[Simh] 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was Re: PDP11 on Simh for public access)

[Clem Cole]

On Sun, Jan 20, 2019 at 6:46 PM Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sorry to dredge up an old thread, but I’m curious as to the provenance of
> the tape.
>
An interesting question that I think that is going to be very hard because
of time and what we now call 'Open Source.'   I personally consider Ahl as
the editor and collector of those games; not the author as the fact is
versions of many of them ran of non-DEC systems before he wrote the book.
My first introduction to computers was in my father's office running
Darthmouth BASIC under GE Mark III on an ASR33 in the later 60s.   Dad was
teaching Math and a intro to computer course at a prep-school in LA and
then in a different school outside of Philadelphia starting in 67.

The game I personally liked the most was the Horse Racing game on the GE
Mark III.  We played a number of them when we were allowed too, as a 12
year old those games were magical.  It is also what got me interesting in
computing and how a computer worked.   I must have studied the sources to
'Races' for hours, asking my dad questions.   I was so proud when I wrote
my first ( BASIC ) program; shortly there after.

Another data point, a year or so later, to save money my Dad switched the
school in Philly from GE  to an HP2000 timesharing system from a local
provider (who's name I do not remember). One reason, I remember is that he
was able to increase our access to three ASR33's instead of one (110 baud,
dial-up with an accostic coupler for the phone) for the same budget.

But to your question, pretty much the same games from the Mark III were on
the HP system too, definitely Races, Blackjack and a Poker game too (there
were others too but those where what stuck in the brain of the 12 yr old
me).   I also remember Dad had an account on a PDP-10 of some type which we
could use for special project that did not work well on the HP.  I was
starting to try actually to do real math on the computer and was trying to
write an root solver using newton's method (in BASIC and later HP2000
assembler).  But along the way, I saw the first versions of the DEC BASIC
on the PDP-10.

The DEC version of Basic was different/more advanced then Dartmouth Basic
of the HP 2000 and GE -- DEC had added some level of typing, i.e. 26
integer variables and number of other extensions, maybe more dimensions for
arrays (I've forgotten the details) than the original Dartmouth Basic had.
But when Dad got me my first PDP-10 account, I remember one of the first
things I looked for was the games directory, and most of what I had seen
before on the GE and HP systems was there also.

FWIW: I later saw Ahl's book from Digital Press in college and thought it
was pretty nifty.  It was eventually republished by someone else (maybe
even number of times), but I did not buy a copy of it until much later and
was from one of those editions.   In fact, I may have still have my old
copy; although the version was after it had been translated to the
Microsoft Basic for the Apple and CP/M systems on the early 1980s (which
were all based on the DEC dialects with their extensions, not the simplier
pure Darthmouth - 'Kemeny and Kurtz version
<https://www.i-programmer.info/history/people/739-kemeny-a-kurtz.html>' of
the 1960s).   As other have pointed out, even DEC the dialects were
sometimes a little different between each other - that was normal in those
days.    Funny, by the time I had the money to be able to buy the book, I
had started to lose interesting in playing games on the computer, or for
that matter writting them and I had definitely drifted from BASIC.  But
running BDS C on a CP/M machine was harder and so many things just used
basic at that point; plus I did not yet an C compiler for my Apple II which
I was then using more as a terminal to remote UNIX boxes.

Anyway, the point is that simple computer games in BASIC were being passed
around between people (as paper tapes), particularly if you had acccess to
multiple different brands of computers.    You always had the source code,
in those days so it was really not big deal.  In fact, my memory is that
one of the new things that you could do on the PDP-10 was >>compile<< your
basic program, or at least leave it in some form that some one could not
see what you had done.   But the HP and GE system, you just loaded the
program and typed 'list' - often after turning on the paper tape punch the
ASR33.

Clem





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