Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

blast from the past

So in regards to a previous posting about DataPower I got a thank-you e-mail from Rich Salz – a name that I’ve not really seen much since I gave up on being a USENET admin in 1996-ish, but which is familiar to we older generation of geeks in the days before USENET became DejaNews, latterly Google Groups. [groups.google.com]

Amongst his many other achievements, I nonetheless still remember him as one of the first porters/enhancers of AberMUD to Unix, and one of the earliest evangelists. [www.crypticide.com] [www.d.kinder.btinternet.co.uk]

I still have the AberMUD 1 source code on paper in B (yes, B, the language[1] which came before C and well before C++ and Java) – courtesy of Chris Samuel.

I wonder whether anyone’d think it worthwhile OCR-ing.

Hmm… Do-able, but painful.

—
[1] “…we have both kinds of variables: auto, and static…”

⊞

Comments

5 responses to “blast from the past”

  1. Jim
    re: blast from the past

    AberMUD 1 source? I’d love to see that…

    Reply
  2. MaF
    re: blast from the past

    Was not Abermud the program where each player had his own process and there was an interesting IPC mechanism. This consisted of one common state-file which each process read/wrote. I do not remember how often the file was updated but think it was more than once per second (per process).

    Needless to say Abermud generated quite a load the machine which hosted it.

    Reply
  3. alecm
    re: blast from the past

    that’s the one; the IPC mechanism was designed because there was no userland interprocess communication under GCOS-3.

    Reply
  4. Chris Samuel
    re: blast from the past

    Aye, it’s a mish-mash of printouts of various date from 88-89 from memory. I don’t think it’s complete, sadly..

    Ah the joys of btidy and having to compile as a batch process..

    Reply
  5. Chris Samuel
    re: blast from the past

    It was created as an extension of the Honeyboard BBS talker that itself was the result of a challenge from the Computer Unit sysman Rob Ash (immortalised as Rotash Burt the mobile in AberMUD1) that you couldn’t do it because there was no IPC.

    So folks (I think Alan, Leon, possibly Jim, not sure as I hadn’t discovered them then) decided to create an IPC mechanism out of shared files.

    And thus a legend was born, and a number of degrees ruined.

    You could argue that without AberMUD 1 Linux would be in quite a different state these days.. 🙂

    Reply

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