From Clive Dawson
This is what I remember about the buildings that the Computer Sciences Dept. occupied over the years. When I arrived in the Fall of 1971, CS was housed in Waggener Hall together with Classics and Philosophy. Pearce Hall (Building) was to the south, across Inner Campus Drive, just west of the Business Building (BEB). It housed an RJE (Remote Job Entry) terminal which is where Dave Matuszek remembers going to submit card decks and retrieve printouts. These functions could also be performed in the Computation Center proper.
Noah: We're talking with Dave Matuszek, co-creator with Paul Reynolds of the 1974 Fortran Star Trek game on the CDC 6600, and we're going to learn about your experiences and your history in 1973 and 1974. So we'll start off with background. So tell me a little bit about yourself. 1973, 1974, how did you end up at UT?
Dave: Okay. I did my undergraduate work at Michigan State University. At that time there basically was no such thing as a computer science program. Nonetheless, a lot of people were interested in computers, and my wife and I took courses where we could find them, like from sociology and psychology and mathematics, and I just got hooked. It was a lot of fun. After I graduated, I wanted to do something more serious with my life, so I went into psychology. And after a year of that, and just deciding it wasn't for me, the ACM at that time posted a little pamphlet of all the computer science degrees in this country and Canada. And we looked them over. I selected five of them and applied. Decided to end up going out to the University of Texas. University of Wisconsin was a strong contender at that point. But that was at the point where people were talking about possibly blowing up the computer there. And in fact, after we moved to Texas, they did try to do that. So I ended up at Texas as a teaching assistant. I really love teaching. I really love programming. And we got into this Star Trek program.
Noah: Well, we'll spend a lot of time on that. We're going to get into that, but let's get a little bit more background. Where did you actually grow up? Were you from Michigan? Dave: Yeah, I was born and grew up in Michigan. Noah: Okay, so moving to Texas was a big move. Dave: Yes. My wife and I kept looking at each other and saying, "Texas?". Okay, but it turns out Austin is a pretty nice cosmopolitan city.
Noah: Where was the computer science department at the time, 1973, 1974? Do you happen to remember what building it was located in or where on campus it was? Dave: I can't bring the name of the building to mind right away. It was right next to the speech building. Noah: Okay. I mean, I'm thinking it might have been Taylor Hall. Dave: Yes. Noah: Okay, yeah, we know roughly what part of campus. So there was Taylor Hall, and this wasn't far from the actual computation center, right?
Dave: Correct. Noah: Can you maybe just describe a little bit what the computation center was like, the actual building, if you can call it that? Dave: Basically, I can't. Okay, what I can tell you is that there was a building quite a ways across campus called Pearce Hall, which is where we typed up our card decks and submitted them, and they were entered into the system and run there. That was physically separate from the computation center. Okay, and then of course after a couple of years we aren't using card decks anymore. Noah: We'll definitely check in on that, like how you physically were interacting with the machine. Let's get a little bit more background before we dive into it though. So, what was your life like outside of UT when you were in Austin? What part of town were you living in in Austin?
Dave: Well, let's see. At first, we were living in someone's rented basement. And let's see, after a while, we got into married student housing. Noah: Okay, was this down by the river, by the lake? Dave: Yes, it was. Noah: Yeah, that's still married student housing today, so I know exactly what you mean. Dave: And it was what, Colorado Apartments, I think? Noah: Uh-huh, something like that, right. It's still there. What would you say Austin was like for you? And were you a Star Trek fan, by the way?
Dave: Less so than a lot of people. I'm a science fiction fan and Star Trek was sort of science fiction, and yes, I enjoyed it. Noah: But not a hardcore Trekkie. Dave: Not a hardcore Trekkie, that's right. Noah: Did you appreciate any other things about Austin like the music or anything special that you remember about Austin at the time? Dave: We were never really into music. My wife was also in a graduate program there. We spent most of our time eating at some of the nearby restaurants. After a few years, we started having children and found a very nice Mexican babysitter for them. Once we had children, spent quite a bit of time going to the nearby library and getting out books. I was there for quite a long time. I was actually in the graduate program for 10 years. And the reason for that was we were getting by okay with the money that we were making, and they kept coming up with new courses, and there was always something new and interesting, and you know of course doing the final dissertation is work. But I eventually got around to it.
Noah: So you were there until the early 80s basically in Austin. Dave: Yeah, not good at dates, but that's about right. Noah: It's about right. So let's go ahead and dive in to actually dealing with the machine and then we'll get into Star Trek. Let's explore a little bit what working with the machine was like. Describe the physical situation. So you say Pearce Hall you were submitting card decks. How did that work?
Noah: So the 6600, yeah, my picture is that it was actually in the computation center which is next to the main building. This kind of subterranean bunker style building and you could walk down into the hallway and behind the glass you could see the machine, right? Dave: Correct. Noah: Was your tape stored there inside the machine room? Okay. And you would be in a different building and you would have to request your tape to be mounted, is that exactly right? How long did that take usually for that to happen?
Dave: A minute or two. Noah: Really? That's nice. Dave: And so you see, although the computation center was right there, there was hardly any reason for me ever to visit it. Noah: Right. Because all you could do would be peer through the glass windows and look at the machine like everybody else. What we can say is because it's in this kind of basement underground bunker, there wasn't a lot of space. There certainly wasn't room for terminal rooms down there. There was just the machine room and maybe some offices, right?
Dave: There was a machine room, as to offices possibly. But you know, as I say, why would I ever go there? Noah: Yeah, there wasn't much space down there. So the machine rooms were in other buildings and people should picture that the users were in other buildings. Let's jump ahead just a little bit to talk about Star Trek. When you were working on Star Trek, did you have a terminal already?
Dave: Yes. Noah: Okay, that's key. Dave: It was interactive. 80 characters, 24 lines, I think. Green screen. Noah: The name Pearce Hall sounds kind of familiar to me. Can you orient me a little bit, like where it was on campus? Was it near the main building? Dave: Okay, there is a, and I think it's still there, a major business building. Sort of on the south end, southwest corner. And it was a bit north of that.
Noah: Okay. Dave: From the westmost corner. And I don't know how long it's been gone, but I'm sure it's been gone for quite a while. Noah: Yep, could be. The name sounds familiar to me, but not. So the terminal room, it was shared with other departments? Was it purely a computer science terminal room or was it shared? Dave: It was shared. If you want a bit of history, it was on the main floor occupying I think pretty much the main floor, although I don't recall. Down below in the basement was anthropology. And it was full of skeletons and things. And there was one office right at the back where if you go down and go through the anthropology room, there's an office. And that was my office for a while.
Noah: Nice. Dave: And I did not get many visitors. Noah: But you were right next to the terminal room, which is nice. It was on the floor above you, right? Dave: Yep. Noah: Was there any possibility of having a terminal in your office? Dave: No, we're still talking about the first year or two. Noah: Actually we skipped over, I missed. How did you meet Paul Reynolds? Dave: He and I were both new. I think he came in the year after I did. In fact, I think, I can't swear to this, but I think he took the Fortran course that I was teaching.
Noah: Okay. Dave: And we got together, did a little bit of programming together, became friends. Noah: So he actually might have been in your class. He was learning Fortran. Did you work together in the terminal room? Did you do coding sessions together? Dave: Okay, now, going back to the terminal room. Again, that was with the punch cards the first year or two. And that was you walk in, you use a machine, you hand in your cards, you walk out again. Except for a period when instead of having an office downstairs, I had an office in what was basically a broom closet in the terminal room, which was a very fascinating place because people thought I was a consultant and they would come to me with all sorts of problems.
Noah: Oh, that's funny. And you were trying to work though. This was your office, and hey I'm willing to help. Dave: I don't care if I don't know the language. You make the same kind of mistakes in every language. Noah: This is curious. Obviously people were using Fortran. Were there people using COBOL? Maybe business students were there as well using COBOL? Dave: Oh God. Okay, here's the truth. COBOL was invented for an IBM 605. Its layout was designed to work perfectly with that machine. That machine was a character-oriented computer where the arithmetic was, you specified how many digits you wanted in each number, and it did the arithmetic from the end like a human would and had a multiplication table stored. 6600 had 60-bit words. It didn't have characters. So fitting COBOL onto that machine was sort of putting a motor on top of a camel or something. And I recall this very well because at one point I got stuck teaching a one-credit course in COBOL, and many is the time I would go in and say to the students, "I tried to prepare for this lecture, but I just couldn't. It's so terrible.".
Noah: Understood, understood. How did you feel about Fortran? Dave: It's what I learned. It was my first language. Fortran II, actually. What we were using on the 6600 was Fortran IV. And I think it was locally developed, their version of it. So let me point out that back in those days, you can't assume that Fortran on one machine was anything like Fortran on another. Noah: Okay, understood. Dave: So we wrote in 6600 Fortran and that was it.
Noah: So, let's start looking at what happened with the Star Trek game. First of all, it sounds like you were quite busy with graduate studies. You were spending a lot of time in the terminal room. Were you aware of games on the CDC? Dave: There was a Space War-type game that the people in the computation center played, but the first and I guess maybe the only game that I was aware of that was terminal-based was Star Trek. And I should recall who wrote that, but I don't.
Noah: And we have a few names. I don't have them at hand right now, but Jim Corp and Brady Hicks. So, the notes we have are that they implemented Star Trek in BASIC on the 6600. Dave: Okay, it was in BASIC, it was on the 6600. Noah: Did you play that game? Dave: A few times, which is why I decided to write it. Okay, there were two basic problems. One is that this is still on a terminal. You're getting text across character by character and it's fairly slow, and it was full of quotes from Marcus Aurelius, who has to be the most boring philosopher that was ever born. And you know you'd be playing and then you'd sit there and twiddle your thumbs for a while while you got some stupid quote. So there were a number of other minor irritants. The computation center really hated it because this is a 6600. Now this is a supercomputer. The BASIC program took 20 seconds to load. And that's an incredible amount of time. And that's not the fault of the programmers, that's the fault of BASIC, but we decided to write our own version in Fortran minus quotes from Marcus Aurelius. And although the official position of the computation center was no games, this is for work, this is for study, you don't play games on it, they loved our Star Trek. First of all, there were a lot of Star Trek nerds. And secondly, instead of taking 20 seconds, it took 1/20th of a second to load. So the pressure on the machine practically vanished with that game.
Noah: Understood. So the 6600 was running in a time-sharing mode. So there were multiple users. So I wanted to ask you about how the computation center felt about games and I think you've made clear that they weren't too happy with it at first. I wanted to ask you, you mentioned that this computation center had a Space War-type game. Dave: I believe so. If you look into the history, as I'm sure you have, there are a number of games floating around at that point that you had to be at the computer in order to play. And it was my impression that they did do that. But of course, nobody told us.
Noah: Over your career, did you ever see the original Space War on a PDP-1? Dave: No, I have not. Noah: Okay. I think that this was a lucky small group of people that actually saw it on a PDP-1 because there just weren't that many PDP-1s. Dave: Right. For a while I used a PDP-8, but that's another story entirely. Noah: So, is there anything else about what we've discussed so far today? Is there anything else that you would like to say about all of that?
Dave: Yeah, let me mention one thing. The game got quite popular among students there at Texas, of course, and because Paul and I had written it, they assumed I was good at playing it. The fact was that I hardly ever finished a game because whenever I started playing, I'd find something that needed polishing or something that could be added. And I had more fun programming it than playing it. Noah: Understood. So I get the impression that you weren't playing a lot of games. In any case, it was more of a programming challenge.
Noah: So, was there anyone else there that were hands on with the code? Or it was mostly you? Dave: Just Paul and myself. Noah: Okay. You said that it became quite popular. Did you have any idea that it would have a history and be talked about 40 years later? Dave: No. So, if I had to choose one thing that I'd be famous for, I'm not sure this would be it. But on the other hand, I can't think of anything else I might ever be famous for.
Noah: So on this topic, Eric Raymond, his website and Git repo kind of records the history of the Star Trek games, and you know we learned a lot about you from that. When you interacted with Eric, did you have any idea that what he was doing would grow into kind of an archive of a type? Dave: Oh, yeah. I met Eric at a science fiction convention in Philadelphia. We were both science fiction fans. Became friends, discovered he lived about a mile from me. And so we were friends for many years. We sort of still are. When I say sort of still, we don't talk politics. He's a libertarian and I'm very much a liberal. Noah: Understood. And Eric has strong opinions. Dave: He does have strong opinions. He's somewhat controversial. My editor asked me not to use a quote from him in my data structures book, which I can respect. But you know, he can still be an interesting person and a great programmer and all that stuff even if his politics are not anything I would want to touch with a 10-foot pole.
Noah: Understood. Dave: We used to be a lot closer, but things changed. Noah: What years was this that you were living nearby? Dave: 80s or 90s. We moved here in '85. We probably met him somewhere around '90. I don't know. Paula, when did we first meet Eric? Yeah, my wife says 1990s.
Noah: All right. So we're going to start with talking about the 6600 and any other machines, any other platforms that you'd like to discuss, right? So, we don't have to stick just to the 6600. So I'm really curious, you were there for around 10 years whether you saw any kind of change over that period. So if you remember anything, maybe you noticed the CDC Cyber come in. I'm quite interested in the history of the Cyber that kind of replaced the 6600, and then we'll go from there into the Fortran, into the game. So let's just start with tell me a little bit about the 6600. How do you feel about it?
Dave: It was a great machine. It was of course a supercomputer in its time. As for changes as I mentioned, started with punched cards and by the time I left we were playing Star Trek online and doing most of our editing online. Let me tell you just a little about the editing process because it wasn't like today when you pull up everything you've got and start editing it. What we did for Star Trek was print the whole thing out every week or two, go through and mark our changes on the printout, and then go to the computer and enter them.
Noah: Would you say that it was kind of pre-screen editor? Dave: Oh, yes. Well, okay, as I remember, now bear in mind that this was a long time ago, I don't remember exactly how the editing process worked, but I know that, yes, we did do it on a relatively limited terminal, 80 characters by 24 lines as I recall. Maybe it wasn't 80 characters. Noah: I'm thinking of some of the early editors I'm familiar with like TECO on the DEC system. So, these were I think they were even called character editors rather than screen editors. You know, this started with editing on paper tape even, right? Dave: Do I remember what editor I used? Absolutely not. Noah: I'm just trying to picture, you know, you would be looking at your printout. Would you maybe enter the line number like I want to edit line number something? Dave: I don't remember line numbers. And as I say, I don't remember exactly how we did the editing on a limited text-only terminal.
Noah: But you, I guess the printout was important. This is a good hint, right, the printout was important. Dave: Oh, yes. That was by far the easiest way to look at the code. Noah: What was your workflow like? You say you print it out once a week roughly speaking and then? Dave: Well I'm a bit amused by calling it workflow. My work was my courses. But whenever I thought of a change I wanted to make or an addition I wanted to make, I would figure out where in the code it went, write it out, and then go type it in. And then, as I recall, I could try it right away. Noah: Okay. I mean you had to compile it and run it but that wasn't a long process at that point. How about a debugger? Was it kind of just run it and see what happens? Dave: Yeah. And I'd go out and club a cave bear and bring it home for dinner. Noah: Right. Dave: Yeah, things have changed a great deal believe me. We're talking what, 55 years ago something like that. Yeah, and this is not a field that has ever stood still.
Noah: Understood. So, it's interesting that you mention that the 6600 was a supercomputer. And you know, it's common to see this that it was the first commercial supercomputer. So did you remember hearing that back at the time? Dave: Oh, yes. I mean, nobody today would call it a supercomputer. Noah: Did you know or have much context on the company? So CDC, this is I guess Minneapolis right? So kind of up north?
Dave: I think so. Noah: Did you know the name Seymour Cray for instance, and that he was involved with the design? Dave: Oh yes. As far as I know, he did the complete design of that and the follow-up machine. I never used it. I don't remember what the next machine was that he designed. I remember one of his comments was that he was done messing around with small computers and was going to build something impressive. I remember pictures of it that showed basically a pillar with what looked like seats all the way around it. So probably tonight in bed I'll remember what that computer was called.
Noah: This is interesting. It might just be the Cray-1. My picture is that UT had kind of all three generations from the 6600. So the next CDC machine, big machine was the Cyber, which was a transistorized version or brought in integrated circuits. That's the second generation and then the Cray-1. And eventually all three generations were there in Austin.
Dave: My undergraduate work was at Michigan State University. They had a Control Data 3600. I spent some time at Indiana University and I think at that point they had a 6600 fairly sure. And then I went to Texas and they had a 6600. By the time the Cray-1 came out, certainly by the time Texas got one, I had been gone from there. But it probably came out well before I left. Noah: So it sounds like you had a lot of experience actually with CDC hardware and CDC Fortran.
Dave: And very little with IBM. Noah: Okay, understood. So yesterday you mentioned that the 6600 was a 60-bit machine. So tell us a little bit about what you think about when you think of 60 bits rather than say 36 bits or 32 bits. Dave: Sure. Two things come immediately to mind actually. One is that there were six bits allowed per character which meant that we didn't have lower case. The second one was that it had 24 registers in groups of three: the index registers, the accumulators, and the third group. And when you got into the assembly language programming for efficiency, you had to keep track of what was in each register. So you didn't have to go up to memory any more often than you had to. And doing some very careful, very efficient programming on that is what decided me that I was done with writing in assembly language.
Noah: Okay understood. Did you do any let's say major projects in assembly? Dave: I did some projects in assembly because I definitely remember struggling with trying to use those registers as efficiently as possible. But I don't remember what it was and I wouldn't call it major in any case. Noah: Okay. So the picture I have is that the 6600 and the 60-bit words were really for floating point and you essentially get the effect of double precision on most machines, but it was single precision on the 6600 because it had the 60 bits. So you got effectively a double precision effect at single precision speed. So this was big for engineers that were doing early numerical simulations, right?
Dave: Yes, I don't recall any distinction between single and double precision. Noah: So what I wonder is, were you aware of any of these power users that were doing numerical simulations on the 60? Were there people that would hog the machine with these big simulations? Dave: I'm sure people were getting into that. It was time shared and there were not any periods where we as students couldn't use it. So nobody hogged the machine to death.
Noah: Okay, in that sense. The reason I ask is I've got some documentation that describes that there were actually two machines. This is the picture that I'm learning about that there was the 6600 and there was a 6400 and they called it the dual dinosaur. So there were two, they had shared memory and the 6400 was handling the time sharing and the 6600 was for the heavy batch oriented big jobs. I was curious if you saw any signs of that. It might have been a different period that this was happening.
Dave: I vaguely recall hearing about something like that, but I don't think that was at UT at the time. Noah: Okay. And this might be later. What I see often is they call it UT2D for the UT dual dinosaur and this suggests these two CPUs with the shared memory. Dave: Well, it's a cute name, but I'm pretty sure that I didn't deal anything with directly with that. It could have come in later. Noah: And there's also a lot of documentation about how the UT system was using kind of a custom operating system. So there was evidently a standard CDC setup and then some oddball sites and UT was one of those oddball sites.
Dave: True. Noah: Something about the character handling. There was something about the line terminations. Does this sound familiar at all? Dave: I think you understand when I say that I don't recall and I doubt that I knew at the time what was being used as a line terminator. And because at no point were we doing any character searches or anything like that. It was just writing code. Every line of code was on a separate line and that's pretty much all we knew.
Noah: What I've seen signs of in documentation is that these kind of odd sites, they had a hard time sharing software and code with the normal CDC sites. It's like code had to be rewritten a bit. Dave: Yes, the word I was trying to think of was standardization. That was in the future.
Noah: That's right. For the languages, for the operating systems, for everything. So you know, I thought about this earlier that let's imagine that we actually recovered your Fortran code. We do have a 6600 simulator, the SIMH type simulator. What I wonder is because your code was on a UT machine would this be a challenge? And I have no idea. It's just something to explore.
Dave: Okay I'm guessing here. The operating system I know UT pretty much did their own. The language I don't think they messed with particularly, the Fortran language. Noah: I think that's the hope that because it's in Fortran, and as you said yesterday Fortran was not standardized but for the 6600 we could hope that it would be a bit standard, so I think we would have hope that it would run. Dave: Yeah. I'd probably give you at least 60 40 odds on that.
Noah: Yeah, understood. That's about what I would guess too. So, before we leave the hardware and move into the Fortran, what would you say was the best part and the most painful part with the 6600? Just to sum it up for people, what did you love the most and what did you find kind of the hardest with the 6600? Dave: Well 6600 was what there was. I mean what am I supposed to compare it to? I very much enjoyed programming on it. There were quite a few workarounds to use characters on it since it was designed as an engineering machine, but it was what we programmed in.
Noah: How many years do you think of 6600 programming did you get? Close to 10 years? Dave: Oh, I'd say so. I've really been into programming languages and although Fortran was my first language, Fortran for the 3600 was different from for the 6600. I've gotten into a lot of other languages and I can't say how much toward the end of that I was actually using Fortran anymore. I think I probably was because I think all the introductory courses were still being taught in Fortran. And that means the upper level courses that I was teaching at that time would also assume Fortran.
Noah: That's important. So this was kind of the academic language in that environment right? Dave: Yep. Noah: So, let's move into the game itself. I think you did an excellent job of describing how you and Paul Reynolds kind of decided to redo this game that was written in BASIC. How long did you spend creating the Fortran version? Dave: I have no idea. I'm guessing probably a month or two to get the initial version running and then probably a few more years of tinkering with it.
Noah: Did you start from the BASIC code of the previous version or just start? Dave: Oh, no. God, that would mean I'd have to look at the BASIC code. And are you familiar with BASIC at all? Noah: A little bit. Dave: Okay. Let me briefly just point out that it depends on line numbers. All the lines are numbered, they have to be in numerical order, and you refer to other parts of the program by line number. So in terms of high level concepts, no. I played the game and I played the game enough to know how it went. I think I changed 8x8 sectors into 10x10 sectors. Nothing fundamental.
Noah: That was all recreating it from what you knew it was supposed to do. When you first saw the Star Trek game, even the BASIC Star Trek game, do you remember seeing this ASCII artifact of when you did the scan and you see a sector grid? Do you remember seeing this ASCII artifact and did that impress you at the time? Dave: I don't think I know what you're talking about. I mean, there was certainly ASCII art, like Snoopy calendars and things like that, but I don't remember seeing any artwork in the game itself.
Noah: Okay. So, I'm not sure that the early Star Trek games did this, but what I'm thinking of is when you typed scan, it would show you a map. That's what I mean by art is this map. Dave: Oh, okay. Noah: Short range scan. Long range scan. The first Star Trek that you saw already had that. And do you think that intrigued you that seeing this kind of map was?
Dave: Well frankly my basic impression of that is that it was useful and it was nice to have the range, nice to be able to type out the map when you needed it. But this was at 33 baud, which is like 10 characters a second or something like that. And so I mean, you'd ask for a long range and go make a new cup of coffee. Noah: Understood. How big do you think the code base was? Was it a large code base that you were working on? Dave: Oh, I'm guessing about 30 or 40 pages. Noah: I would say that's pretty big. Dave: We weren't counting bytes, we were counting printed pages. Noah: I would say that's pretty complex and sophisticated in some way. Do you think that the game was a bit sophisticated for its time?
Dave: No. I mean there was already the BASIC version of it and there were a few other games that I was vaguely aware of. I mean, you could play things like Hangman or Nim. Noah: So let's ask this. What part of the implementation was kind of the most fun or interesting for you and what were you proudest of in some way? Dave: Oh, I most enjoyed, I think that would be The Thing. It occurred to me one night when I went in and added to the code and set it up so that when you saved the game, it wasn't saved. So you would see The Thing appearing maybe once every 20 or 25 games. And you either dealt with it then or it was gone. Do you know what I mean by The Thing?
Noah: I'm guessing some kind of space monster? Dave: Yep. It appeared as a question mark. And Spock would say, "Fascinating.". And about the only thing you could do with it was shoot it with a photon torpedo in which case it screamed and disappeared. Noah: So was there a Romulan ship in those early Star Treks? Dave: No, I'm afraid that what happened was that, as I say, we listed out our code and used it for a while and threw it away and then apparently someone stole our code from the garbage can. Now, we did not have Romulans or dilithium crystals in it. But someone stole our code, created Super Star Trek, and added it. And that was annoying, of course, but if they had simply come to us and said, "Hey, can we get involved in this?" I'm sure we would have.
Noah: Well, Dave, this is fascinating. I did not know this twist to the history that someone got your code and separately created Super Star Trek. Dave: Correct. Noah: So, you know what happened then was within two years there was the two-player Star Trek on the 6600. Dave: I'm not aware of that. I wasn't paying a lot of attention. I mean, it wasn't my game anymore. Noah: So, then within four years there was this later 18-player game and in it the Romulans appeared as question marks. So, kind of like The Thing.
Dave: Now, I know nothing about that. Noah: Yeah, so in the 18-player game this AI controlled enemy, the Romulan ship, comes in and it appears as a question mark and it acts somewhat like you described The Thing. So what I'm thinking is you might have in fact invented what many people know as the Romulan when you invented The Thing. Dave: It could be. Let me also mention one of the things that kept us occupied in talking about the game was trying to get everything balanced so that there was not a best way to play. Initially the impulse engines were worthless. So we made it possible so that if you used the impulse engines to enter a sector you weren't detected right away. And that meant you had first shot. But then that meant that the way to win the game was to go every place at a crawl using only the impulse engines. So at that point we decided that impulse engines took time and every once in a while a star would go nova. So if you depended entirely on the impulse engines you'd run out of stars or star bases.
Noah: So this is another thing, stars going nova, that I'm realizing you might have invented several of the things that later became quite familiar and famous to people in your version. This is entirely possible. Dave: Could be. The thing in particular I know while I was at UT had quite a following because anybody that could claim that they had seen The Thing got a certain cachet. Noah: That's right, yeah, this is fascinating. You know we've got one minute left, but what I'm thinking is I'm going to hope that we can explore some of these stories more in the future. I had no idea that Super Star Trek was a separate production from your code.
Dave: Well, you can't call it a separate production the way that Star Trek was separate from BASIC because that was our code. They just took it and added to it. Noah: Yep, okay. So, I'm glad that we got to learn this, I had no idea. So this is something to follow up. You know, a lot happened at UT with Star Trek, let's put it that way. And we're just starting to explore all of that history. So okay I think we're going to run out of time for right now, but I hope that we get to discuss this more in the future. And thank you very much for the last two days.
Dave: It's been fun.
1978 - 1982 UTCC DEC-10 people are creating Decwar, building on the Fortran Star Trek single-player and two-player code that was created on the CDC 6600 from 1973 onwards. They're usually working in the offices around the DEC-10, in the HRC building on campus, right beside the Drag, Dobie, etc.
1983 - 1998 The game is exploited by CompuServe (CIS). In the first months as a commercial CIS game, it's called Decwars (with an "s", instead of Decwar). This period lasts roughly six months to a year. It's pure Decwar, no real changes, fast, responsive, and thrilling. This is the source code we have today. In our project utexas reconstruction we're actively removing the small CIS additions to the code. They're glaring and obvious, related to selling things to players, so it's not a real issue. Soon, it's rebranded as MegaWars and intentionally slowed down. CIS charged by the minute, enough said. With MegaWars, all Star Trek names are removed to dodge lawsuits, this is 1984, maybe as early as late 83. Later, MegaWars III is even slower and more time consuming. By that point the original UT Decwar was a rather distant ancestor.
1995 All through the nineties, people are searching for the code on the Internet, primarily via USENET newsgroups. In 1995, a mystery person sends the very early CIS codebase and environment to Harris, attached to a mystery email. The complete original UTCC tape contents are in there, including even the original letter from UT to CIS. Things are all jumbled together and it takes research and patience to disentangle. We've done that in the project utexas reconstruction. The code is from 1982 and 1983. It's a snapshot from the months immediately after the UT tape arrived at CIS, while CIS was still working on getting the code working in their environment. UT code was not changed, CIS was only adding a few commercial things and getting everything working. Our theory is that the mystery person carefully preserved a tape containing this early snapshot when they realized what was coming, and because they knew that it would become historic later, when the real, serious, major CIS changes kicked in. They are a hero for doing that! Decwar was an immediate hit and sensation on CIS, and the mystery person was wise enough to understand what that meant and took action. This was well before the MegaWars era. There is even debugging style output showing the state of the CIS DEC-10s, almost certainly reflecting the period when CIS was getting the game working within their commercial environment. Their primary concern was bringing in paying customers to their special dedicated DEC-10 and charging those customers by the minute. The expert on this period is Merlyn. Merlyn very likely knows more about the CIS period than anyone except the actual CIS employees and contractors.
2024 PiDP-10 front panel reconstruction is released thanks to efforts of Oscar, Lars, and RichC. This naturally leads to many new things.
So, long history, and the 1995 mystery email is quite early in all that! Three central names forming the essential historical skeleton for UTCC.
This is an experimental post. We're experimenting here with whether it's possible to use a blog post like this to share some picture...
