Hi, xBattle, which was a multiplayer game to be run on one workstation which opened windows for each player on different X displays - at that time (early 90s) there was no network mode. -- "You don't become great by trying to be great, you become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process." - xkcd #896

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

Help me here please. I have been hunting for the source of search for ages. I want to fly through that universe again - curses and all! We modified the source of our version at the Uni to make it a bit more Scottish and to include objects that had names based on local lectures/students etc. My search skills in searching for search have let me down badly. I would like to get search up on one of my VAXEN and show my staff what a real 80s computer game was about ;-) Does anybody have any ideas if the source is still extant? Iain