[ih] byte order, was Octal vs Hex, not Re: Dotted decimal notation

[Jack Haverty]

Hi Geoff,

I was in MIT-DM when Mazewars happened, and I did some surgery on our
PDP-10 TTY hardware to boost the RS232 speed up near 100 kb/s so we
could make the game reasonable with Imlacs interacting with MIT-DM over
RS232.   It became quite popular.

But I don't recall any cross-country Mazewars at all over the ARPANET.  
At one point, I did contact BBN to ask if TIP lines could be run at
higher speeds (like at least 56 kb/s), so we could plug Imlacs in to
TIPs.   The answer was "The TIP supports speeds up to the reasonable
maximum of 9.6 kbps."   I suppose someone could have tried running
across the ARPANET somehow through a Telnet connection, but I don't
remember anyone doing that.

FYI, the 1970s-era ITS and Imlac Maze have both been resurrected by a
group called "ITS Hackers".   I don't know how far they've gotten but it
may someday be possible to run Maze over the Internet.

See https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/1330

/Jack Haverty



On 12/30/20 6:50 PM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
Internet-history wrote:
> in a trip down memory lane vis-a-vis "The Imlac PDS-1" at
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imlac_PDS-1
> yours truly chances to note at the bottom under Applications
>
> "... *Mazewar <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War>*, the first online
> multiplayer computer game, was created on a pair of PDS-1's. Later, up to 8
> players ran on PDS-1 stations or other terminals networked to the MIT
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology> host
> PDP-10 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10> computer running the Mazewar
> AI <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_artificial_intelligence> program.[11]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imlac_PDS-1#cite_note-11> Mazewar games
> between MIT and Stanford were a major data load on the early Arpanet
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET>."
>
>
> the MIT PDP-10 reference must be of Al Vezza's MIT-DM host, but yours truly
> is kinda perplexed over the last sentence of:
>
> "Mazewar games between MIT and Stanford were a major data load on the
> early Arpanet."
>
> wondering just what host at Stanford this must have been -- if not SU-AI --
> which yours truly recalls had a couple of Imlac's -- one of which was at
> JMC's (John McCarthy's) house and other at RWW's (Richard Weyhrauch's)
> house -- both of which were connected with 1200 baud leased lines... hardly
> big enough to "contribute" to "a major data load on the early Arpanet." --
> most especially given that JMC &/ RWW didn't seem to be the mazewar playing
> kinda folks...
>
> anyone got more "history" here on this...¿¿¿
>
> geoff
>
> On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 2:22 PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> On 31-Dec-20 11:07, Dave Crocker wrote:
>>> On 12/30/2020 11:54 AM, Bill Ricker wrote:
>>>> The competing 16-bit design team (Edson DeCastro et al) likewise came
>>>> from a 12-bit processor (PDP-8).
>> The Imlac PDS-1 was also very much a 16-bit PDP-8, also (I believe)
>> designed
>> by ex-DEC people.
>>
>>     Brian Carpenter
>>
>>>
>>> was the core of that team four people? ...
>>>
>>>
>>> d/
>>>
>>> ps. and just to add to the whimsy, the three-person set also reminds me
>>> of the Magical Number Seven paper. (Nevermind that it's a great read.)
>>>
>> --
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>>