1 Feb
2023
1 Feb
'23
10:50 a.m.
Moo (later marketed as Master Mind) was an import from Cambridge. A
moo leader board sprang up. Maintenance of a file that had to be
written on behalf of any user posed a conundrum--how could you protect
it against false updates? Dennis's novel solution to this and related
problems was setuid, which garnered the only Unix patent.
Wumpus was my preschool kids' introduction to computing. They learned
the tricks of shooting crooked arrows faster than I learned that the
cave is always the same, with random room numbers. Only years later
did I discover by reading the code that the shape is a dodecahedron.
That fact would have helped note-taking a lot.
Doug
On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 9:59 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Wumpus predates Unix. It was a basic game on the GE635 when I first saw it in the mid
1960s along with a horse racing game a blackjack game. I ran them on the ASR 33 in my
Dads office it’s what got be interested in computers actually
Many games were on different systems and reimplemented. david Ahl eventually published a
book called 101 basic computer games which was a collection that he brought together from
a number of systems.
HP2000, TSS/8, DTSS and GCOS as well as TOPS and later RSTS all had games as well as
Unix.
As for Moonlander, my friend the late Jack Burness wrote it as a contractor for DEC as a
demo for the GT40 and was also not of Unix origin. Originally it was DOS11 later RT11.
It’s an amazing piece of code - check out his 16 bit cordic integer trig routines. He
sat in the MIT library for a weekend figuring out how to write them. Hand simulating
everything. Went back to Maynard and typed up his routines. Very impressive
Rogue was Unix however but that was BSD.
On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 9:32 PM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
All,
I just saw this over on dragonflydigest.com:
https://0j2zj3i75g.unbox.ifarchive.org/0j2zj3i75g/Article.html
It's an article from 2007 about the history and genesis of the Colossal Cave
Adventure game - replete with lots of pics. What I found fascinating was that the game is
based on the author's actual cave explorations vis a vis the real Colossal Cave.
Gives you a whole new appreciation for the game.
My question is do y'all know of any interesting backstories about games that were
developed and or gained traction on unix? I like some of the early stuff (wumpus, in
particular), but know nothing of origins. Or, was it all just mindless entertainment
designed to wile away the time? Spacewar, I know a bit about, but not the story, if there
is one... Maybe, somebody needed to develop a new program to simulate the use of fuel in
rockets against gravity and... so... lunar lander was born? I dunno, as somebody who grew
up playing text games, I'd like to think there was more behind the fun that mindless
entertainment... So, how about it, was your officemate at bell labs tooling away nights
writing a game that had the whole office addicted to playing it, while little did they
know the characters were characterizations of his annoying neighbors?
If you don't mind, if you take the thread off into the distance and away from unix
game origins, please rename the thread quickly :).
Thanks,
Will
--
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual