HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: QUESTION: What was the 1st computer game?
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Keywords: game
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 92 17:26:42 GMT

In article <1992Nov10.184123.15279@tc.cornell.edu>, mdw@theory (Matt Welsh) writes:
>In article <BxIDz1.2Fw@mach1.wlu.ca> veen2976@mach1.wlu.ca (veenstra christopher) writes:
>>>>
>>
>>Okay, Spacewar is the unanimous winner of that one.  Here's a followup then,
>>what's the first computer adventure game?
>
>Why, Crowther and Wood's "Adventure", of course. :)
>
>These are too easy.

Well, to be *really* anal-retentive about it, the *first* adventure game would
be Will Crowther's version, done on a CDC system as I recall, which Don Woods
then improved when he moved it to a PDP-10.  (I forget whether he had help from
Crowther in this.)
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.folklore.urban,talk.bizarre
Subject: Re: Jackpotting ATMs for $$$$
From: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly)
Organization: The Man With Ten Cats
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 04:23:13 GMT
Reply-To: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly)

In article <BxM6Du.Izx@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> kodak@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Jason Balicki (KodaK)) writes:
>In article <9211112318.18@rmkhome.UUCP> rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
>>In article <1992Nov11.183645.15704@tc.cornell.edu> mdw@theory.TC.Cornell.EDU (Matt Welsh) writes:
>>>In article <Mf0=nre00iUx8=Zlc8@andrew.cmu.edu> Samuel Roy Helwig <sh4j+@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
>>>>    ATM == Automatic Teller Machine
>>>>                --Sam
>>>Why, thank you Sam. I'm glad you cleared that up for us all.
>
>>And all along I thought it stood for:
>
>>	Atonally Tormented Mustard

>Hmmm.  Every time I step up to one I feel like I'm being ripped off by the
>Atrocious Testicle Masher.

You're not supposed to get that close.

-- 

Rick Kelly	rmk@rmkhome.UUCP	unixland!rmkhome!rmk	rmk@frog.UUCP
From: lennart@blade.stack.urc.tue.nl (Lennart Benschop)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Unix administration horror stories.
Date: 6 Nov 92 09:15:20 GMT
Organization: MCGV Stack, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands.


Just my Unix (well it's Linux) administration horror story:

I installed Linux (a free Unix clone) from the SLS distribution.  The SLS
distribution is a distribution of Linux and all utilities on floppies.
That distributions contained a few little mistakes. 

One of them was that there was a uuencode program but no uudecode program. 
Both uuencode and uudecode were hard links to the same program that happened 
to be uuencode. There may be versions of the program around that behave 
like either uuencode or uudecode depending on the name through which 
they are called, but this one is not.

The makers of SLS are so kind as to provide fixes for their mistakes. So
there was a tar file that contained the missing uudecode binary. A few days
later I tried to uuencode a file. Oops. The new uudecode had replaced the
old one that was a hard link to uuencode. So uuencode was gone. Both names
were still links to one binary. 

So I erased uuencode and tried to get the original uuencode from the
distribution disks. Guess what! Still no uuencode! It was still a link to
the uudecode program. Tried it a second time. How was that possible?
Finally I got it. The tar file on the distribution disk contained the
uuencode program under the name 'uudecode' and an entry 'uuencode' as a
hard link to 'uudecode'. By restoring uuencode I merely got a new hard link
to uudecode! So I removed uuencode again, renamed uudecode to something
completely different, restored 'uudecode' from the distribution disk,
renamed that to 'uuencode' (it really was the uuencode program), and finally
I renamed the uudecode program back to 'uudecode'. Then it worked as it
should.

Links can be a major source of confusion if you have them where you don't
want and if you don't get rid of them in time. This is maybe not a real
horror story but just funny, but I could imagine that similar situations
cause real horror at times.

Lennart.
 
 
   
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: david@cs.uow.edu.au (David E A Wilson)
Subject: Re: Wanted: Altair 8000 or Imsai 8080 and Modem
Organization: Dept of Computer Science, Wollongong University, Australia
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1992 04:40:46 GMT

maxwell@acsu.buffalo.edu (John H. Maxwell) writes:
>Did you also remember that acoustic modem was auto-dialing ??

No problem with tone dialling. Automatically hanging up is another matter.
-- 
David Wilson				+61 42 213802 voice, +61 42 213262 fax
Dept Comp Sci, Uni of Wollongong	david@cs.uow.edu.au
From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: QUESTION: What was the 1st computer game?
Keywords: game
Date: 10 Nov 92 00:55:10 GMT
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU

In article <1992Nov9.131928.4633@athena.mit.edu>, dmsilev@athena (Daniel M Silevitch) writes:
>I'm pretty sure that the first game written for computers was Spacewar,
>written for one of the early PDPs from DEC (PDP-1, -3 ?), a two-player game in
						    ^^
WOW!  Does anyone have source for this implementation???  ;->

>which the goal is to kill the other player without being killed :). Spacewar
>is still around, someone wrote a version which runs under X.

The PDP-3 was a paper machine, a 36-bit system that was never implemented.
(The PDP-2 was a 24-bit paper machine.)  The numbering for actual, delivered
products is PDP-1, PDP-4 ...
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_
Xref: sparky alt.folklore.computers:16212 comp.unix.questions:13381
From: tm8t+@andrew.cmu.edu (Tod McQuillin)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Whence Unix? (was Re: IS UNIX DEAD?) (New Thread?)
Date: 13 Nov 92 21:57:49 GMT
	<1du8ooINNha5@armory.centerline.com> <1dvltdINN6i4@skat.usc.edu>
	<STEVEV.92Nov13100727@miser.uoregon.edu>
Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA

stevev@miser.uoregon.edu (Steve VanDevender) writes:
> curses(3) was developed for rogue(6).  hack, and then NetHack,
> came much later.

I don't think this is exactly right.

From a paper entitled "Screen Updating and Cursor Movement
Optimization: A Library Package", by Kenneth C. R. C. Arnold:

          Acknowledgements

               This package would not exist without the work  of  Bill
          Joy,  who,  in writing his editor, created the capability to
          generally describe terminals, wrote the routines which  read
          this  database, and, most importantly, those which implement
          optimal cursor movement, which routines I have simply lifted
          nearly  intact.   Doug Merritt and Kurt Shoens also were ex-
          tremely important,  as  were  both  willing  to  waste  time
          listening  to  me rant and rave.  The help and/or support of
          Ken Abrams, Alan Char, Mark Horton, and Joe Kalash, was, and
          is, also greatly appreciated.

This is the document from which I learned curses.  I don't know when
it was written, but it says it was revised 16 April 1986.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: pt@geovision.gvc.com (Paul Tomblin)
Subject: Re: command abbreviation
Reply-To: pt@geovision.gvc.com
Organization: Not officially GeoVision Systems Inc., Ottawa, Ontario
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 16:50:16 GMT

lowen@lorc.UUCP (Lamar Owen) writes:
>course, Tandy's programmers used the up arrow for exponentetiation, so, instead
>of saying (as in C) x**y to mean x to the power y, on the TRS-80 you said
>X[Y (of course, that was an up arrow there!  And the TRS-80 is uppercase only

Uh - which version of 'C' did you use?  Perhaps one called 'IBM FORTRAN-G'?

Almost as bad as somebody I knew who said, when I told him I programmed in
C: "Oh I've heard of C - Structured Cobol, right?"!

-- 
Paul Tomblin - speaking from but not for GeoVision Systems Inc.
There are 2656 unread articles in 46 groups - don't you think you read too
much news?
From: xyzzy@mertwig.UUCP (Daniel Drucker)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: Unix administration horror stories.
Date: Sun, 08 Nov 92 09:33:11 EST
Organization: Odd Parity Hacker's Group

lennart@blade.stack.urc.tue.nl (Lennart Benschop) writes:
> Just my Unix (well it's Linux) administration horror story:
> 
> I installed Linux (a free Unix clone) from the SLS distribution.  The SLS

Where can I ftp linux from?

Daniel Max P. Drucker

=============== mertwig!xyzzy@jaflrn.uucp ==========================
#define slogan_1 Don't pick on me, I'm only 14.
#define slogan_2  Hey! Lets port it to COBOL!

Difficulty! It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!
Hi, I'm a .sig virus! Copy me into your .sig and spread the fun!
=========== uupsi!utoday!jaflrn!mertwig!xyzzy ======================
From: lwall@netlabs.com (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: command abbreviation
Date: 9 Nov 92 19:52:50 GMT
Organization: NetLabs, Inc.

In article <1992Nov8.034229.7196@sol.ctr.columbia.edu> slb22@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Seth L. Blumberg) writes:
: Huh.  I'm an assistant system manager (read: work-study slave) here at
: Columbia U. (in CTR, for all you locals), and I've just recently been learning
: perl, where $_ is the default operand of a lot of commands, and @_ is the
: array in which subroutine parameters are passed.  D'you suppose Larry Wall
: might've spent some time programming in SPL...?

I don't think so.  But you never know in these days of uncertainty...  :-)

The closest I've come to SPL is that my boss at Seattle Pacific University,
John Kropf, used to work for HP.  About the time I was taking a Cobol class
(in my defense, I should point out that I did nothing in the class
except read the IBM Cobol manual the night before the final, and got the
top score), we were discussing why Cobol used a verb like "perform", when
a shorter word like "do" would be much better.  He told me that SPL (or maybe
some other HP-ish language) used "do".  So I put it into a language I was
writing at the time called JAM (not to be confused with a completely
separate product of the same name what you see advertised nowadays).  From
there "do" eventually made its way into Perl, although as a subroutine
call it is now deprecated.

$_ (and later, by analogy, @_ and _) were picked primarily for the pun
between "underline" and "underlying".  Humor aside, this has some small
mnemonic value.  Secondary considerations were that $_ is visually
quite distinctive, and that an initial underscore already conveys
strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

Ambiguous Pronouncement of the Week:
    Some analysts think they understand synthesis.  Nobody else does.

Larry Wall
lwall@netlabs.com
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: value of a pdp-11,va
From: don@zl2tnm.gen.nz (Don Stokes)
Date: 14 Nov 92 01:01:50 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: The Wolery

rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
> My father has always claimed that the 11/45 was shoved out of the way by
> the 11/70, and that it wasn't allowed to reach it's full potential.  His
> 45 was serial number 21.

Well, the 11/70 was a better machine for timesharing by virtue of the 22bit
memory addressing and fast I/O.  For raw single user compute speed, the two
were about equal.

--
Don Stokes, ZL2TNM (DS555)                        don@zl2tnm.gen.nz (home)
Network Manager, Computing Services Centre            don@vuw.ac.nz (work)
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand              +64-4-495-5052
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: PDP-8A 500
From: cchd@lucifer.latrobe.edu.au (Huw Davies)
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 00:21:18 GMT
Organization: La Trobe University


I've just aquired my first 'real' PDP-8 to go with my DECmateII :-)
I was told that I was getting a PDP-8A but when it arrived it was a
PDP-8A 500 (according to the front panel). It doesn't look like the
photos of 8A's that are in "Computer Engineering - A DEC view..." (which
is my bible of old PDP photos :-)

Does anyone have any further information? From the little I know about
the system there are three boards making up the CPU (floating point
too???), a core memory board (my understanding was that 8As had
semiconductor memory), a console serial card and a controller for the dual
RX02s.

This is a repost of an article I posted to alt.sys.pdp8. I received no
replies to my posting, so I'm assuming that (for mysterious reasons) my
posting didn't escape from here....
-- 
  Huw Davies           | Huw.Davies@latrobe.edu.au
  Computing Services   | Phone: +61 3 479 1500   Fax: +61 3 479 1999
  La Trobe University  | I own an Alfa to keep me poor in a monetary
  Melbourne Australia  | sense, but rich in so many other ways
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: hermit@cats.UCSC.EDU (William R. Ward)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: domain questions
Date: 5 Nov 92 02:48:54
Organization: Computing and Telecommunications Services, UCSC
	<Yex5FwK00VpdJMYt4j@andrew.cmu.edu>
	<1992Nov4.100506.14057@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: am.ucsc.edu
In-reply-to: adyonka@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu's message of 4 Nov 92 10:05:05 -0500

In article <1992Nov4.100506.14057@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu>, adyonka@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu (Aaron D. Yonka) writes:
) jf41+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jonathan R. Ferro) writes:
)> Yeah, ok, but did we ever get an answer to the question "Where is the
)> master list of all these suffixes?"
)
) There is a list of country codes in Appendix E of 
) _Zen_and_the_Art_of_The_Internet_ (ISBN 0-13-010778-6, Copyright 1993 (yes,
) 1993), published by Prentice Hall).  The appendix lists "the known country
) codes as defined in the ISO-3166 standard.

The list is also posted as a FAQ on comp.mail.uucp--I just saved a
copy.  If you don't get that group on your site or can't find the
article mail me and I will send you a copy.
--
William R Ward                         __o   Bay View Software
VoiceMail: +1 (408) 479-4072         _ \<,_  Internet:  hermit@cats.ucsc.edu
SnailMail: 1803 Mission St. #339    (_)/ (_) BITNet:    hermit@cats.bitnet
           Santa Cruz CA 95060 USA
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: CM5 pic: Our people are working on it
From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 01:02:56 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept. University of Auckland

Sorry about the delay folks - it's being distributed via several ftp sites but
at the moment Thinking Machines' lawyers are huddled together whispering to each
other about whether it's OK to actually distribute it or not.  I'll post an
annoucement when the matter is cleared up....

Peter.
--
    pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz || peterg@kcbbs.gen.nz || peter@nacjack.gen.nz
			    (In order of preference)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: mdw@theory.TC.Cornell.EDU (Matt Welsh)
Subject: Re: Unix administration horror stories.
Organization: Cornell Theory Center
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 05:11:48 GMT

In article <5k53TB3w165w@mertwig.UUCP> xyzzy@mertwig.UUCP (Daniel Drucker) writes:
>Which is better, 386BSD or Linux?
>
>Here goes .... <grin>

The answer to this is in my section III of the Linux FAQ, actually. :)
Should stop all flame wars, unless of course you don't like my answer.

mdw
used to have a .sig


Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: frank@rover.uchicago.edu (Frank - Hardware Hacker - Borger)
Subject: Re: Value of a PDP-11,VAX-11/750?
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    
Reply-To: frank@rover.uchicago.edu
Organization: Joint Center for Radiation Therapy
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 21:39:00 GMT

In article <1992Nov11.190304.13102@mail.cornell.edu>, Jeffrey Luszcz <jrl2@cornell.edu> writes...
>  Re: Power Failures
>... lots of problems with slum landlord type power
> Does anyone know if a pdp-11/23+ uses less power then a 34a?

	unfortunately, changing your cpu will not help. Hungriest of the
	bunch is probably the RK05, followed by the tape drive. (RK05 on
	startup draws lots, that's when we usually popped breakers, when
	it turned out we were trying to run an 11/10 and RK05 plus some other
	stuff on the same line as a room air conditioner.)

	23 vers 34 is a little less power, but not by much.

	Were I in your position, I'd probably go scrounging around and try
	to snarf up an RL02 drive and controller. You'll get 4 times the
	storage for much less power.

   Frank R. Borger - Physicist    __       Internet:  Frank@rover.uchicago.edu
Michael Reese - Univ. of Chicago |___      Phone : 312-791-8075 fax : 567-7455
  Center for Radiation Therapy   | |_) _   I'ts a recession when your neighbor
                                   | \|_)  losses his job; it's a depression
    "Birthplace of Softball"          |_)  when you loose yours. - H. Truman
From: jcmorris@mwunix.mitre.org (Joe Morris)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: Typewriter-printers (was Re: Wanted: ... and Modem)
Date: 13 Nov 92 14:21:26 GMT
Organization: The MITRE Corporation

bcc@lanai.Eyring.COM (Brian Cooper) writes:

>On a related vein, did anyone ever use a contraption that sort of
>bolted onto a standard electric typewriter and turned it into a printer
>by using MECHANICAL FINGERS that would push the keys?
>As I recall, the advertising copy bragged that any common electric 
>typewriter could be converted to a computer printer in this way.  I
>suppose they might have tried it with a manual typewriter too, but
>for the carriage return (images of a large lever reaching up and going
>WHAPPP!).  My doubts are:  what was the accuracy of the device?  How 
>long before the poor typewriter broke under the strain?  Anybody have
>first-hand experience?

I remember those "magic fingers" boxes from my grad-school physics labs.
We used them to dump the counters from nuclear spectroscopy experiments a
and were damn thankful that we could avoid the dubious pleasures of
manually recording the data.

The standard unit bolted onto the keyboard of a standard office Selectric,
and had fingers for the ten digit keys, minus, tab and carriage return.
The controller for it was clocked to output data at slightly under the
Selectric speed (14.6 cps), with some extra delays when the <CR>  or tab 
key was struck.

I don't recall having any particular problems with the unit, although 
I did have some problems with the data it printed out...but for some
reason I don't think that it would be appropriate to blame *that*
problem on the printer itself...

Joe Morris
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: wingo@apple.com (Tony Wingo)
Subject: Re: command abbreviation
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1992 00:14:27 GMT
Organization: Apple Computer
Followup-To: alt.folklore.computers

In article <1992Nov6.223354.8877@sol.ctr.columbia.edu>,
slb22@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Seth L. Blumberg) wrote:
> 
> In article <foo> wingo@apple.com (Tony Wingo) writes:
> ...
> >
> >Yeah, back when I was programming on a PDP-10 in the early 70's, about two
> >thirds of our teletypes (ASR33's mostly) had the back-arrow as the shift-O
> >character. PIP was not the only thing that used it: I saw at least one
> >ALGOL variant that used it for assignment.
> 
> So, on those ASR-33's that *didn't* have the mutant shift-O, you would type
> 	pip dest _ source
> ?!?

Yep.  It was ugly.

(actually, prior to 1970 or so, I think that _ was the mutant shift O
character and <- was standard, though I'm not absolutely sure since before
working on the PDP-10 I did my typing on an 029 keypunch.  Maybe someone
older than me can clarify this point :-) ).

-tony
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: jleonard@jarthur.claremont.edu (Jon H. Leonard)
Subject: Re: proliferation of alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb groups
Organization: Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1992 18:57:12 GMT

In article <1dh98rINNceu@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> rfd@po.CWRU.Edu (Richard F. Drushel) writes:
>
>In a previous article, alange@rahul.net (Andrew Lange) says:
[deleted]
>>Does anyone know of the history of this prediliction for naming groups
>>alt.opt-adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb ?
>>
>>Which is the first one you saw? Have you ever created one?
>
>	I have only been on the net for 2 years, so I hardly qualify
>as net.god.  However, the word I hear from the bona fide net.gods is
>that alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork was the first such group with
>the triplicated verb.verb.verb.  For the Swedish Chef this is natural,
>because he says "Bork! Bork! Bork!" as a matter of course.  I am also
>told that this newsgroup formerly had a fair amount of traffic, which
>has since been diverted to alt.tv.muppets.
>
>	Perhaps someone from net.admin keeps stats on the creation
>dates of newsgroups, which would definitively answer the "when" part
>of your question.
[deleted]

Interesting:  A question on the net that I'm particularly qualified to answer.

Alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork had its creation here, and only escaped to the
net as an accident.  The initial reason for the group was that two students
(Jeff Vogel and Alex Pranger) wanted to create it locally as a prank on another
student (T.J. Wheeler) as a followup to a silly late night discussion.

Jeff, being our local news administrator at the time, proceeded to create the
group, but managed to make 2 mistakes:  He misspelled the word Distribution,
and didn't know to modify our sys file so as not send our articles.  This
combination was sufficient to give the group alarmingly wide distribution.
Even though it was rmgrouped within 3 hours of its creation, the sillier
elements of the net had seen it, and continued to post to it and recreate it.
Jeff was not responsible for anything after the original newgroup, as was
very concerned about it for some time.

As I recall, this was a little over 2 years ago, but I can't remember exactly.
-- 
Jon Leonard		jleonard@jarthur.claremont.edu

I'm not an actor, I just play one on TV.
Pay no attention to the microprocessor behind the curtain.
From: ansok@cco.caltech.edu (Gary Ansok)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: QUESTION: What was the 1st computer game?
Date: 11 Nov 1992 15:41:15 GMT
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
NNTP-Posting-Host: alumni.caltech.edu
Keywords: game

In article <1992Nov10.182806.14073@pollux.lu.se> magnus@thep.lu.se (Magnus Olsson) writes:
}In article <BxIDz1.2Fw@mach1.wlu.ca> veen2976@mach1.wlu.ca (veenstra christopher) writes:
}>Okay, Spacewar is the unanimous winner of that one.  Here's a followup then,
}>what's the first computer adventure game?
}
}But _that's_ an easy one, and an FAQ at that:
}
}Adventure, aka ADVENT, aka Colossal Cave, by Crowther and Woods.

What about "Hunt the Wumpus"?

Gary Ansok
... trying very hard not to make some comment about Clinton feeling a draft...