From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=MAILING_LIST_MULTI autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 21444 invoked from network); 2 Feb 2023 00:44:14 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (50.116.15.146) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 2 Feb 2023 00:44:14 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [IPv6:::1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BCF3741200; Thu, 2 Feb 2023 10:43:37 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mercury.lcs.mit.edu (mercury.lcs.mit.edu [18.26.0.122]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id C786C411FF for ; Thu, 2 Feb 2023 10:43:29 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11178) id 8872918C073; Wed, 1 Feb 2023 19:43:28 -0500 (EST) To: tuhs@tuhs.org Message-Id: <20230202004328.8872918C073@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2023 19:43:28 -0500 (EST) From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Message-ID-Hash: NQKFUCPOHFUD3DDCA75ZABEH3YJUIYMY X-Message-ID-Hash: NQKFUCPOHFUD3DDCA75ZABEH3YJUIYMY X-MailFrom: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; header-match-tuhs.tuhs.org-0; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header CC: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [TUHS] Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: > 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