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Some of us older gerbils had accounts on the University PDP-10 just to play this ancient text-based game. Well, its "developers" want to put out a newly-polished Open Source version and have entrusted the work to ESR.

Yep, that ESR.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7536

I played various versions of that game on most of the platforms I have used starting with the Atari 800XL.

I'm just glad that it's getting a last loving sendoff and that ESR is doing it. I don't expect the maintainer of the Jargon File to screw up this job.

I had never heard of this guy before but now that I've read
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7524 and http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7408
I trust that you are of the right opinion, Captain Ned.

EDIT: Damn, I love his Things Every Hacker Once Knew series.

Crayon Shin Chan wrote:

I had never heard of this guy before

Your nerd credentials are hereby revoked.

CSC:

ESR is, quite simply, an Elder God (c.f. Jargon File). The RMS/hard core GNU adherents don't like him one bit, but that's deep Open Source politics (and jihad). Read the blog you've quoted and you'll find that he's rewritten/fixed/cleaned crufty code out of a myriad of the unsung routines/daemons that keep Linux running (he's quite happy with his work on a secure version of the NTP time daemon). Dude also writes Content Management Software as if he were tossing off yet another space simulator.

Redocbew wrote:

Crayon Shin Chan wrote:

I had never heard of this guy before

Your nerd credentials are hereby revoked.

That's okay, I'll get them back soon enough.

His Psychology category is also really interesting, as well as his PUA/inner alpha male articles. Never thought I'd read an article about that from a hacker!

Back to the topic, I fully expect whatever ESR delivers to be functionally correct and that he'll have carved out and trashed a whole lot of "poorly optimized" code when he finally delivers.

Anyone who would like to know more about ESR and the "olden" days, may I suggest a book titled " Rebel Code" by Glyn Moody. It was published in 2002, but it gives an interesting read about the history of, not only open source software, but the beginnings of the internet and computing software in general. It includes some light bio's on a lot of the hacker-god's of old.

Captain Ned wrote:

CSC:

ESR is, quite simply, an Elder God (c.f. Jargon File). The RMS/hard core GNU adherents don't like him one bit, but that's deep Open Source politics (and jihad). Read the blog you've quoted and you'll find that he's rewritten/fixed/cleaned crufty code out of a myriad of the unsung routines/daemons that keep Linux running (he's quite happy with his work on a secure version of the NTP time daemon). Dude also writes Content Management Software as if he were tossing off yet another space simulator.

Yeah I'm in the middle of the RMS/ESR camp and I highly admire what both men have done with FOSS.

Crayon Shin Chan wrote:

I had never heard of this guy before but now that I've read
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7524 and http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7408
I trust that you are of the right opinion, Captain Ned.

EDIT: Damn, I love his Things Every Hacker Once Knew series.

As someone who is trans, reading that first article is incredibly depressing. I can't make myself finish it.

I.S.T. wrote:

Crayon Shin Chan wrote:

I had never heard of this guy before but now that I've read
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7524 and http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7408
I trust that you are of the right opinion, Captain Ned.

EDIT: Damn, I love his Things Every Hacker Once Knew series.

As someone who is trans, reading that first article is incredibly depressing. I can't make myself finish it.

It's pretty typical of ESR's thinking on non-technical topics, sadly.

I guess he is financially secure enough he doesn't feel any threat from SJW's.

You can’t base “identity” on a person’s private self-beliefs and expect sane behavior to emerge any more than you can invite everyone to speak private languages and expect communication to happen.

I.S.T. wrote:

Crayon Shin Chan wrote:

I had never heard of this guy before but now that I've read
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7524 and http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7408
I trust that you are of the right opinion, Captain Ned.

EDIT: Damn, I love his Things Every Hacker Once Knew series.

As someone who is trans, reading that first article is incredibly depressing. I can't make myself finish it.

Have trouble with opinions that differ from your own?
In the nearly 63 yrs that I've been around, I've discovered some things. One is that those who demand tolerance for their own beliefs are the least likely to tolerate others beliefs.

OK folks, I really didn't think this one would go R&P, so let's please knock off the R&P.

Thanks for listening.

All I'll really say is

LGBT have had to debate their existence for thousands of years. This man is no new bigot. He is an old style bigot.

And with that, I'm done with this site. I've been coming here for over 13 years. I was hoping it'd be safe from this ****, with the bathroom bills attempting to restrict us to our homes only. Y'all are letting this hate be out in the open. Disgraceful. Disgraceful!

Wow, "The New Hackers Dictionary" is still available on Amazon.
A freshen-up of CCA by someone who truly understands the term Open Source could be quite interesting...

I played CCA (both the original 350-point version and one of the expanded versions) on my 8-bit CP/M system way back in the day. I can still remember the "ka-chunk" of the floppy disk drive kicking in after you typed each command, to fetch the data for the next room. With only 64K of RAM, there was NO file cache on those systems!

As noted in the article, the original 350-point version has already been ported; FWIW Ubuntu users can do "sudo apt-get install bsdgames" to install it. Looking forward to having the expanded version available again. IIRC I found an archive of source code for several versions somewhere online a while back, but never got around to attempting to compile any of them.

just brew it! wrote:

IIRC I found an archive of source code for several versions somewhere online a while back, but never got around to attempting to compile any of them.

Subsequent posts from ESR indicate that he received C code (2400 lines or so) machine-translated from FORTRAN, and that he's working on the 430 point version.