At 06:04 PM 6/6/01 -0700, Kristin wrote:
>...I cut the graphical crap and play the Rogue descendatnt,
>NetHack. (MSDOS version - I understand with unixoids you know, but I can't
>stand the vi key mapping...) I've *never* beaten the thing, and I'm
>already a version behind! But the Power of Open Source makes it so
>wonderfully complicated even if you ARE just an @ symbol in a dungeon of
>dots!
>
>Rogue was something I discovered by accident; I went to a small college
>where even an English major like me could get an account on the DEC PDP-20
>(DEC 20) mainframe they had at the time. Of course, you got twice as much
>disk space and some traffic priority if you *were* a computer science
>student, but I didn't mind. I found the games and it was kinda rigged so
>you could only play when the load dropped below a certain threshold which
>tended to mean 2am or something; i teneded not so much to get killed as
>thrown out when work came first! well, try iut and you're hooked (I hear
>there is even a version of the original Rogue for PalmPilots.)
>
>Just think, me and a few pals in the campus Dr. Who club (closest thing
>we had to an SF club) used this whole big computer for frivolous things
>like, um, sending email to each other!
Some years ago, people would frequently bring the entire campus IBM 370/158
system to its knees when a few of them tried to simultaneously play the
lunar landing simulation from terminals in various parts of campus. And of
course by today's standards we are talking laughably simple ASCII graphics
. . .
-- Ronn! :)
