The cool games mainly came out of Minnesota, especially from the state high school cyber mainframe (MECC, Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium). Empire, Sceptre of Goth, many combat games, etc, etc. On the University cybers, we had Karnath, and other similar multi-user mazes of monsters. And of course if you could wrangle access to the real CDC systems downtown at the corporate headquarters, you could play Avatar. The university wrote some really nice compilers. MNF (Minnesota Fortran) and a really nice Pascal compiler, both with Post-Mortem Dump facilties that made debugging code very easy. When the program aborted, it would print a table explaining what function/subroutine name it aborted on, what line number, and a printout of variable names and values. If i recall, it would also print the source code line as well. The Pascal came with a very extensive set of library routines, I even convinced em to add some functions to allow me to properly manipulate direct-access files for a communication system I wrote for a game i never completed, though it was later added to someone elses game. -Lawrence LeMay