Odd "endianness" [was Re: RE: Base 64 posts to the list]

[Chuck Guzis]

On 12/07/2016 11:03 PM, jim stephens wrote:

> The Multics version I saw came from a Fortran version taken from a 
> PDP10.  If I'm not mistaken it was directly from the timeshare
> system they used in Billerica,Ma where Don Woods worked.  After some
> massaging it was unleashed on Multics.  Most of Honeywell was wiped
> out by copies on various machines for quite some time (2 or 3
> months?) before people quit risking getting into trouble to play it
> anyway.
> 
> There were two files, the main fortran file, and the table file with
> the cave encoding.  I suspect anyone who got a copy of the latter,
> and read the former wrote a program to print out a very useful cheat
> sheet.  If you had that, you could solve all of the puzzles from data
> in the table, and you only had to worry about the problems associated
> with random behavior.
> 
> The PDP-10 source did have a schedule feature to allow the game to
> only be played during certain hours, but in the copy we were running
> that was bypassed to allow it to run 24 / 7.

That sounds right.  I also remember the process in the PDP10 version
involved saving the entire core image of the game.  While I didn't make
a cheat sheet from the travel tables, a couple of friends did.

ADVENTure turned out to be a huge black hole for employees' time.  I
never owned up to being the ne'er do well who introduced it--it could
have turned into a big obstacle in my career had the facts been known.
I loosed the source on the landscape like a bunch of locusts--my name
never appeared anywhere in the CDC adaptation.

But I never took to the game very much.  I've never been one for
computer games and wheile Adventure was interesting, I grew
disinterested after about a week.  I knew people who'd sit at the 6600
operator's console playing Chess 3.0 for hours in the middle of the
night, but the idea of playing against a machine held no fascination.

That has proved to be the pattern ever since for computer games.  When I
wrote SIMCGA for the Hercules-Graphics-equipped PC, publishers would
send me games to try out.  None of them did a thing for me other than
make some money.

I must have the wrong mindset.  Does computer chess hold any interest
today?  Or is the matter of machine-over-human pretty much a fait accompli?

--Chuck