We all pretty much started with Adventure (Dungeon, Collosal Cave) whatever you want to call it.

We got Zork later on.

There was Peter Langston’s Empire that had a huge following at BRL. We thought we had it in check because the game had it’s own limits on how much you could play it you were limited to 60 minutes of clock time a day and how many BTUs (bureaucratic time units) your capital made. The problem was people would spend their time online downloading maps and then spend the afternoon pouring over tomorrows moves. The director finally made us shut it down.

There was a multiplayer game called “search” that we would play. Late in the day you’d hear someone yell “Search’s up” and off we go.

Then we got the SGI workstations and flew the flight simulator. They had a multiplayer dogfight but it used XNS which our network wasn’t going to handle (at least not off the local subnet). I recoded it to use TCP. Rather than using broadcast packets, each “airplane” opened a connection to a server I called “Air Traffic Control.” From there I could watch the whole thing. I also added an anti-aircraft gun to shoot at people hanging around the airfield waiting to attack aircraft that newly appeared in the game there. A few months later I was at Nasa Ames for an IETF meeting and mentioned I had done this and they made me sit down and ftp over the code so NASA’s productivity could also be destroyed.

Ron “A hollow voice says ‘plugh’ Natalie