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

[Jack Haverty]

I just asked this question on a forum of ex-BBN employees, which is
populated by many of the people who were involved with building and
operating the ARPANET from its beginning and through the 70s and 80s.  
That elicited answers from the two people who were in charge of the
ARPANET project through that time, with ARPA as their client/boss, as
well as engineers who worked on building and operating it.

The consensus -- no such thing as ARPA banning MazeWars over the ARPANET
actually happened:

"I would have heard about it if it were true.  I was deeply connected
with ARPA at the time"

So I'd consider that pretty good evidence that the "legend" is fantasy.

MazeWars was (unsuccessfully) banned at MIT-DM as it became a prime
consumer of CPU and Console time, but that mostly just shifted gaming
into the wee hours of the day.   No ARPANET involved.

/Jack Haverty
(MIT-DM 1970-1977; BBN 1977-1990)

On 12/31/20 4:10 AM, Lars Brinkhoff via Internet-history wrote:
> Geoff Goodfellow wrote:
>> 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...¿¿¿
> I have seen this story many times, but no evidence to back it up.
>
> It seems DEC WRL's MazeWar for X10/X11/Sunview is one source for the
> claim.  The manpage says "MazeWar first appeared at MIT in the early
> 1970s, using IMLAC displays and the ArpaNet network.  Legend has it
> that, at one point during that period, MazeWar was banned by DARPA from
> the ArpaNet because half of all the packets in a given month were
> MazeWar packets flying between Stanford and MIT."