Raiford's Journal: The mystery of my sig

"Player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"

The origin of my sig goes back quite some time in the history of computer gaming. Set the way back meter to 1979 and the time-sharing system at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which at that time was a CDC Cyber 70/74. A twin machine existed at the computer center at the University of Georgia at the same time. There was a game on the Georgia Tech Cyber (and on the UGA Cyber for a while) called "Multrek". As the name cryptically implies it was an early incarnation of a multi-user Star Trek game. You logged in using one of the ultra-modern CRT terminals with an acoustically coupled modem at 300 bps or if you were a little less privileged with a clunky TTY terminal with the big wide paper feed. Now this was real immersion. You had a maximum of five players and a choice of two weapons: phasors or photon torpedoes. The map looked something like this:

. . . . . . . . . .
. . . 1 . . . . . .
. . . . . . . 4 . .
. . . . . . . . . .
5 . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . 3 . . . . . .

Player 4 hit player 1 with 100 stroms
Player 4 hit player 1 with 100 stroms
Player 4 hit player 1 with 100 stroms
You have been destroyed

Before you scoff too much remember the era. There was just as much passionate involvement in this gaming activity as in an all night Quake fragfest. The source was written in Fortran 77 with assembler subroutines (Compass was the assembly language for the Cyber) which made the multi-user part possible.

For the Cyber 70/74, file access was accomplished in one of two ways: direct access or indirect access. In direct access your application was directly locked to the file containing the game data and modifications were made directly from a file buffer to the file. Indirect access of a file constituted an application working with a copy of a file and if any modifications were made a translation step performed by the OS would update the original file. The University of Georgia suspended direct access privileges to student accounts making the game unusable on that system and the death of "multrek" came to UGA and the other colleges within the university system that used that grand old machine.

I obtained a copy of the source for sentimental reasons and to appreciate the gaming technology of the time. I carried it around for a while as if it were a Bible or at least a copy of the key to a calculus midterm. One day while pouring over the source I was struck with one of those "too good to be correct" ideas and off to a terminal I ran. After about an hour I compiled and linked my first major hack and had multrek revived on the UGA Cyber using indirect access files for updating the state of the player environment. Then came that feeling; I WAS A GOD. I posted word of my triumph on a popular bulletin board on the system and within 30 minutes glorious battles were once again being waged in cyberspace on the UGA Cyber 70/74.

The fruit of my accomplishment lasted for about a week and the university computer administration prevailed and removed "multrek" again once and for all claiming that the game was causing excessive drive wear to the child of Seymour Cray: The CDC Cyber.

I have been programming ever since ...