The Computer Quiz

The Computer Quiz is a 1988 DOS trivia game and it is exactly what the name promises: a hundred multiple-choice questions about computer hardware and software. It circulated as part of a disk magazine, the format in which PC owners of the day bought a floppy full of small programs — and this quiz was the entertainment on it.

The game side is simple but it works. You start with three lives and lose one for every wrong answer, while ten correct answers earn one back. At the end, unused lives convert into points, so a perfect run finishes on 113 — and that one detail turns a plain test into a game where it is worth gambling, guessing and keeping a reserve in hand. Before you start you choose colour or monochrome text; the program was written plainly enough to run on any PC of the era.

The content is more interesting than the mechanics. The questions are a period portrait of what a computer user in 1988 was expected to know: acronyms, components, working with the system, the software of the day. Some answers are still obvious; others cover things that even a lifelong computer professional would not recognise now. Reading it as a quiz about computing history is oddly more fun than playing it as a test.

The weakness is plain: there are a hundred questions and they never change. By the second run you are remembering rather than thinking, and no further layer arrives. This is not an evening's game, then, but a short and honest curiosity that shows how much the phrase computer literacy has shifted in nearly forty years.

On oldgame.cz the quiz starts directly in the browser, with no installation.