When I was a kid, early 80s, my mom's job had bought some IBM computer. Not PCs, but some kind of large computer in a room to help with accounting / book keeping. Terminals with green text screens were attached to this computer. They had text based menus, and somewhere in this menu system, there were games. One game was a kind of horse race I remember, where digits were racing from left to right on the screen. Another was probably a lunar lander, but memory is lacking. Can someone tell from this description what kind of computer this was, and what OS it was running?
How were the contributions by Richard Caley handled? "The legal reality was harsh: Richard’s contributions to Conquer couldn’t be relicensed. The university couldn’t help contact heirs due to privacy laws."
The notion that everything had to be relicensed under the GPL “so it could be properly preserved and packaged for modern Linux distributions” seems pretty silly.
There use to be a set of games which were available for SunOS and may be Solaris, including a flight simulator with wired frame graphics, and Sun even had released a book about these games at that time(may be early 1990's).
Are they also covered by these? Anyone remember a flight simulator with wireframe graphics available Unices?
I remember something similar from my university days (30-odd years ago) called Empire. This still lives on here [1]. There was many a map printed out on the laser printer (and my prof wanted to know why his budget was so much higher that term...) back in the day. We played against other colleges of the university of Londone over JANet, and I ran the server on a DECstation 5000, somewhat less powerful than my watch these days...
Empire has the concept of a "Bureaucratic Time Unit" which recovered to its maximum in real time every update, and was based on how many civilians (as opposed to military) you had in your capital city. I always thought that was a pretty cool idea - every operation took X BTU's, so you couldn't log on at 3am and utterly nuke another country before they woke up. 3am was still the popular time to start nuking another country, of course :)
I still remember waking up (I splurged on a 1200-baud modem rather than the standard 300-baud one) in the morning, logging in on my Atari ST before I went to college, and seeing "You have 2000 telegrams...". Oh crap. You got telegrams for lots of reasons, but one of those reasons was an attack. It was all part of the "All the news that's fit to print!" messaging system. Just like 'Diplomacy', half the game was in the interaction between people, alliances and betrayals, not just getting stat X to 100% ...
[1]: http://www.wolfpackempire.com
Love that a term from Vinge has almost entered our lexicon. The author is a "programmer archeologist".
When I was a kid, early 80s, my mom's job had bought some IBM computer. Not PCs, but some kind of large computer in a room to help with accounting / book keeping. Terminals with green text screens were attached to this computer. They had text based menus, and somewhere in this menu system, there were games. One game was a kind of horse race I remember, where digits were racing from left to right on the screen. Another was probably a lunar lander, but memory is lacking. Can someone tell from this description what kind of computer this was, and what OS it was running?
System/34 or System/36, the game was RACE. Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYRuTHz-wwk
IBM System/34, System/36, or System/38 perhaps? Those are IBM's minicomputers available in that timeframe.
How were the contributions by Richard Caley handled? "The legal reality was harsh: Richard’s contributions to Conquer couldn’t be relicensed. The university couldn’t help contact heirs due to privacy laws."
The notion that everything had to be relicensed under the GPL “so it could be properly preserved and packaged for modern Linux distributions” seems pretty silly.
There use to be a set of games which were available for SunOS and may be Solaris, including a flight simulator with wired frame graphics, and Sun even had released a book about these games at that time(may be early 1990's).
Are they also covered by these? Anyone remember a flight simulator with wireframe graphics available Unices?
Before xtrek and eventually netrek, there was hunt: https://techtinkering.com/2009/08/11/my-top-10-classic-text-... you might think that games back then were slow but this one was fast paced mayhem. using the vi commands was perfect.
I remember something similar from my university days (30-odd years ago) called Empire. This still lives on here [1]. There was many a map printed out on the laser printer (and my prof wanted to know why his budget was so much higher that term...) back in the day. We played against other colleges of the university of Londone over JANet, and I ran the server on a DECstation 5000, somewhat less powerful than my watch these days...
Empire has the concept of a "Bureaucratic Time Unit" which recovered to its maximum in real time every update, and was based on how many civilians (as opposed to military) you had in your capital city. I always thought that was a pretty cool idea - every operation took X BTU's, so you couldn't log on at 3am and utterly nuke another country before they woke up. 3am was still the popular time to start nuking another country, of course :)
I still remember waking up (I splurged on a 1200-baud modem rather than the standard 300-baud one) in the morning, logging in on my Atari ST before I went to college, and seeing "You have 2000 telegrams...". Oh crap. You got telegrams for lots of reasons, but one of those reasons was an attack. It was all part of the "All the news that's fit to print!" messaging system. Just like 'Diplomacy', half the game was in the interaction between people, alliances and betrayals, not just getting stat X to 100% ... [1]: http://www.wolfpackempire.com
The creator of this game is a frequent contributor on this site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=WalterBright
TIL :)
Comp.souces.games was a source of delight and pain as I learned how to port software from sizeof(int) == sizeof(void *) architectures.
Conquer was an amazing game, I hope someone puts it online so I can pay again!
Nice to see this happening, FWIW:
I uploaded a very old Star Trek Game I think from 1973. I got it from the Coherent OS people. You can get it by issuing these commands:
curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/repository/trek-73.tar.gz' -o trek-73.tar.gz
curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/repository/trek-73.tar.gz.asc' -o trek-73.tar.gz.asc
and my gpg key in case you want to validate the download:
curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/jmcsdf.asc' -o jmcsdf.asc
I often find the historical and archaeological aspects more important, this is a wonderful way to start the day.
There was a Curses version of Trek called "universe" that I was obsessed with, back in the day, but I've never been able to find it again.