It was thus said that the Great Ethan Dicks once stated:
>
> --- Martin Scott Goldberg <wgungfu_at_csd.uwm.edu> wrote:
> > Thanks to the Milwaukee Computer Society, MIDI Maze on the Atari ST will
> > be returning as a computer display for the first time in 14 years. For
> > those not familiar, MIDI Maze was the first networked
> > personal computer game (using the ST series' built in MIDI ports).
>
> There was a game for the PET that linked user ports that was available
> years before the ST came out. It was well documented in Byte magazine.
> I never bought it because I had only one PET. Each player had a fixed
> base and a roving tank. The goal of the game was to lob an ICBM on
> the other player's base. You located it by exploring with the tank.
> I cannot recall the name at the moment, but it's come up for discussion
> on the list before.
I thought of that as well (it was the December 1980 issue of Byte by the
way, and later one it became Flash Attack available on the MajorBBS)
but I discountd that as I thought it used the serial port to hook only two
machines together; technically that may make it a "network" but not in the
general sense of the word (multiple machines).
The article itself was written by Tim Striker and someone else I don't
recall and pretty much worked as described. Later on, Tim founded
Galacticomm, which started out as a hardware company making multi-port
serial boards but switched to software when one of their demo program, the
MajorBBS, because a hit. I the late 80s, Tim (or maybe it was Scott Brinker
[1]) rewrote Flash Attack for the MajorBBS. I even wrote a program [4] to
help me play the game (which was encouragd by the company as they realized
people would cheat, so they made the cheats available 8-)
-spc (Interesting game ... )
[1] Nice guy, but wierdly intense in that optimistic Richard Simmons
type of way. I first met him in the late 80s/early 90s when he was
still in high school running one of the larger dialup BBSes in Ft.
Lauderdale; this was when Flash Attack came out. A few years later
in the mid 90s he became President of Galacticomm and during his
stint the MajorBBS was being ported to Unix [2] and I was hired to
help the port---I ended up quiting two weeks later over differences
in coding styles [3].
[2]
http://www.kenmaier.com/gcomm/mbbsunix.htm
[3] They used K&R style and actively discouraged comments; no function
or global variable could not be longer than seven characters (ANSI
C89 limit, but realistically the compilers they used allowed more)
and they themselves could not rationalize *why* they enforced that
style (other than, that's what Tim, Scott and Bob [Stein] were used
to). My arguments were dismissed, then so was I.
[4] Still have the code and it works for both the PC and PCjr [5]. It
was also smaller, faster, less intrusive (it was NOT a TSR) and did
not require floating point math, unlike the program written by
Galacticomm itself. I could also beat people dialed in at 1200 than
those dialed in as 2400 ...
[5] Subtle differences in how the keyboard interrupts work; enough that
you have to code around them.
Received on Sun Jun 01 2003 - 23:17:00 BST