"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
I played it on an IBM 360 mainframe.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
I know it as “Colossal Cave”. It was available as an Android app on Amazon’s app store a few years back. Did you also tell them that the Guaranteed Escape for that maze (versus the “all different” maze) was North North North Up Down I first saw the game at the local Junior College on its HP 3000 mini which was the size of 2-3 refrigerators circa 1981.
I first saw it on a Prime 400 at Rutherford Labs in 1978 when I was on the "Industry" part of a "thick sandwich" degree course. When I left to return to Uni, they gave me a complete copy of the FORTRAN source code on microfiche since I had spent so much time on the game! :-O
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
This is one of the standard comments Matthew makes when he's giving me tips on some of the more...dusty...areas of the CodeProject codebase.
cheers Chris Maunder
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
My big "shock" along the same lines I actually had 30 years ago, around 1992-93. I was teaching telecommunication systems; going to look at various signaling alternatives such as tone signaling, interrupt signaling, digital out-of-band signaling (in ISDN). To open with something familiar, I started with the tick-tick-tick of the rotary dial phone. The students returned a blank stare. Rotary dial, what's that? In two student groups, a total of between 55 and 60 students, two of them had seen such a phone, plus one claiming that an old aunt actually had one of those museum devices. A few other students told that they had seen such things in old movies, but never in real life. So my attempt to start out at 'something familiar' failed completely. Today it is not surprising that rotary dial phones are unfamiliar, but this was thirty years ago! Then: I frequently see young people refer to concepts like 'Big Brother' and '1984', sometimes obviously out of context. Whether out of or in context, if I ask a little closer, it turns out that the only thing they know about the novel is the title, and that the state in called 'Big Brother'. They haven't even opened the title page of the book. There was a reference not many days ago, here in the lounge, to 'I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.' I guess that a fair share of the readers know this as 'a way of speech', but have never seen the movie. I could list a dozen similar ones, but half of them are culture specific. Still, they are of the same nature: Ways of speech, and idiomatic references where the older generation knows the historical background, the younger do not but keep using it as ways of speech. I suspect that a lot of the ways of speech of my generation is the same way: To me/us, they are just 'standard expressions'. If I could ask my great grandparents, if they had been alive, they might associate something very specific with it, maybe from a person we have hardly heard of, or to some event far back in history. So I am not really demanding/expecting younger people to understand the background for expressions such as twisting little passages all alike, I'm afraid I can't do that, jumping after Wirkola and the Soup Council. It is nevertheless fun to meet youth who are willing to learn the background. If they ask, they are fascinated by the answers.
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
Played it on a PDP-10 in 1977 or 1978.
Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. -
Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
"Adventure." Floppy disk. From MS actually. A dragon on the packaging. Pencil and paper to chart the maze. Like "mind" VR. (Before that there was Star Trek; on the engineering computers; by modem; on thermal paper)
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
I played text-based Adventure games on my TI/99-4a back in the early 1980s. :) The games took 1-3 letter verb/noun commands like loo w for look west or dri rum for drink rum. :laugh: IIRC, the author was Scott Adams. (no, not that one, and not the golfer!) I had a g/f a few years later with a C64 and Zelda. At the time I was more interested in things other than games, but I remember it being way cool! Fast forward to the late 90s and I got interested in computer games again and had fun with Lighthouse and the Myst/Riven series. Then I got a job working on computers all day and the desire for playing computer games all but disappeared. It's better to get paid for solving puzzles! :)
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse "Hope is contagious"
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I first saw it on a Prime 400 at Rutherford Labs in 1978 when I was on the "Industry" part of a "thick sandwich" degree course. When I left to return to Uni, they gave me a complete copy of the FORTRAN source code on microfiche since I had spent so much time on the game! :-O
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
That was the first computer game I ever played, it was on my dad's TRaSh-80 Model I. I loved it! Now I'm playing the modern graphical version created by Roberta Williams of Sierra Online fame (King's Quest series, Space Quest series, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.) You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all alike.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs.
- Thomas SowellA day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.
- Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes) -
I first saw it on a Prime 400 at Rutherford Labs in 1978 when I was on the "Industry" part of a "thick sandwich" degree course. When I left to return to Uni, they gave me a complete copy of the FORTRAN source code on microfiche since I had spent so much time on the game! :-O
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
I was at Manchester doing a PhD in Nuclear Structure Physics at about the same time (late 70s) and I think is was either the Rutherford or Daresbury computers I was playing it on. For a while, I also had the FORTRAN source code. :)
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One of my University friends frequently comment that being a sophomore was the three best years of his life. (You had to pass all freshman/sophomore exams to advance to junior level.) Well above two of those three years, he spent on the (ASCII text only) version of Adventure, and he was the very first Great Adventurer Grandmaster of our University. The game was so that if you dragged all the fortunes you had capture to the exit, that cost you resources, i.e. points. He was the first to realize that the dynamite you had found had very little value in itself. But some of fortunes was found in cave quite close to the outside mountain wall. If you detonated the dynamite there, it would break a hole into free air, where you could escape with all your treasures and earn the very highest grade. If you tried to set the dynamite off in other caves, you were usually told that "Unfortunately, you are now dead. I can incarnate you, but that will cost you 500 points." Although the game was command line interpreter based, and could be played on an teletype, the version we had checked whether the terminal was a CRT, with escapes for things like inverse video (black on green rather than green on black). So when the dynamite blast went off, the program sent the escape sequences to the screen to turn the entire 25 by 80 characters inverse video, then back to normal, another flash of inverse video and back. The first one of the students setting off the dynamite was totally unprepared and fell of his chair from the shock :-) Drawing maps of the little twisting passages, all alike (or was that twisting little passages? Or little twisty passages? Or twisty little passages? or passages, all twisty and alike?) came at a very early stage, and was in fact a collaborate effort among a group of eager adventurers. Not all of it was playing, though. We managed to obtain the Adventure source code (in Fortran!), and this study mate of mine spent a lot of his time expanding the cave with new passages, new fortunes to be found, and did major restructuring of the data structures to hold the the treasures you collected, information about your path and he made improvements to the input analyzer. So it was far from a complete waste of time - he learned a lot of programming that way. He graduated as an EE engineer, but from that day he has been a full time programmer, and still is. My study mate's three sophomore years lasted from the fall of 1979 to the spring of 1982. I believe that we got hold of the source code in the spring of 1980.
trønderen wrote:
Drawing maps of the little twisting passages, all alike (or was that twisting little passages? Or little twisty passages? Or twisty little passages? or passages, all twisty and alike?) came at a very early stage, and was in fact a collaborate effort among a group of eager adventurers.
I think it was Zork which a had an ice maze which you entered by sliding down an unclimbable slope and had descriptions like... You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different. You are in a twisty little maze of passages, all different. You are in a maze of little twisty passages, all different. You are in a twisty passage of a little maze, all different. etc... **SPOILER** :) When mapped. the result was the word THURB, upside down, which was the magic word to exit the maze.
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This is one of the standard comments Matthew makes when he's giving me tips on some of the more...dusty...areas of the CodeProject codebase.
cheers Chris Maunder
web2Stop shaking Chris; it couldn't have been that bad.Software Zen:
delete this; -
OriginalGriff wrote:
FORTRAN source code on microfiche
Although I know one can do AWS Lambda in COBOL I am unsure about FORTRAN. But presumably possible. So then one would just need to figure out how to get it off the microfiche.
I've never tried it - I'm not a masochist - but apparently you can get both Cobol and Fortran in .NET flavours. Which is a horrific idea if you think about it for too long. X|
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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trønderen wrote:
Drawing maps of the little twisting passages, all alike (or was that twisting little passages? Or little twisty passages? Or twisty little passages? or passages, all twisty and alike?) came at a very early stage, and was in fact a collaborate effort among a group of eager adventurers.
I think it was Zork which a had an ice maze which you entered by sliding down an unclimbable slope and had descriptions like... You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different. You are in a twisty little maze of passages, all different. You are in a maze of little twisty passages, all different. You are in a twisty passage of a little maze, all different. etc... **SPOILER** :) When mapped. the result was the word THURB, upside down, which was the magic word to exit the maze.
The Adventure (aka Colossal Cave) maze did not have any magic word to exit it, it was "logical", so if you mapped it, you would be able to find your way out. I gave up getting out (and gave up the entire Adventure), maybe too quickly :-) It was sufficient entertainment watching a few of my study mates going completely crazy over it. Adventure preceded Zork, so I guess Zork picked up the maze idea from Adventure, rather than the other way around.
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
Not only did I know (and play) ADVENTURE, but I still have a BASIC listing of the code for it.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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web2Stop shaking Chris; it couldn't have been that bad.Software Zen:
delete this;Pure Evil.
cheers Chris Maunder
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
There was another unlock word as well, but I cant remember what it actually did now. The word was "PLUGH". Does this ring a bell with anyone
