Display of first networked personal computer game returning

From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Mon Jun 2 07:19:01 2003

--- Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org> wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great Ethan Dicks once stated:
> > 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 thought of that as well (it was the December 1980 issue of Byte by
> the way...

Thanks. I *thought* it was in 1980, but I wasn't certain enough to
claim it.

> ... 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

PETs don't come with serial ports. The VIC-20 and C-64 had ROM code
to give you a bit-banging TTL serial port up to 1200 baud, but that
came after the PET. The Flash Attack communication protocol uses a
custom cable that transfers a nybble with full handshaking. One end
of the cable also has a specific pin grounded (the other end is floating)
to allow the computers on either end to determine who sends first.

I made a similar cable and used it extensively to transfer data between
my C-64 and my PET in 1982, long before I got a 4040 drive.

> technically that may make it a "network" but not
> in the general sense of the word (multiple machines).

All you need for a network is two machines. I've attached several
VAXen over point-to-point sync serial links and run DECnet over them.
Multiple machines and routing (or token passing) is another level
of networking, to be sure, but that doesn't disqualify a network with
only two endpoints.

-ethan
Received on Mon Jun 02 2003 - 07:19:01 BST