civil War" — written in basic, typed in by hand from a magazine.
Now we measure Ram in Gigabytes, and still don't have enough!
Trouble was with Radio Shack — they didn't know what they had, and marketing sluffed it off as a useless game console — a home computer with no usefulness in the home. Advertised it to be used in the kitchen to store and instantly retrieve recipes, or with the BSR X-10 to control lights in your house.
Little did they guess that CBC Radio would use the Model 4 for automation — start and stop tape recorders, switch audio feeds, and it even controlled the Thunder Bay program delay centre!
So, where are the winners listed?