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Tech myths that won't die: 404, 640K, the space pen and Nuclear Gandhi

20 questions · by Quizbun

Room 404 at CERN, Bill Gates's 640K quote, NASA's million-dollar space pen, the Gandhi bug in Civilization, Grace Hopper finding the first bug. They're great stories, and most of them are wrong. Each Question starts from the popular version and asks what really happened. The Explanations show where each myth came from and why it caught on.

Start

Questions

  1. Not answered. Is the 404 error named after Room 404 at CERN, where the web's first servers supposedly sat?
  2. Not answered. In an HTTP status code such as 404, what does the first digit 4 tell you?
  3. Not answered. Did Bill Gates say that "640K ought to be enough for anybody"?
  4. Not answered. In what year did a version of the 640K quote first appear in print?
  5. Not answered. The IBM PC's Intel 8088 processor had 20 address lines, each carrying one bit of a memory address. How many kilobytes of memory could it address?
  6. Not answered. The story goes that NASA spent millions on a pen that writes in space, while the Soviets just used pencils. Who actually paid to develop the Fisher Space Pen?
  7. Not answered. "Why not just use a pencil?" Which of these were real reasons to keep pencils out of a spacecraft?
  8. Not answered. In the joke, Soviet cosmonauts just used pencils. What did they actually do?
  9. Not answered. If you store 1 in an unsigned 8-bit integer and subtract 2, what value do you get?
  10. Not answered. Was "Nuclear Gandhi" a real bug in the original 1991 Civilization?
  11. Not answered. Which of these reasons from the game's own designers rule out the Nuclear Gandhi underflow in the original Civilization?
  12. Not answered. Where is the earliest known version of the Nuclear Gandhi story?
  13. Not answered. In what year did operators find a moth in the Harvard Mark II computer and tape it into the logbook?
  14. Not answered. This logbook page has a real moth taped to it. What does it show?
  15. Not answered. The moth is often called "Grace Hopper's bug". What was her connection to it?
  16. Not answered. Where is the logbook page with the moth today?
  17. Not answered. You browse in Chrome's Incognito mode. Who may still be able to see which sites you visit?
  18. Not answered. Was the QWERTY keyboard layout designed to slow typists down?
  19. Not answered. Does swiping away your open iPhone apps save battery?
  20. Not answered. Final round: which of these tech stories are true?