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

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

[Douglas McIlroy]

> 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

I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing
System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller
story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf

> This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish

So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to
be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were
complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had
had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9.
Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
have met the same fate.

Doug

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

[A. P. Garcia]

> Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
have met the same fate.

Not at all. :-) Windows Subsystem for Linux uses 9P to share files
between the linux and windows environments on the same box:

$ ps -ef
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
root         1     0  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:00 /init
root         4     1  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:02 plan9 --control-socket
5 --log-level 4 --server-fd 6 --pipe-fd 8 --log-truncate

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:23 PM Douglas McIlroy
<douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> 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
>
> I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing
> System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller
> story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf
>
> > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish
>
> So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to
> be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were
> complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had
> had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9.
> Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
> have met the same fate.
>
> Doug

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

[ron minnich]

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The u-root cpu command uses 9p, and Eric Van Hensbergen recently submitted
changes to Linux kernel 9p that boost throughput 10x. We continue to look
at ways to make it faster.

9p lives on in several corners of the world :-)

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 12:43 PM A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com>
wrote:

> > Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
> have met the same fate.
>
> Not at all. :-) Windows Subsystem for Linux uses 9P to share files
> between the linux and windows environments on the same box:
>
> $ ps -ef
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
> root         1     0  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:00 /init
> root         4     1  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:02 plan9 --control-socket
> 5 --log-level 4 --server-fd 6 --pipe-fd 8 --log-truncate
>
> On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:23 PM Douglas McIlroy
> <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> 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
> >
> > I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing
> > System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller
> > story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf
> >
> > > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish
> >
> > So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to
> > be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were
> > complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had
> > had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9.
> > Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
> > have met the same fate.
> >
> > Doug
>

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

[Douglas McIlroy]

> 9p lives on in several corners of the world :-)

Thanks to all who set me straight. Sometimes being corrected is good news.

Doug

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:47 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The u-root cpu command uses 9p, and Eric Van Hensbergen recently submitted changes to Linux kernel 9p that boost throughput 10x. We continue to look at ways to make it faster.
>
> 9p lives on in several corners of the world :-)
>
> On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 12:43 PM A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
>> have met the same fate.
>>
>> Not at all. :-) Windows Subsystem for Linux uses 9P to share files
>> between the linux and windows environments on the same box:
>>
>> $ ps -ef
>> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
>> root         1     0  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:00 /init
>> root         4     1  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:02 plan9 --control-socket
>> 5 --log-level 4 --server-fd 6 --pipe-fd 8 --log-truncate
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:23 PM Douglas McIlroy
>> <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> 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
>> >
>> > I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing
>> > System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller
>> > story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf
>> >
>> > > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish
>> >
>> > So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to
>> > be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were
>> > complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had
>> > had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9.
>> > Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
>> > have met the same fate.
>> >
>> > Doug

[TUHS] 9P Lives. (Was: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure)

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Doug,

> > 9p lives on in several corners of the world :-)
>
> Thanks to all who set me straight.  Sometimes being corrected is good
> news.

Another corner where I keep spotting 9P is on small embedded devices
which lack physical controls but want to give a rich interface to the
outside world without going the web-server route.

9P is also used inside QEMU, the machine emulator and ‘virtualiser’.
https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/9p

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

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

[Dan Cross]

[TUHS to Bcc]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:23 PM Douglas McIlroy
<douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> 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
>
> I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing
> System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller
> story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf

Interesting. This is now being discussed on the Multicians list (which
had a DTSS emulator! Done for use by SIPB). Warren Montgomery
discussed communication files under DTSS for precisely this kind of
thing; apparently he had a chess program he may have run under them.
Barry Margolin responded that he wrote a multiuser chat program using
them on the DTSS system at Grumman.

Margolin suggests a modern Unix-ish analogue may be pseudo-ttys, which
came up here earlier (I responded pointing to your wonderful note
linked above).

> > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish
>
> So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to
> be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were
> complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had
> had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9.
> Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
> have met the same fate.

I wonder if there was an analogy to multiplexed files, which I admit
to knowing very little about. A cursory glance at mpx(2) on 7th
Edition at least suggests some surface similarities.

        - Dan C.

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

[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

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

[Will Senn]

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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


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

[Clem Cole]

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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@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

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

[Douglas McIlroy]

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@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@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

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

[Rob Pike]

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Best TUHS mail ever. I never knew that setuid was for moo. What other
secrets are you hoarding?

-rob


On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:51 PM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> 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
>
>

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

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 1 Feb 2023, Rob Pike wrote:

> Best TUHS mail ever. I never knew that setuid was for moo. What other 
> secrets are you hoarding?

It was mentioned in the Ed 6 docs ("It solves the MOO problem" or some 
such); now I know what it is...

-- Dave

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

[Marc Donner]

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There was an enjoyable documentary "Get Lamp" about Adventure and related
text adventure games released several years ago:

http://www.getlamp.com/

Best,

Marc
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>


On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:24 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 1 Feb 2023, Rob Pike wrote:
>
> > Best TUHS mail ever. I never knew that setuid was for moo. What other
> > secrets are you hoarding?
>
> It was mentioned in the Ed 6 docs ("It solves the MOO problem" or some
> such); now I know what it is...
>
> -- Dave
>

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

[Adam Thornton]

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Hey, I'm in _Get Lamp_!  It's a cool documentary.

On Thu, Feb 2, 2023 at 8:36 AM Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com> wrote:

> There was an enjoyable documentary "Get Lamp" about Adventure and related
> text adventure games released several years ago:
>
> http://www.getlamp.com/
>
> Best,
>
> Marc
> =====
> nygeek.net
> mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:24 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 1 Feb 2023, Rob Pike wrote:
>>
>> > Best TUHS mail ever. I never knew that setuid was for moo. What other
>> > secrets are you hoarding?
>>
>> It was mentioned in the Ed 6 docs ("It solves the MOO problem" or some
>> such); now I know what it is...
>>
>> -- Dave
>>
>

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

[Jonathan Gray]

https://www.multicians.org/moo-in-multics-1972.pdf

"there is no way of saying 'a person can have access to a data base only
when it is accessed through a particular program'. This is, of course, a
difference between Multics and the University of Cambridge system."

"Tampering occurred quite a lot in the beginning but has fallen off"

http://jfwaf.net/Bulls_and_Cows.pdf

The Cambridge machine was Titan.  Describes more of the history.

On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 11:50:14PM -0500, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
> 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@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@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
> 

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

[Jonathan Gray]

Also mentioned in the UNIX Time-Sharing System CACM paper.

"this protection scheme easily solves the MOO accounting problem posed
by ``Aleph-null.'' [8]"

8. Aleph-null, `Computer Recreations,' Software Practice and Experience,
1 2, April-June 1971, pp.  201-204.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/1097024x/1971/1/2

On Wed, Feb 01, 2023 at 05:27:41PM +1100, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> https://www.multicians.org/moo-in-multics-1972.pdf
> 
> "there is no way of saying 'a person can have access to a data base only
> when it is accessed through a particular program'. This is, of course, a
> difference between Multics and the University of Cambridge system."
> 
> "Tampering occurred quite a lot in the beginning but has fallen off"
> 
> http://jfwaf.net/Bulls_and_Cows.pdf
> 
> The Cambridge machine was Titan.  Describes more of the history.
> 
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 11:50:14PM -0500, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
> > 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@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@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
> > 

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

[Rich Salz]

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"Hunt the Wumpus" came from the People's Computer Company in San
Francisco.  Wikipedia article on him is nice; we corresponded a bit.
CHM has all the old PCC newsletters, it seems, at
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102661095

What about Peter Langston's empire? It was distributed as object code, but
someone (CMU?) decompiled it to C, and we built it on Pyramid's. It created
its world by having meteors smash into it to distribute the trace and heavy
metals IIRC.


On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 9:32 PM Will Senn <will.senn@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
>
>
>

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

[Will Senn]

Rich,

When you mentioned empire and Peter Langston, I was confused, but then 
realized there were probably two empires. My dad introduced me to the 
other empire (Walter Bright's) way, way back when (Original version was 
on PDP-10). It's probably my favorite text game of all time.

The c version vms-empire still builds and runs today (on my mac), these 
days it's all fancy ascii, back in the day it was pure text, IIRC:
-------------
Choose a difficulty level where 0 is easy and 99 is hard: 99

Your city is at 1797




EMPIRE, Version 5.00 site Amdahl 1-Apr-1988
Detailed directions are in EMPIRE.DOC
Cannot open saved game: No such file or directory
-------------
++.  16
+O.     R
+..  18
-------------

Bright's touchy cuz folks are always taking credit for work he initially 
did - independently of Langston, one must note :), but the story of its 
development is interesting, nonetheless:

http://www.classicempire.com/history.html

Will

On 2/1/23 8:41 AM, Rich Salz wrote:
> Peter Langston's empire

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

[Rich Salz]

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Walter Bright, the D, etc., guy?  Neat article, thanks.

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

[Henry Bent]

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On Tue, 31 Jan 2023 at 21:32, Will Senn <will.senn@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 uncle, Richard Zopf, did extensive exploration of Mammoth Cave with Will
Crowther.  My understanding is that Colossal Cave was truly impressive in
its ability to replicate the real situations that the cavers faced,
especially given the limitations of the storage and processing abilities of
the machines at the time.  To my mind this stands well apart from the more
rudimentary early computer games which were very math/logic driven vs. the
concept of an "open world" exploration.

-Henry

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

[segaloco via TUHS]

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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)?

Reason I ask is I've been thinking about the feasibility of such an architecture, what with perhaps a "system server" process that reads various IPC for messages from a "game" process and then internally translates those into X11 calls, OpenGL, etc. Could even be multiple servers for different concerns (display, audio, input, networking obviously).

This would be similar to a multi-threaded engine except that we're using system processes and IPC rather than threads and synchronization primitives (on some implementations, these may converge pretty heavily). An added benefit I could see would be having the one server running with the ability to arbitrate multiple games through the same pipelines. Think something like SDL but running as a server taking IPC calls to do things instead of just a library being called in the same process space. This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish that UNIX-ish, but would be an interesting use of the system architecture.

A compelling argument for not doing things this way would be platform lock-in, as sure other operating systems would probably provide similar enough process and IPC mechanisms to achieve the same end result, but no such thing would exist on the preponderance of embedded platforms running no OS, such as cartridge-based consoles. Still, I could see such an architecture begetting clean separation of system interfacing from game logic which would then lend itself well to library-ization of the system server part in embedded cases where it has to be directly entered rather than IPC'd to from yonder process. There is then of course the performance hit of communicating between the different components via IPC rather than it all being self-contained, but as we all know, an increase in maintainability and code clarity sometimes makes a little performance and/or size hit worth it.

Anyone know of anyone doing this back before id, Unreal, and Unity cornered the game engine market?

- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, February 1st, 2023 at 9:52 AM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 31 Jan 2023 at 21:32, Will Senn <will.senn@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 uncle, Richard Zopf, did extensive exploration of Mammoth Cave with Will Crowther. My understanding is that Colossal Cave was truly impressive in its ability to replicate the real situations that the cavers faced, especially given the limitations of the storage and processing abilities of the machines at the time. To my mind this stands well apart from the more rudimentary early computer games which were very math/logic driven vs. the concept of an "open world" exploration.
>
> -Henry

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

[Rich Salz]

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On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 1:33 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> 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)?
>

https://www.unix.com/man-page/bsd/6/hunt/
source at http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/unix/4.3bsd/reno/games/hunt/hunt/

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

[Dan Cross]

[TUHS to Bcc]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 2:11 PM Rich Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 1:33 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> 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)?
>
> https://www.unix.com/man-page/bsd/6/hunt/
> source at http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/unix/4.3bsd/reno/games/hunt/hunt/

Hunt was the one that I thought of immediately. We used to play that
on Suns and VAXen and it could be lively.

There were a number of such games, as Clem mentioned; others I
remember were xtrek, hearts, and various Chess and Go servers.

        - Dan C.