[TUHS] Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > segaloco wrote:

    > In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that
    > have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even
    > just pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes
    > (games with networking notwithstanding)?

The machine of the DSSR/RTS group at MIT-LCS, Steve Ward's group (an -11/70
running roughly PWB1) had an implementation of a form of Perquackey:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perquackey

that was a multi-player game; I'm pretty sure there was a process per player,
and they communicated, I'm pretty sure, through pipes, not files - there was
certainly no IPC in that system.

IIIRC, the way it worked was that there was a parent process, and it spawned
a child process for each terminal that was playing, and the children could
all communicate through pipes. (They had to communicate because in that
version, all the players shared a single set of dice, and once one person had
played a word, the other players couldn't play that word. So speed was
important in playing; people got really addicted to it.)

Alas, although their machine was very similar to CSR's (although ours was an
-11/45 with an Able ENABLE and a lot of memory, making it a lot more like a
/70), and we shared most code between the machines, and I have a full dump of
the CSR machine, we apparently didn't have any of the games on the CSR
machine, so I can't look at the source to confirm exactly how it worked.

        Noel