If the Good Die Young, What Does That Make Us? Quiz

Answer: Pong

"Pong" was released by Atari in 1972 and was the first video game to gain mainstream popularity. The designers beta-tested the prototype at a local bar because they knew the bar's owner -- Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, CA.

The original designer relied on his background in transistor-transistor logic, a type of digital circuits, to build the first "Pong".

Answer: Record player

The record player, originally called the phonograph, was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. They were the standard for playing recorded music at home until use of the cassette player became widespread in the 1970s. Some people still prefer the analog, scratchy sound of vinyl records to that of digital playback systems like DVD or CD players.

The recordings played on such a device consist of waveforms that are engraved onto a rotating cylinder or disc. As the cylinder or disc rotates, a stylus or needle traces the waveforms and vibrates to reproduce the recorded sound waves.

Answer: Black and white

By "greyscale," the young man was referring to the old black-and-white style TV. Television programming was first broadcast only in black and white, with color becoming more common in North America and Europe during the late 1960s and finally standard in the 1970s. NBC was the first to offer limited programming in color in 1954, followed by ABC and CBS in the 1960s.

Answer: True

It's hard to imagine now, but for a long time, when you watched TV, you had to walk over and turn a dial to change the channel. So a lot of us just watched whatever was on, because we were too tired or lazy to get up. TV programming has gotten a lot better over the years -- that is probably why!

The first TV remote for a television was called "Lazy Bones" and was released by Zenith Radio in 1950. It used an actual wire to connect a box with buttons to the television. Pretty quickly, wireless remotes became available and by the early 1980s they were standard.

Answer: These were all standard functions

Slide rules were quite useful for a large variety of mathematical computations. In addition to the computations above, they could also help users with trigonometry, sine and tangent, and Pythagorean scales. And they never needed recharging!

Answer: Icebox

An icebox is just what it sounds like. It was a compact box with a door and a shelf, usually lined with tin or zinc and packed with cork, sawdust, straw, or even seaweed to insulate the food inside. A large block of iced was placed on the top shelf inside the box, keeping cold air in the lower section. Some people would go out and buy a block of ice, but it was also common to have it delivered by the iceman. Yes, that was a real job!

Some apartment complexes had built-in iceboxes, two sided, one side for the residents, the other side on the other side of the wall for the iceman to put the ice into.

Answer: Rotary phones

Those squat, sturdy rotary phones were standard issue from the monopolistic phone company for many decades. They were replaced by new-fangled push-button phones.

The rotary dial uses electrical pulses to place calls. The user manually turns a dial to a fixed point using a finger (or pencil) and then releases it: the dial returns to its starting position because of an internal spring, which generates electrical pulses that send a signal down the telephone line, which is a physical cable connected to a telephone company's hub. The phone itself uses centrifugal force to moderate the dial's rotation.

Phones and phone service has changed so much in the last two generations - there's enough fodder for a whole new quiz!

Answer: 8-inch

The original way to store and move data involved putting the data on a disk and moving it to where you wanted it. The first consumer-level floppy disks available were 8" square, which seems gigantic today, especially when you consider they held about 1.2 megabytes of data -- the size of one large image, about.

The 8" disk was replaced by the slightly-better-but-still-actually-floppy 5-and-a-quarter inch disk. But by 1984, Apple and 23 other media companies were releasing compatible versions of the 3-and-a-half inch disk which remained the standard for almost 20 years. Apple stopped shipping computers with floppy drives in 1998, and the other computer companies soon followed suit.

Answer: Long distance call

If you said you were on a "long distance call," people backed away and treated it as if you were doing a very rare and important thing! Now it's nuthin'!

Long distance calls used to be called trunk calls and were handled by the telephone operator. And not just any telephone operator -- there was a specialty long-distance telephone operator.

Answer: Fax machine

Fax machines -- short for facsimile -- provide transmission of scanned printed material, generally over telephone lines. Xerox Corporation first patented an early commercial version in 1964 and it gradually became popular in business and even home offices through the 1990s before being usurped by other technologies.