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looking for a program - last gasp questions (Dr Iain Maoileoin)

by cruff＠ruffspot.net

Perhaps http://www.asciisector.net/ <http://www.asciisector.net/> ?

6 years, 8 months

Free to a good home: Honeywell/Bull DPS-6 workstation / server (Seattle, WA)

by derschjo＠gmail.com

Hi all -- I picked this DPS-6 up over the summer and it's just taking up space (quite a bit of space) in the corner of my basement. This is a custom 16-bit, bitsliced, microcoded CPU from the early 80s with (I believe) 8mb of memory, and ethernet. It would originally have run a version of GCOS. It's about the size of a large-ish minifridge, but a bit deeper. It's also quite heavy! It's a neat machine, but it's very obscure and unfortunately incomplete (it is missing both mass storage and storage controllers). Otherwise, it is complete and in good condition (albeit a bit dirty). So you can see why you'd really want to have it in your collection . If anyone's up for a project, drop me a line. Local pick up in Seattle, WA. Thanks, Josh

6 years, 8 months

cctalk Digest, Vol 61, Issue 17

by iain＠csp-partnership.co.uk

Paul - I had a quick look at PLATO. I dont think it was like that. In this game when you set a movement direction and velocity you moved through the universe in that direction ?forever?. There was not concept of ?moves? or ?turns?, it was very dynamic. Spasim looks much closer - but was that ?vector graphics?? The game I was using was just 24 x 80 characters. For the year and the WYSE terminals (etc) it was great. > > I wonder if this is a port of the PLATO game by the same name, which goes back to 1976 or so. PLATO had lots of multi-user games with various levels of graphics sophistication. Space war games included "conquest", "empire", and "spasim" -- that last actually had 3d graphics, which was quite a stretch for 1977. Then there was "airfight" (the inspiration for Microsoft Flight Simulator) as well as a boatload of "dungeon & dragons" games. > > paul > ------------------------------ > > Was it in use at Berkeley? I might have it stashed away in some of my > BSD-related tapes. > Chuck, I am Scottish, I have never been to Berkeley! I just cant remember the history. I remember playing the game with a bunch of post-graduates. I was either a post-grad or perhaps an early lecturer in the Uni. That places it square in the mid-80s. I did spend most of my time researching. The games would have appeared on tapes from other places?.. I am hunting around amongst the post-grads to see if any of them can tell me where it came from. I knew the game as ?search? in that that is what you typed in to start it. To keep the undergrads out if it we had to put both passwords and time-locks in the code?. Iain > --Chuck

6 years, 8 months

cctalk Digest, Vol 61, Issue 16 Message 11 - computer game

by iain＠csp-partnership.co.uk

> > Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 12:55:09 -0400 > From: Bob Smith <bobsmithofd at gmail.com> > To: Dr Iain Maoileoin via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > Subject: Re: looking for a program - last gasp questions > Message-ID: > <CAHtNYbW8s10zaOODxSjvc1UNKpzRRqgcA4su4VW9ZSGw=OvKSA at mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > are you thinking of conquest? > https://github.com/jtrulson/conquest > > conquest > > Conquest is a top-down, real time space warfare game. It was > originally written in RATFOR for the VAX/VMS system in 1983 by Jef > Poskanzer and Craig Leres. > > I spent incredible amounts of time playing this game with my friends > in the terminal labs at college, and when I actually had a multi-user > system running at home (Unixware) I decided to try and translate/port > the code to C in Unix. This was in the early to mid 1990's. > > Of course, over the years many things have changed. Today, Conquest is > a true client/server game. The client uses freeglut, SDL 2.0 (for > sound) and OpenGL. It uses C++11 to build, though for now it's "C > software with some C++ containers and constructs?. Fraid not ;-( no grid in search?. You actually scrolled through the universe on your 24 x 80! If you passed a plannet/star then you could see it on screen ( in the distance, or with a screen full of *?s as you hit it!) It had a vast universe and you could scroll around the universe for a hour without seeing the same place. > 4 or 5 of us playing it really cranked up the CPU load. I think many terminals were 9600, if you got your hands on a 19200 or better you were a p*g *n sh*t. On and off I have been hunting for this for 3-4 years. I know I am not making it up - it did come from some US university.

6 years, 8 months

looking for a program - last gasp questions

by iain＠csp-partnership.co.uk

Not star-trek.... I am trying to track down the source of a unix game ..... Years and years ago - 1980s - I was in the Computing Science Department at Strathclyde Uni.? and we had a bunch of BSD4 systems running on VAXen. I have memory of - but have never located - a curses based 24 x 80 display - multi-user "space-war" game that allowed you to navigate around a 3D universe with the 24 x 80 giving you a full screen view of the universe.. In the game you could * hunt the universe for aliens (like "shankers" I cant remember the others), * other players - you saw them as they saw you you could also team up with other players to have more firepower and call for help using a 1-line on screen chat/broadcast system, there were planet(s) scattered about - that you could hide behind. The students and I modified the program with some "special features".? I cant remember if the name of program was changed too ;-( Anyway we knew the game as "search", it was written in C - it was a good test of serial output capability of the VAXen - it was also a great way to teach students about the VI keys - since hjkl worked as expected for movement (at least that was out excuse to the prof when caught playing the game during the day). From my poor description can anybody tie down what I am looking for? Appreciated Iain

6 years, 8 months

Strange DEC stuff.

by mattislind＠gmail.com

An ex-DEC engineer offloaded some strange stuff that was going to the skip. I just thought I could have a look. But what is it? There is two backplanes marked KA14 and BE14. I thought it was the PDP-14, but I am not sure really. https://i.imgur.com/86tcLFz.jpg https://i.imgur.com/BWiCz8l.jpg I came together with a similar sized PSU. Then there was a strange DEC workshop built paper tape reader. The reader mechanics looks similar to PC04 and PC05 but is smaller. The wheel is smaller and the stepper motor is smaller as well. Are these parts from some other DEC reader they cobbled together at DEC for inhouse duty. https://i.imgur.com/0zv55pP.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rE423Hi.jpg https://i.imgur.com/8th1y3Z.jpg https://i.imgur.com/VKoH2LX.jpg Any clues?

6 years, 8 months

I apparently have Spacewar for Unix?

by dseagrav＠lunar-tokyo.net

While dumping lispm tapes, I found one with a label saying "Read it into DRAL" (may be "DRAC"?) "and sent a message to cap's bboard saying where it can be found. -Bob?. There was another paper label that had fallen off. What I think is the label in question was later found in the bottom of the box, a strip of masking tape saying ?SPACEWAR FOR VAX (Unix?)?. The contents are a 136KB tar archive containing source to a program called ?orbit?, all files are dated August 22nd, 1983. The README file follows: ?? To install orbit: 1. Do a 'make all'. 2. Make sure the directories on the path /usr/games/lib/orbit/* all exist and are writable by you (except /usr, of course). 3. Do a 'make install'. This should work with no changes on Berkeley 4.2, unless the structure for the console keyboard buffer has been changed. The crock that reads the up-down codes here should be changed to use the real ROM-table hooks, anyway. Unfortunately, all that nice stuff is in protected memory. Enjoy! - Bob Bane (bane.umcp-cs at UDel-Relay) ?? Does anyone know what this is? The (gzipped) tar file is at https://www.bogodyne.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/orbit.tar.gz <https://www.bogodyne.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/orbit.tar.gz>

6 years, 8 months

LISP implementations on small machines

by sieler＠allegro.com

David...where did you use Lisp on a B6700? Bill Gord and I wrote the first INTERLISP interpreter for the B6700 back around 1974-1975, on a DARPA contract, at UCSD. (At the start, it was to implement BBNLISP, but the name changed during the project :) DARPA found that researchers using INTERLISP (or others) on Dec PDP10s (and similar) were hampered by the limited address space (256K virtual memory). The B6700 offered a significantly larger address space (and many other features, of course :) (I know our LISP got distributed to other Burroughs sites in those days, just like our STARTREK and Bob Jardine's SOLAR.) Danny Bobrow (with Xerox PARC at the time) came and helped us get started. I met Warren Teitelman ... he had no idea that the cover of the INTERLISP manual was an homage to his last name. (See: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/interlisp/Interlisp_Reference_Manual_Oct_197… ) We got our system up and running, including DWIM and other packages, and were told ... oops, DEC figured out how to expand the amount of virtual memory on the PDP-10, so we don't need to buy Burroughs mainframes now! Our INTERLISP was a full interpreter, and also had a compiler to LISP p-code, which might have inspired UCSD Pascal's p-code (Ken Bowles was our boss). I believe I have the source, in Burroughs ALGOL. As a side bonus, I got to interact with Danny, and people from PARC and BBN as we were watching other UCSD Computer Center people put the B6700 on the ARPANET. (I think we were something like the 25th computer.) Stan Sieler

6 years, 8 months

LISP implementations on small machines

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Koning > Some early machines, the PDP-6 I believe is an example, have > "registers" in the ISA but they actually correspond to specific parts > of main memory. The PDP-6 and KA10 (basically a re-implementation of the PDP-6 architecture) both had cheapo versions where addresses 0-15 were in main memory, but also had an option for real registers, e.g. in the PDP-6: "The Type 162 Fast Memory Module contains 16 words with a 0.4 usecond cycle." The KA10 has a similar "fast memory option". Noel

6 years, 8 months

DIBOL manual

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

I recently picked up a copy of "CTS-300 - DIBOL Language Reference Manual" (because when I went to do a CHWiki page for the language: http://gunkies.org/wiki/DIBOL I could find almost nothing about it online); does anyone have enough of a use for this that I should put it in the high-priority scan list? Noel

6 years, 8 months

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