We wrote service and utility programs for use by the classes we helped to teach, for example, a very superior MIX assembler and interpreter, based on the work of Donald Knuth . One of my minor claims to fame is to have been memorialized in a footnote and the index in Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming , Vol. But mostly we wrote games, and other entertainments. It was generally considered a feather in one's cap to beat this program more than half the time. I wrote the Hangman game, where you try to guess a word by guessing letters.
Wrong guesses result in having successive portions of stick figure drawn.
If the figure is complete before you guess the word, you lose. There were three sets of these tables, one for the initial two letters in a word, one for the final two letters in a word, and one for interior letter pairs. We primed these tables by typing in an entire short story, and running a program to count letter pairs. We also played around with early computer art , our canvas being standard computer paper and our medium the high-speed line printer. When these happened fast enough, you got a variety of buzzes, whirs, and bleeps.