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Cyhist Mar 14 1997 D
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Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 11:40:19 -0600
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> From: Don Hyde <dhyde@BDCAST.COM>
Subject: Re: Games and XYZZY
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Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
I have rather fond memories of time wasted on ADVENT and XYZZY.
I encountered it on a DEC-20 at DCA, where I was programming statistical multiplexers that were used to save line charges with a lot of those old timesharing machines.
When Adventure landed in that building full of dedicated professional hackers and computer geeks, it was only a matter of hours before someone had extracted the magic word XYZZY from one of the game's files and we all (including the company president) wasted company time trying to figure out what you could do with it in the game.
As it turned out, the whole map of Colossal Cave was not very hard to extract (if you had admin privileges so you could fish around in the game's files), but there were quite a few details such as where and when the magic word worked and what it did that were embedded in the code.
Fortunately (for the company), or unfortunately depending on your point of view, all this inside information helped us burn out on the game pretty fast (well, a few weeks, anyway), and we stopped before anyone actually disassembled the code. We did have a lot of fun while it lasted, though.
Don Hyde
Broadcast Electronics, Inc.
Supplying specialized electronics and software to the radio broadcast industry.
dhyde@bdcast.com (217)224-9600 http://www.bdcast.com
______________________________________________________________________
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> From: Don Hyde <dhyde@BDCAST.COM>
Subject: Re: Games and XYZZY
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
I have rather fond memories of time wasted on ADVENT and XYZZY.
I encountered it on a DEC-20 at DCA, where I was programming statistical multiplexers that were used to save line charges with a lot of those old timesharing machines.
When Adventure landed in that building full of dedicated professional hackers and computer geeks, it was only a matter of hours before someone had extracted the magic word XYZZY from one of the game's files and we all (including the company president) wasted company time trying to figure out what you could do with it in the game.
As it turned out, the whole map of Colossal Cave was not very hard to extract (if you had admin privileges so you could fish around in the game's files), but there were quite a few details such as where and when the magic word worked and what it did that were embedded in the code.
Fortunately (for the company), or unfortunately depending on your point of view, all this inside information helped us burn out on the game pretty fast (well, a few weeks, anyway), and we stopped before anyone actually disassembled the code. We did have a lot of fun while it lasted, though.
Don Hyde
Broadcast Electronics, Inc.
Supplying specialized electronics and software to the radio broadcast industry.
dhyde@bdcast.com (217)224-9600 http://www.bdcast.com
______________________________________________________________________
