Q 01/05

What did the 'K' in Y2K stand for?

A) Kalendar, an old spelling

B) Kilo, meaning a thousand

C) Kilobyte, a unit of data

D) Kernel, the core of an OS

Answer · why

B) Kilo, meaning a thousand

Y for year, 2, and K for 1000: 2K meant 2000. It was also called the millennium bug.

Q 02/05

The Y2K bug arose because many programs stored years as how many digits?

A) One

B) Two

C) Three

D) Four

Answer · why

B) Two

1985 became '85', so 2000 was indistinguishable from 1900; fixes included expanding to four digits or 'windowing' the century.

Q 03/05

Which programmer first publicly flagged the year-2000 problem after noticing it in 1958?

A) Grace Hopper

B) Bob Bemer

C) Alan Kay

D) Dennis Ritchie

Answer · why

B) Bob Bemer

He spent twenty years failing to get IBM, the US government and standards bodies to take it seriously.

Q 04/05

Under the Gregorian calendar, 2000 was a leap year but 1900 was not, tripping up some Y2K-era code. Why?

A) Century years need to divide by 400

B) Only odd centuries get a leap day

C) 1900 fell in a leap-year skip decade

D) Every fourth century is skipped

Answer · why

A) Century years need to divide by 400

Programmers who coded only 'divisible by four' were fine by luck; those who added the 100 rule but forgot the 400 rule broke.

Q 05/05

Which peer-to-peer service, launched by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker in 1999, defined the MP3 era?

A) Kazaa

B) LimeWire

C) Napster

D) Gnutella

Answer · why

C) Napster

It peaked at about 80 million users; a leaked Metallica demo of 'I Disappear' helped bring the lawsuits.