• Re: Colossal Cave Adventu

    From Mike Powell@1:2320/105 to JEFF THIELE on Tue Mar 1 16:18:00 2022
    Same here. The Mammoth Cave system was the inspiration for "Colossal Ca
    Adventure," the first interactive fiction computer game (1976). Develop
    a PDP-10, the author used maps and recollections of his own Mammoth Cav
    explorations to populate it, and the original version had no sorcery or
    dragons or the like. It was an attempt to let people experience Mammoth
    without having to actually go into it.

    It was indeed text-based. I'm not sure what would need to be done to make it a door game, but the original was in FORTRAN and can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/Neko250/adventure

    Too bad it is not COBOL or I might understand what it was doing. :)

    Did they have COBOL for the PDP machines?

    Going to move this to Classic Computers before we start something here we
    don't intend to! :D

    Mike


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  • From Jeff Thiele@1:387/26 to Mike Powell on Fri Mar 4 16:40:12 2022
    On 01 Mar 2022, Mike Powell said the following...
    Too bad it is not COBOL or I might understand what it was doing. :)

    Did they have COBOL for the PDP machines?

    Going to move this to Classic Computers before we start something here we don't intend to! :D

    They did have COBOL for the PDPs, but the PDP-8 and PDP-11 were quite
    different from one another. The PDP-8 was fairly primitive as computers go.
    It didn't have a consolidated CPU, the memory consisted of iron rings woven together with wire, and it had no concept of a stack. It had only 8 instructions, with one instruction including all operands per 12-bit word
    (with one exception). The exception was a microcoded instruction that could represent (and execute) multiple operations simultaneously.

    DEC's goal with the PDP-8 was to make an affordable computer (<$20K) for
    people and businesses who may not have needed a full-blown IBM mainframe. Although it's dwarfed by even the most modest of modern computers, it was
    quite popular at the time. There was even a cheaper, slower model, the
    PDP-8/S that had a serial system bus: it did everything one byte at a time.

    The PDP-10 (a successor to the PDP-6) and PDP-11 were more advanced.

    I can compile a DOS or Linux version if you'd like (although I'll bet that there are already Linux binaries out there somewhere).

    Jeff.

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