[TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!

[don@DonHopkins.com (Don Hopkins)]

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Remember Eedie & Eddie, Peter Langston’s DecTalk voice synthesizers who would answer the phone with “Yes, operator, I will accept the charges!” and then responded to touch tone commands to perform algorithmic compositions and sing songs together to you over the telephone?

http://www.langston.com/SVM.html <http://www.langston.com/SVM.html>

Good thing Bellcore had all the free long distance phone service they could use, because anyone who knew the phone number for Eedie & Eddie could use it to make as many free third party charge long distance phone calls as they desired! 

(Spoiler: The phone number was listed in the title of Peter S. Langston’s 1986  Summer USENIX paper!)


Search Results
201 644-2332 or Eedie & Eddie on the Wire: An Experiment in Music Generation

http://www.langston.com/Papers/2332.pdf

-Don

> On 16 Nov 2017, at 02:56, Erik E. Fair <fair-tuhs at netbsd.org> wrote:
> 
> Sorry, "psl" is Peter S. Langston, so:
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1972_video_game)
> 
> http://www.langston.com
> 
> That Wikipedia entry should describe it as a "computer game" (or "simulation") rather than as a "video game", given the common understanding of those phrases. PSL's "empire" was a multiplayer game similar (sort of) to the board game "Risk" and the "graphics" were ASCII-maps.
> 
> I played that game at some length after leaving UCB - it was "guaranteed to drop your GPA two points" (addictive as hell). Another way to parboil your brain with it was to set the "update interval" to 5 seconds (a.k.a. a "flash" game) and have a several hour (instead of the more typical several month) gaming session with like-minded crazies ... I mean, "players" ... in a terminal room.
> 
> I recall one such evening up at LBL with Craig Leres and Jef Poskanzer, among others ...
> 
> Anyway, the Dave Pare mentioned in the Wikipedia entry is the same one who worked on decompiling the Morris worm, with the aforementioned tools he'd developed (he liked playing empire and wanted to fix bugs and extend the game, but psl was only supplying binaries ...).
> 
> It's funny where tools come from sometimes.
> 
> 	Erik

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