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posted by Fnord666 on Friday May 08 2020, @05:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the frobizz dept.

Source code for seminal adventure game Zork on dead mainframe exhumed onto GitHub:

Source code for seminal adventure game has been Zork[sic] recovered and published on GitHub.

While classic adventure games (aka interactive fiction) are well represented in the Internet Archive - there's plenty of playable Zork versions here - this new trove is source code that's been retrieved from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tapes of Tech Square (ToTS) collection at the MIT Libraries Department of Distinctive Collections (DDC).

If you access the repo and its README you're told the source was written "in the MDL programming language written on a PDP-10 timeshare computer running the ITS operating system".

[...] The code in the repo comes from 1977, before the game was commercialised but at a time it was informally distributed.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by hubie on Friday May 08 2020, @07:33PM (3 children)

    by hubie (1068) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 08 2020, @07:33PM (#991795) Journal

    Ah yes, that is the same version control I remember from VAX/VMS. You'd go along for a while and then you could type "purge" to keep only the highest numbered file. Accidentally purging copies I wanted to save happened from time to time.

    If I may go off on a tangent, another thing I remember from VMS was that DECNET was all connected together. You could change directory from your account to someone else's just like you do on unix, but you could also do it across the world by typing (I think) OTHER_MACHINE::other_directory. You had the equivalent of the user permissions on unix, but you could easily mount a disk across the world as if it was mounted to your machine. I miss those days. I didn't need software that uses 50% of my computer resources to be constantly running in the background and scanning for "threats" and such.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2020, @10:00PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2020, @10:00PM (#991842)

    > I didn't need software that uses 50% of my computer resources to be constantly running in the background and scanning for "threats" and such.

    Yes because you spent 50% of *your* resources doing that. Someone automated it and now you're butthurt. Aw you're butthurt.

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Saturday May 09 2020, @01:31AM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 09 2020, @01:31AM (#991923) Journal

      You've seen the T-shirt that says "stupidity should hurt"? What they meant was, stupidity should hurt the stupid people. Specifically, stupidity should hurt the people who designed an insecure system, as well as those people who pay good money for the "privilege" of running those insecure systems.

      Upgrade to *nix.

  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Saturday May 09 2020, @03:33AM

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 09 2020, @03:33AM (#991946) Journal

    Back in the early 80s when I was at DEC, I remember printing on a line printer (with just 2 or 3 pages of 132-column, green-bar paper) the a map of the *entire* DECNET network. With plain old ASCII characters for *everything*.

    +-----------+    +-----------+
    | MAR-VAX-1 |----| MAY-T20-3 |--- ...
    +-----------+    +-----------+
          |                |
          |                +----
         ...

    (There was more but I had to chop it out to bypass the site lameness filter for "too much whitespace or repetition".)

    DECNET -- yes, local or remote -- from the user side of things they were equivalent (except for network delays, of course!).

    I've occasionally wondered how much DECNET path-names influenced Microsoft's UNC [wikipedia.org] names.

    --
    Wit is intellect, dancing.