Call for Resources for CDC 6000/Cyber 70 Series Emulator

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Fri Jun 1 14:27:17 2001

> 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.

My first exposure to MECC was post-college; MECC had converted a huge
base of BASIC programs to run on one of those Wang suitcase-portable
BASIC systems; I had to convert the programs to run under Primos'
BASIC/VM.

> 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.

Yeah, MNF was pretty cool, I wish I still had my manual!

However, I didn't know they spun a Pascal compiler; strange, I was a
PUG Charter member...

Regards,
-doug q
Received on Fri Jun 01 2001 - 14:27:17 BST