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posted by Fnord666 on Monday December 25 2017, @10:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the there-was-life-before-WWW? dept.

Right from the beginning, games were a component of the commercial online services that predated the World Wide Web; both The Source and CompuServe included them among their offerings from the moment those services first went online. In the early years, such online games were mostly refugees from 1970s institutional computing. Classics like Star Trek, Adventure, and Hammurabi had the advantage of being in the public domain and already running without modification on the time-shared computer systems which hosted the services, and could thus be made available to subscribers with a minimum of investment. Eventually even some text-only microcomputer games made the transition. By 1984, CompuServe, now well-established at the vanguard of the burgeoning online-services industry, had a catalog that included the original Adventure along with an expanded version, nine Scott Adams games, and the original PDP-10 Zork (renamed for some reason to The House of Banshi). And those were just the text adventures. There were also the dungeon crawls Dungeons of Kesmai and Castle Telengard and the war games Civil WarFantasy, and Command Decision, while for the less hardcore there were the CompuServe Casino, board games like Reversi, and curiosities like a biorhythm charter and an astrology calculator.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by daver!west!fmc on Monday December 25 2017, @06:01PM (1 child)

    by daver!west!fmc (1391) on Monday December 25 2017, @06:01PM (#614116)

    Heh. I remember Doom. Here's how.

    Imagine a large state university with campuses all over the state. Only now it's the 1990s and here we are in an administrative computer center. Even though we have TCP/IP, there's still some folks holding on to VMS and DECnet (which is gonna be OSI real soon now, and that'll be it for your TCP/IP, yeah right) and worst of all LAT, and LAT is worst because there's a network spanning the state (because the VMS fan club is still big on VT220s into DECserver 100s/200s) and LAT means it's bridged. Yeah, the bridges are smart but they're not smart enough, kind of like the VMS fan club.

    So here's the latest thing, Doom, and there's a couple of us looking at it, so we've got it up on two PCs. "Hey is that you?" I ask, pressing the fire key because I don't know any better way to indicate what I'm pointing at. "Yeah yeah yeah stop shooting!" And the phone rings, Arseburg campus out at the arse end of the state has just dropped off the net because of all the IPX broadcast traffic between our two PCs.

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  • (Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Thursday December 28 2017, @04:49PM

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Thursday December 28 2017, @04:49PM (#615154)

    I remember doom very well because the first version was a little buggy...

    It used IPX broadcasts to talk to other players. Not too bad if you have a single game with 3 other people. Very very very bad if you have groups of people who are supposed to be working sneaking games of doom on an IPX network with a game that uses broadcasts on.. a 4 megabit token-ring star topology.

    oh man

    then the network/server guys get blamed that someone can't print or connect to whatever file server...but it's because... 32 people are playing doom in 8 different areas in just this department alone!

    Needless to say, it was my desire to continue gaming despite the tradegy of the new "computer use policy" we all had to agree to... that helped me become the person I am today! I also learned a lot as to how this stuff worked... and how to identify similar broadcast storms and the like. Games suffer the same problems applications do, too, and with games it is worse... people are rarely honest about it. It can be harder to troubleshoot a widepread issue when no one admits to being part of the problem but are readily blaming others.

    Sometimes games really do provide an education even if shooting demons with friends doesn't seem like the most intuitive career path to take...

    To id's credit, id also later fixed the broadcast issue in the next patch of Doom (maybe 1.1; I think 1.2 introduced the serial/modem option... I was using IPX over serial and then tunneling it at 9600bps at the time, so the official support was a welcome change since it worked the first time...unlike my command-line kludge...)

    (and hey I laughed at the VMS/bridges being smart but not smart enough comment... it's still relevant today. there are diehard adherents out there, but I was more of a VT100 guy myself since it put me into a proper 'work mode'. ANSI made me think of calling boards and online games...)