What happens when you type Google.com into your browser and press enter?
github.com
github.com
In the interest of a constructive discussion, why do you believe that a URL shortener is a bad interview question?
The problem with the original question is that it masks your true question and makes it really difficult to understand what the discussion is about. If someone is used to answering questions succinctly, directly, and usefully (which are valuable traits in a productive engineering environment) then it's really difficult to formulate a clear answer on the spot, regardless of your depth of knowledge. The best response is probably the question, "Exactly which part are you interested in, and in relation to what kinds of problems?"
That's nice, but you forgot to explain how electrical circuits work. Which ideally would have begun with with a rigorous statement of Kirchhoff's laws (and in particular how these are generalizations of Ohm's law, and corollaries of Maxwell's equations in the low-frequency limit).
We were also hoping to see you demonstrate at least a basic understanding of how modern semiconductors work, to a point where we could feel confident that you were at least reasonably conversant in the underlying language of solid state physics. If you really wanted to get our attention, you would have asked for extra time at the whiteboard to derive at least, say, the 1-soliton solution to the wave equation, and used the first few terms of the expansion series to obtain both elementary conserved quantities and additional non-trivial quantities using the invariance and multiplier approach based on the well-known result that the Euler-Lagrange operator annihilates to total divergence.
That is, you could have. But you didn't.
We thank you for taking the time to discuss this opportunity with us; but mind you, when we said we were looking for candidates with "strong CS fundamentals", we meant it. So unfortunately we'll be moving forward with other candidates, and we wish you the best of luck with your job search.
That said, if I let them completely hijack the interview, I'm failing as an interviewer. They're also failing as an interviewer, if they're actually willing to waste the entire time answering the question in full in that way, rather than recognising that the interview process is a two way street.
Either way, all this does is change the range of acceptable answers. Being aware this information has been collected in such a useful way is the important part. So again, Thanks!
Ideally, if you're testing ability to research rather than domain-specific knowledge, they'd just send you a link to a really good explanation. No sense reinventing the wheel.
Or you've detected their ability to effectively absorb and recall intricate technical details.
In a way, that's what learning something from someone else amounts to.