Of course, there are differences between the “Jeopardy!” show and the Computer Bowl: people who play “Jeopardy!” want to be millionaires. Many of the players in the Computer Bowl already are. The contest pits some of the best minds in computing against each other on an unabashedly trivial playing field. This isn’t just some wonk-Orama, though. It’s all for a worthy techno-cause: the bowls have raised more than $2 million for The Computer Museum in Boston. And each draws a mighty crowd: about 650 people were expected to watch the event in Boston this year, with an additional 250 linked by satellite in Silicone Valley at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and 300 more hooked up at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. In mid-May, the event will air on the PBS show “Computer Chronicles.”

The two teams–one representing the East Coast and the other representing the West–are drawn from the highest reaches of the computer industry and have included everyone from software zillionaire William Gates HI of Microsoft to Mitchell Kapor, cofounder of Lotus Development Corp.–as well as venture capitalists, industry pundits and even a journalist or two. (No millionaires there.) These are the kinds of people who can answer questions ranging from the cultural (such as the name of the computer in the 1957 film “Desk Set,” EMORAC) to the arcane (naming the ASCII decimal equivalent of the escape key, which happens to be 27). The museum plays the event for full camp effect, drawing up garish promotional posters that make wrestling ads look sedate.

Yet unlike pro wrestling, this contest is for real. Hell hath no fury like a techie refused a score. Journalist John Markoff of The New York Times still sounds miffed when he recalls the judges’ call last year on a question about the BITNET computer network. (If you must know, he said that the acronym stood for Because It’s Time, but the judges insisted on the full name, Because It’s Time Network.) Microsoft cofounder Gates just about threw tantrums during his stint on the West team two years ago. Still, he earned the Most Valuable Player award; this time around, Gates asked the questions as the official bowl “examiner.”

Besides their natural competitiveness, players have a strong incentive to win. “You’d get pretty embarrassed if you fail in front of the entire computer industry,” says Heidi Roizen, head of software company T/Maker and captain of the 1991 West Coast team. So many of these busy, harried executives cram for the big show like college sophomores before the big final. Roizen recalls that last year Gates asked her how much studying she had done; she replied that you can’t really study for trivia quizzes and had read only one book. Roizen says Gates upbraided her for being too laid back: “When I was on last year I read 11 books!” Roizen deadpans. “I guess that’s why I run a $10 million company and he’s got an $11 billion company.” (Gates, rebutting through electronic mail, denies he read 11 books. He says he read three. “I’ve always found the history of computers to be really interesting, and the Computer Bowl gave me a good excuse to read books about it.” So there.)

The 1992 bowl promised the usual quotient of chills, thrills and teraflops–but it also retained the event’s sense of fun. The East Coasters wore tuxedos-with blinking red bow ties. The West Coast team, still smarting from last year’s rout, 460-170, had prepped hard and sipped caffeine-rich Jolt cola. The strategy worked: the West won back the silver bowl with a score of 320-240.

The bowls won’t. last forever. In 1994, a final Championship Bowl will be played among the Most Valuable Players from the previous five bowls. Home editions of the game might appear-maybe even computer games, right? Like the Altair, the unfriendly box that made history in 1975 as the first personal computer, the competition might someday become the stuff of trivia contests itself. It will be part of the growing oral tradition of computing-and that’s anything but trivial.

Photo: A most valuable player: Microsoft cofounder Gates, moderating last year’s tourney (JOE CZOP-COMPUTER MUSEUM)

bTrivial? Not to Them

Bowl players are asked everything from the color of the floor stripe in the machine room at MIT’s artificial-intelligence labs (yellow) to the hexadecimal equivalent of 27 (1B). Below, past questions:

What was the first home computer to sell a million units? The Apple II, the Commodore VIC-20 or the TRS-80?

Which of the following was not the name of a computer during the 1950s: Leprechauns, Mobidic, Babbage or MANIAC?

Most of us have heard the story of why we call something that interferes with the proper operations of a computer a bug. Can you tell us what computer pioneer discovered that bug? Can you tell us what kind of bug it was? In what computer did she find it? ..L1.-

ANSWERS: (1) Commodore VIC-20; (2) Babbage; (3) Grace Hopper; a moth; Harvard’s Mark II.