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VCF 7.0: BBS Bonanza in Bay Area
RaD Man [ACiD] writes "Vintage Computer Festival 7.0 will be taking place November 6-7th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California! In addition to the tours of antiquities and computer history galore, VCF 7.0 will be hosting a unique Retro Video Game Programming Challenge and presenting a number of interesting seminar speakers, such as the inventor of FidoNet, Tom Jennings. The VCF founder will also be appearing on G4TechTV's "The Screen Savers" this Tuesday, October 19th, to demonstrate some of his favorite artifacts."
Clearly you haven't played MUD which (as far as I can tell from research) predated LORD by over 10 years. LORD according to one site I checked started in the "early '90s" whereas MUD...
> The history of MUDs all starts in the UK, about 1979. Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University, started writing MUD, a game written in BCPL on a DEC-10. Along with Richard Bartle, who tidied up the system and added a very crude database compiler for it, they produced a very good combat game for it.
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
Tying into the underlying BBS theme this year, VCF will be hosting the first and only public screening of the long anticipated BBS Documentary which is due out on DVD late this year.
One other interesting fact about original MUD from the 1980s involving a VERY well known character:-
;)
One player of the Essex MUD was Alan Cox, also known as Anarchy. He wrote (with a bit of help) AberMUD, named after the University of Aberystwyth, Wales, which he attended at the time. It was originally implemented on a Honeywell mainframe running GCOS but was soon ported to UNIX. Its poor design and implementation (all game information was stored in a shared file, which meant that several processes were constantly accessing the disc) did not endear it to many system administrators. Nevertheless, it was the first MUD to gain widespread popularity. After the source code reached the United States, several people made enhancements and additions, notably Rich $alz. It now seems to have found a home at St. Olaf University, where a few dedicated hackers are keeping it alive despite its general grunginess.
I believe he's still programming somewhere & has improved greatly...
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
In case you guys don't understand the significance of RaD Man posting this story, he leads the ACiD artwork group. ACiD was the biggest, and best, ansi art group back in the day. They had distro's all over the world at one point, and if you had original ACiD art on your board, you were leet.
I miss the BBS days. There was something appealing to me about playing B.R.E, L.O.R.D, Barneysplat, posting FIDOnet messages, and trying to figure out ways to scam the upload/download credit system. Bulletin boards definately helped inspire some of the basic fundamental utilities we have on the internet today - message boards, games, file transfers, we had it all.
It really was some of the best times i've ever had with a computer, period. I'm only 24 and this is literally part of my childhood. I urge any old sysops, or anyone who is curious to check out the BBS Documentary website for more nostalgia & information.
708/312 repruhzent.
i wish there was something like that remotely close to where I am, old computer systems are so cool. i think its a shame that there isn't something that we can do with all that old equipment
Ah, the Kaypro 4. It originally shipped with a 2Mhz Z80 in the 4-83. The 4-84 had a 4Mhz Z80. If it was closer to '81, maybe your friend had a Kaypro II with its zippy 2Mhz Z80?
There were all kinds of speed up kits, hacks, and mods out there for the Kaypros. Now, mix the 8Mhz speed up kit with the SWP 8088 coprocessor board and use the 256Kb of memory for a ram disk and you are cooking!
It is pretty amazing to think that you could get the Kaypros to run at 2-4X the speed for a reasonable price. I don't think that you can do anywhere near as good now. (Anyone got a P4 up to 14.4Ghz yet?)
If your friend was programming with SBasic, I can understand the desire to speed it up. It had to be in the running for Slowest. Compiler. Ever. Maybe one of the early Ada compilers written in Lisp running on a DEC would give it a run for the money. Maybe.
An awful lot of good work was done on those old computers.
C'mon crack open an old computer programming book, boot up an emulator (or for us collectors, dust off one of those micros you have stacked in the corner.) and practice writing your three-hour masterpiece.
Resources for Retrocoders:
Atari Archives bookshelf, includes many 6502/BASIC related books
Project 64's C64 Manuals & Programmer's Reference Guide
Here's some Apple IIgs manuals. :-/
Not much of any on-line accessible resources for Apple IIs, where are all the real Apple II fans!!???
As a retrocode winner, I would sugest looking at the stuff in the Atari Archives (the BASIC Games books) to get ideas of the type of games that are doable in three hours (no, not Super Star Trek, the smaller ones!) But I wouldn't write any of 'em verbatim, you get points for making it more modern, flashier, and/or vintage computer related.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield