The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group A Stroll Through Games History Tim McQueen |
|
Tim McQueen tells some stories from the early days of computing when games of another type were played and often they were more fun! |
Like many older members my introduction to computer games was the Noughts and
Crosses machine at the old Melbourne Museum. I got seriously interested in
computing at Melbourne University in the mid 1960s. There, the computer was the
province of the operators - undergraduate students rarely got physically close
to it. I don't know of any games from that time. But we still had fun. The
procedure was that you would leave your deck of punched cards in open racks
outside the computer centre. The operators would clear the racks regularly and
return printed output and card decks to a shelved area. After successfully
debugging a program you would get back a set of compiled machine language cards
- almost impossible to decipher by eye. (And heaven help you if you dropped a
compiled card deck and the cards got out of order).
One unfortunate PhD candidate used to leave the program he was working on for
his thesis in the rack of a morning and pick it up again on the way home from
work. Because he was a graduate his job would be processed and returned quickly.
That left an opportunity for someone to hijack his program, make some subtle
changes, resubmit it for processing and finally switch the compiled decks. When
he ran his planned final run he was surprised to get totally unexpected results
as well as odd comments appearing in his carefully laid out report. Maybe not a
virus, but a very early infection.
Later, when I started working I was shown that you could put a transistor radio
in the computer room without tuning the radio, and listen to noises produced by
different programs. Output usually went to noisy chain printers - a metal chain
with raised characters spun around a set of hammers that would push the
appropriate character against an ink ribbon and the paper. It was possible to
manipulate output so that the printers would produce noises vaguely recognizable
as `Jingle Bells' or `Happy Birthday'. Printers were also used to produce `art
works' - Peanuts characters and naked ladies were particularly popular.
The poor old computer operators used to cop the results of the programmers'
sense of humour. Often during night shift the teletype terminal would burst into
life and ask for a response to some unexpected and completely senseless
question. The Univac 1108 used to have an operator video console which only
displayed text. Sometimes, at around 3 am, when a new operator was on shift, the
console would clear completely. Suddenly a drawing of an eye would appear. The
eye would wink, the screen would blank and the normal content would reappear. Of
course everyone would tell the operator it was impossible and that they were
hallucinating - after all, there was nothing on the hard copy audit trail.
Invariably it would happen to them again some other night.
Before PCs proliferated there were a number of time-sharing bureaus available.
These provided rudimentary games like Hammurabi - a precursor of today's
Civilization games that allowed you to manipulate a basic prehistoric economy.
There were also some gambling games. These inspired me to attempt to write a
horse race game. It had a field of horses at various odds and used the odds and
random numbers to position the horses each furlong. One drawback was that, given
the same field and the same distance, it always produced the same result. I
fixed that and then attempted to forecast the result of the 1972 Melbourne Cup.
After 20 or 30 iterations I got a result that I liked, and showed it to my boss.
As it turned out my 'winner' came in third, the boss thought it was marvellous
and for some time thereafter raved about the usefulness of computers and my
expertise!
There were a lot of text based Adventure type games. At one place I worked most
of the staff - including the receptionist - played Zork at any opportunity. She
was most embarrassed one day as she was greeting some important visitors into
the office when she glanced at her screen to see "You have just been ravished by
a dwarf".
With the advent of video screens 'pattern' games like Life became popular. Then
came Pong and Space Invaders, but I never got interested in that type of game.
As graphics screens replaced text screens and PCs replaced terminals, card games
and chess games led to golf games and flight simulators. In non-realistic mode,
Tetris appeared.
When I was training staff to use PCs in the early 1990s I found that Mahjong was
very good to introduce people to using the mouse. In fact it became so popular
that we had to restrict access to training staff and those being trained, with
some allowance for lunchtime and after hours use.
Looking at my PC now I have the standard Microsoft Windows games, Flight
Simulator, and a freeware Tetris. But I still don't play computer games.
Reprinted from the October 2004 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
