Eidetic memory: What magic numbers you still remember?

Posted by Hao on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Hao
Published on 2009-01-20T15:24:32Z Indexed on 2010/06/13 14:42 UTC
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Long before you practice writing readable code, what "magic numbers" you still remember up to this day?

here's some of my list:

  • 72 80 75 77 13 32 27 - up down left right enter space escape
  • 1 2 4 128 - blue green red blink
  • 67h 33h 17h - interrupt for EMS, mouse, printer
  • function AH 9, interrupt 21
  • alt+219 for block ASCII
  • alt+164 ñ
  • 90 NOP
  • 13 10 carriage return, line feed
  • ascii 1 and 2 face, ascii 3 heart. no not this heart: <3 :-)
  • debug -o72,10 -o71,12 clears the BIOS password. I don't know what those numbers mean, it's like a trade secret that gets shared with each other during college days.
  • ascii 7 sounds a beep

P.S. Somehow, remembering some of these magic numbers can help you in some tech problems, your keyboard is broken, the office pal's keyboard doesn't have accented characters. An anecdote, during college, one of my friend asked me how to remove the newlines in his Word document. Not having used Word so much then, I somehow "intuitively" guessed to find ^013 and replace it with blank. Well it works :-)

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