We’re hitting that point in time when key figures in the history of early computing are starting to leave us. It’s nice to see these early applications preserved. If we can get this code off old disks and tapes and into modern cloud-based repositories, with open source licenses, we might be able to enjoy these programs for a long time, whether for actual amusement or just historical significance. The digital age is both a blessing and a curse in that so much information can be moved around so easily, but a lot of it is locked away on obsolete media that will eventually decay.
Someone should start a museum where you can walk in and play these ancient games and fiddle with ancient software (probably using virtual machines and emulators for the sake of hardware preservation). They could use donations and admission tickets to fund the restoration of more and more old stuff, in a virtuous cycle.
“The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.”
Hey John, I tried your build, just out of curiosity, something worth preserving too. I noticed it when compiling that the code also needed to be modernized, the same thing I had to do for conquer for the gpl-release.
I read in a comment below that work was already done, isn´t?
Trek lives in every OpenBSD install. And OFC with any Basic interpreter running the original game.
I translated a Zmachine port into Spanish, too. ZTrek.
Hey Anthk, if you ported it to a Zmachine, does it mean is it like an interactive fiction game (aventura conversacional in spanish). Is it in the CAAD archive?
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?
Hello, I am the author of the article. I did not know of those games you mention at the time. We used to play conquer at the AIX (Unix) that our computer labs provided for all the alumni. I have only tracked conquer's authors to obtain their permissions to relicense and preserve in a way that others could study and build upon.
I bought a copy of Aviator by Curt Priem and Bruce Factor, that ran on my SS2 pizzabox's GX "LEGO: Low End Graphics Option" SBus card (an 8 bit color + 2 bits monochrome overlay plane graphics accelerator):
>Bruce Factor and Curtis Priem developed a flight simulator called Aviator for Sun's S-Bus GX graphics accelerator. I had one of them on my SS2, and owned a copy of Aviator on CDROM, and loved to play it. [...]
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."
Author of the article here. Richard's contributions remain in the codebase but under original terms.
We documented his legacy as a person, and that is explained in the README of the repository.
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.
Talking about netrek, I read that it originated in a game called Empire on PLATO (not the one played on rec.games.empire).
I wonder if this game be played somehow these days?
Btw the game hunt with destructable regrowing mazes is still being distributed in the bsd-games package today.
Empire was a blast. Top players instinctively knew how ships would move and would key in commands much much faster than the display would update. One second you are in orbit, the next refresh you are dead and the planet has been taken.
Empire was responsible for a lot of 5th year seniors back in the 80.
Oh god, netrek was addictive. At 12-14, I played it a lot on the HP-UX machines when my mom had to work weekends and drag my brother and I along (very willingly) in the mid 1990s. The early internet was also accessible to us.
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
Is that the same Empire? The version I've seen has no BTUs. Just basics: random continents, cities produce military units, units require different numbers of turns for production, etc.
However, I saw a modern-ish decendent called Empire Deluxe, so maybe the original had more features?
LOL, part of the charm of those games is what you mention, the plots behind the movements with the messages between the nations, the double games to make the other thing you were allied with someone, when in every turn maybe...you were sending troops by boat from another direction. People could enter deep into the roleplaying on those messages and that could be really fun. That was my experience with conquer :P
PS: I am the author of the article, and although I reached the university when the modems were being phased out (1994 or so), we played a lot to it while we were in the computer labs, instead of studying.
Readit News
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/
https://www.tnmoc.org/
https://www.museumofcomputing.org.uk/
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 read in a comment below that work was already done, isn´t?
https://github.com/philspil66/Super-Star-Trek
Are they also covered by these? Anyone remember a flight simulator with wireframe graphics available Unices?
https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/aviator_15_for_sun_netwo...
>AVIATOR 1.5 FOR SUN NETWORKS OPENS UP GRAPHICS WORKSTATION GAMES MARKET. By CBR Staff Writer, 08 Jul 1991.
https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/aviator-a-flight-sim...
https://bitsavers.org/bits/Sun/aviator/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RQscDJCy4c
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44049987
>Bruce Factor and Curtis Priem developed a flight simulator called Aviator for Sun's S-Bus GX graphics accelerator. I had one of them on my SS2, and owned a copy of Aviator on CDROM, and loved to play it. [...]
Unsure about the games. Here’s an early lunar lander:
https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~storer/LunarLander/LunarLander....
Another Lunar version:
https://undefinedvalue.com/lunar-for-c-and-rust.html
System/36 guide:
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibmsystem3rogrammingWi...
Possible source for games in David H. Ahl in his book 101 BASIC Computer Games.
Btw the game hunt with destructable regrowing mazes is still being distributed in the bsd-games package today.
[1] https://www.cyber1.org
Empire was responsible for a lot of 5th year seniors back in the 80.
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=WalterBright
However, I saw a modern-ish decendent called Empire Deluxe, so maybe the original had more features?
PS: I am the author of the article, and although I reached the university when the modems were being phased out (1994 or so), we played a lot to it while we were in the computer labs, instead of studying.
An AI could maintain the state of a world in its "mind", take text commands from a bunch of players, and update the state the next day.