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I first saw it on a Prime 400 at Rutherford Labs in 1978 when I was on the "Industry" part of a "thick sandwich" degree course. When I left to return to Uni, they gave me a complete copy of the FORTRAN source code on microfiche since I had spent so much time on the game! 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: FORTRAN source code on microfiche
Although I know one can do AWS Lambda in COBOL I am unsure about FORTRAN. But presumably possible.
So then one would just need to figure out how to get it off the microfiche.
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I've never tried it - I'm not a masochist - but apparently you can get both Cobol and Fortran in .NET flavours. Which is a horrific idea if you think about it for too long. 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I was at Manchester doing a PhD in Nuclear Structure Physics at about the same time (late 70s) and I think is was either the Rutherford or Daresbury computers I was playing it on. For a while, I also had the FORTRAN source code. 
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I found the Star Trek game that I'd played on an IBM 370 as an Android app a few years ago.
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This one?
“Do you think it us wise to use unrefined dilithium crystals?” Y/N
5% initial chance of explosion.
doubles each time you do it!
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I am not now, nor have I ever been in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
A 10x10 grid of chambers connected by passages, all alike except for the occasional pit, yes.
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One of my University friends frequently comment that being a sophomore was the three best years of his life. (You had to pass all freshman/sophomore exams to advance to junior level.) Well above two of those three years, he spent on the (ASCII text only) version of Adventure, and he was the very first Great Adventurer Grandmaster of our University.
The game was so that if you dragged all the fortunes you had capture to the exit, that cost you resources, i.e. points. He was the first to realize that the dynamite you had found had very little value in itself. But some of fortunes was found in cave quite close to the outside mountain wall. If you detonated the dynamite there, it would break a hole into free air, where you could escape with all your treasures and earn the very highest grade. If you tried to set the dynamite off in other caves, you were usually told that "Unfortunately, you are now dead. I can incarnate you, but that will cost you 500 points."
Although the game was command line interpreter based, and could be played on an teletype, the version we had checked whether the terminal was a CRT, with escapes for things like inverse video (black on green rather than green on black). So when the dynamite blast went off, the program sent the escape sequences to the screen to turn the entire 25 by 80 characters inverse video, then back to normal, another flash of inverse video and back. The first one of the students setting off the dynamite was totally unprepared and fell of his chair from the shock 
Drawing maps of the little twisting passages, all alike (or was that twisting little passages? Or little twisty passages? Or twisty little passages? or passages, all twisty and alike?) came at a very early stage, and was in fact a collaborate effort among a group of eager adventurers.
Not all of it was playing, though. We managed to obtain the Adventure source code (in Fortran!), and this study mate of mine spent a lot of his time expanding the cave with new passages, new fortunes to be found, and did major restructuring of the data structures to hold the the treasures you collected, information about your path and he made improvements to the input analyzer. So it was far from a complete waste of time - he learned a lot of programming that way. He graduated as an EE engineer, but from that day he has been a full time programmer, and still is.
My study mate's three sophomore years lasted from the fall of 1979 to the spring of 1982. I believe that we got hold of the source code in the spring of 1980. Maybe it was in the fall that year.
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trønderen wrote: Drawing maps of the little twisting passages, all alike (or was that twisting little passages? Or little twisty passages? Or twisty little passages? or passages, all twisty and alike?) came at a very early stage, and was in fact a collaborate effort among a group of eager adventurers.
I think it was Zork which a had an ice maze which you entered by sliding down an unclimbable slope and had descriptions like...
You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different.
You are in a twisty little maze of passages, all different.
You are in a maze of little twisty passages, all different.
You are in a twisty passage of a little maze, all different.
etc...
**SPOILER**
When mapped. the result was the word THURB, upside down, which was the magic word to exit the maze.
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The Adventure (aka Colossal Cave) maze did not have any magic word to exit it, it was "logical", so if you mapped it, you would be able to find your way out. I gave up getting out (and gave up the entire Adventure), maybe too quickly It was sufficient entertainment watching a few of my study mates going completely crazy over it.
Adventure preceded Zork, so I guess Zork picked up the maze idea from Adventure, rather than the other way around.
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About that time, I went to an engineering open house at University of Illinois where I saw PLATO. It was used for class assignments and some entertainment. The vector graphic terminals were water cooled. Someone had controlled the solenoids controlling the valves and made a terminal shake in sync with the onscreen animations of a "Leisure Suit Larry" character.
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bryanren wrote: University of Illinois where I saw PLATO
Online multi-player gaming. Players could be in one game across the US.
Star Trek. Up to 32 players. Federation, Orion, Klingon, Romulans. Ship type for each was different.
I heard, but never actually saw, a claim that someone hooked one keyboard to multiple machines to make a 'fleet' that maneuvered the same.
Probably wore out keyboards because you had to rapidly hit a key (space?) during any battle to keep your shields up.
-------------------------------
Also 'tracking' users. Games/applications ran in a space and if someone accessed that one could track their usage (seems like more than just the name.)
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So much more than gaming.
Was told that some college classes were entirely online via PLATO.
They showed us a touchscreen application for teaching fractions to littles.
I don't know if the vector terminals I saw were the only format.
Those were amber.
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bryanren wrote: Was told that some college classes were entirely online via PLATO.
They certainly marketed it that way.
bryanren wrote: They showed us a touchscreen application for teaching fractions to littles
I wrote a teaching application on that platform as an independent study course in college. It taught, or at least attempted to, electrical characteristics of a common small circuit. Taught it, gave examples, animated it, gave tests.
bryanren wrote: if the vector terminals I saw were the only format.
As far as I know/recall there were two terminal types. Couldn't really hook anything else up to the system since it would have been pointless without the specialized hardware.
Googling (wikipedia) suggests that the terminal was vector and character based. That makes sense since I remember using and creating games specifically involved creating a character set to represent the game on the screen. So, if I remember correctly, for the star trek game above each ship had a different character (or could have been two each half and half). Then those were plotted to the screen.
The screens were touch screens. But I don't recall doing much with that at all.
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I never saw a Plato terminal myself, but I read about it in Ted Nelson: Computer Lib / Dream Machines. He tells:
The internal circuitry that draws the screen
is highly capable. Receiving a 20-bitt code,
the terminal itself deciphers it as --
A LINE ON THE SCREEN, or
TWO STANDARD CHARACTERS ON THE SCREEN
from its FIXED set character memory, or
TWO SPECIAL CHARACTERS ON THE SCREEN
from its CHANGEABLE character memory
(which can be loaded with Russian,
Armenian, katakana, Cherokee or what-
ever -- even little pictures -- at the
start of the lesson), or
A COMMAND TO THE MICROFICHE PROJECTOR, or
A COMMAND TO THE AUDIO PLAYER, or
A COMMAND TO WHATERVER'S IN THE GENERAL JACK.He also tells:
The next generation of Plato terminals is coming down the line. The microfiche projector is withering away, as was easily foreseeable; meantime steps are being taken toward a more high-performance terminal, by putting a computer in it.
So it seems like there were at least two generations of Plato terminals, and it could handle both characters and lines - but only pixel on/off, no halftones. The microfiche was projected plasma screen from the back; it gave access to 'unlimited' amounts of text without having to transfer it over the phone line. The touch panel was an option, as was the audio disk. The 'general jack' was an I/O connector, intended for 'all kinds of other devices, such as piano keyboards, to be used for student input'. A terminal cost USD 5000 -- that is mid-1970s dollars.
I can't tell exactly the year this was written; my copy states 'Copyright (c) 1974, 1975, 1980', but I believe that the text is unchanged from the original 1974 edition. (It wasn't labeled 'Second edition' until 1987', long after I got my copy.)
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I had a whole stack of graph paper with the floor layouts
Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors - and miss.
Lazarus Long, "Time Enough For Love" by Robert A. Heinlein
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JudyL_MD wrote: I had a whole stack of graph paper with the floor layouts
Me too.
I feel a bit younger after reading all these posts; I didn't see Adventure until the BBC micro port.
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JudyL_MD wrote: I had a whole stack of graph paper with the floor layouts
Me too.
I feel a bit younger after reading all these posts; I didn't see Adventure until the BBC micro port.
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I played it on an IBM 360 mainframe.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I knew immediately....
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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This is one of the standard comments Matthew makes when he's giving me tips on some of the more...dusty...areas of the CodeProject codebase.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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web2
Stop shaking Chris; it couldn't have been that bad.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Pure Evil.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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My big "shock" along the same lines I actually had 30 years ago, around 1992-93.
I was teaching telecommunication systems; going to look at various signaling alternatives such as tone signaling, interrupt signaling, digital out-of-band signaling (in ISDN). To open with something familiar, I started with the tick-tick-tick of the rotary dial phone. The students returned a blank stare. Rotary dial, what's that? In two student groups, a total of between 55 and 60 students, two of them had seen such a phone, plus one claiming that an old aunt actually had one of those museum devices. A few other students told that they had seen such things in old movies, but never in real life.
So my attempt to start out at 'something familiar' failed completely. Today it is not surprising that rotary dial phones are unfamiliar, but this was thirty years ago!
Then: I frequently see young people refer to concepts like 'Big Brother' and '1984', sometimes obviously out of context. Whether out of or in context, if I ask a little closer, it turns out that the only thing they know about the novel is the title, and that the state in called 'Big Brother'. They haven't even opened the title page of the book.
There was a reference not many days ago, here in the lounge, to 'I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.' I guess that a fair share of the readers know this as 'a way of speech', but have never seen the movie.
I could list a dozen similar ones, but half of them are culture specific. Still, they are of the same nature: Ways of speech, and idiomatic references where the older generation knows the historical background, the younger do not but keep using it as ways of speech.
I suspect that a lot of the ways of speech of my generation is the same way: To me/us, they are just 'standard expressions'. If I could ask my great grandparents, if they had been alive, they might associate something very specific with it, maybe from a person we have hardly heard of, or to some event far back in history. So I am not really demanding/expecting younger people to understand the background for expressions such as twisting little passages all alike, I'm afraid I can't do that, jumping after Wirkola and the Soup Council. It is nevertheless fun to meet youth who are willing to learn the background. If they ask, they are fascinated by the answers.
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Your Big Brother reference reminded me of something from my first year of university, that being 1971-1972. I was a member of the university radio station. One of the staff bought a new date stamp and discovered, somewhat prophetically or ironically, that the highest date it could produce was December 31, 1983.
He took a sheet of paper, stamped it all over with that date, leaving a blank area in the middle. In that space he printed "You know what tomorrow is...", then he posted the result on the bulletin board in the station.
Many of us looked it over, smiled and nodded, having got the reference right away. However, those of us who did get it were astounded by the number of people who stared at it, then said, "I don't get it". Even after pointing out to them that the next day would be January 1st, 1984, their typical answer would be "So?".
For most of us, 1984 had been required reading in a high school literature class. It kind of brought home that too many people had never cracked the book, and never learned about doublespeak.
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