A 25th Anniversary Quiz

The Computer Science Department at Loyola College is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Much has changed since 1984, and much hasn't. In 1984, students used the time-shared VAX system, typing in their FORTRAN and COBOL programs on monochrome display terminals, while the recently retired PDP-11 became a platform for experimentation with BSD UNIX 2.0. Structured programming with indentation had been used in enlightened pockets for eight or so years, but there were plenty of GOTO statements hanging around. Scientists sent files to one another over the Internet, which had succeeded several networks such as ARPANET the year before. Domain name services (DNS) was introduced late in the year, making addressing the 1,000 or so Internet nodes a whole lot easier.

Here's a little quiz: which of the following existed in 1984?

1. HTML
2. XML
3. The IBM PC
4. The Apple Macintosh
5. C++
6. Java
7. Virtual pets

Scroll down for the answers.

Answers to the quiz:

1. HTML? Nope. The first description of Hypertext Markup Language tags was available to the public in 1991.

2. XML? Nope. XML 1.0 was specified in 1998. It is, however, interesting to note that the ancestor of XML and HTML, IBM's Generalized Markup Language (GML), existed prior to 1970.

3. IBM PC? Yep. It was introduced in 1981.

4. Apple Macintosh? Barely. It was introduced in January, 1984.

5. C++? Yep, but you might not have heard of it for another few years. An ACM article that helped popularize it, "Out of the C World Comes C++" by Dewhurst and Stark, was published in 1987.

6. Java? Yep. An island in Indonesia, it formed millions of years ago. :)

7. Virtual pets? Not even close. The earliest commercial virtual pets came about in 1995. One could, however, play "The Game of Life" on the Loyola VAX, so you could say virtual pets existed, if you think of bacteria as a pet.