I’m a hoarder of certain things; I admit it. Somewhere I have source tapes for Peter Langston’s Empire game, just in case someone wants to reconstruct that piece of history for a modern system.
That’s just one example; here’s another: You can buy a complete release of the Pacifica Radio Archive on a teeny USB stick, for about $100. Or, well, that’s what I paid for it, anyway. I was listening to some long-obsolete podcast from the early days of podcasting and Pacifica said “now, if you donate $100 we’ll send you our complete radio show archive from the 70s!” I couldn’t find the link on their website so I finally just picked up the phone. After some confusion, the poor person from Pacifica realized I was responding to a 6 year old offer, but they agreed to take my money, anyway.
I like to imagine that people appreciate it when someone interrupts their busy day by saying “I am so in love with your stuff, please help me get it?” I feel that way when someone asks me about a knife; they are probably overwhelmed in details, thinking “what have I started?” Anyhow, I know that radio shows like Pacifica always need money; that’s not a new thing that has been true since at least the 80s when I hung out with some of the JHU Radio crew, who would have cheerfully traded their souls for a new box of patch cords, let alone a microphone.
That little USB stick contains all of Pacifica Radio Show’s Archives. I bought it specifically because it had a bunch of never-before published talks by Howard Zinn. But it’s all the interviews, all the meandering lectures, it’s a distillation of the golden age of community radio from San Francisco in the 70s, when you could walk down the street, bump into Margaret Mead or Angela Davis and ask them if they’d drop by the studio for an interview that evening…? Maybe…? (oh, god, please!)
It’s the San Francisco that was a beacon of coolness and weirdness when I was a kid; the place I wanted to run off to. Before it was taken over by the soulless dotcom assholes who commute in and leave nothing of value behind.
Perhaps you remember Alan Watts – the mystical buddhist philosopho-weirdo, who had a radio show where he would philosophize, live. If that’s what you call it. It’s an important view into the counter-culture: Watts and DT Suzuki’s west coast interpretation of buddhism has had tremendous influence on the formation of american buddhism – the de-religion’ed religion that has helped many people bamboozle themselves. It was Watts’ show that got me interested in zen, around the same time that I first began to study iaido and was realizing that a lot of the great samurai (specifically Musashi) were unhinged and probably struggled hard with madness their whole lives. I’m listening to a bit of the Watts at random, now, and it sounds like whagarbl to me – apparently my philosophy has become more disciplined, or structured – or ossified and dogmatic. I don’t know and I don’t care anymore – his voice is still one I could fall asleep to and a little nagging voice in the back of my mind tells me that I bet it’d go well with a big ole hit of opium. [I have resisted giving the dragon a claw-grip on me: opiates and cocaine are the kind of drugs that are deadly to someone with an inquisitive nature who likes to explore limits] [But I bet it’d go well] There are .MP3s of all the episodes of Watt’s show on this little USB stick.
There are 10 previously unpublished speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. I only just now noticed them. Let me predict the future: I will be quoting some from them, for us all. It’s hard to find complete speeches by MLK, or it used to be – the family held closely to the copyright, and it was (for a long time) hard to get a complete audio of the “I have a dream” speech.
And over in this folder: “Black voices…” holy shit, it’s Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Kathleen Cleaver (I had a huge crush on her when I was in college) And over here’s Molly Ivins, and a whole folder of Tom Hayden… There are Malcolm X speeches, too, and interviews with Joan Baez
When I got the thumb-drive I spent the better part of a month driving around to the sound of Howard Zinn’s voice. Or grinding and filing to the sound of Howard Zinn patiently explaining our failures in that weird, gentle yet clipped voice of his.
Here’s the link: [KPFK] – it appears the archive is not currently available, but I bet if you email and beg, they’ll take your money.
Hmm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1972_video_game)
Which version?
i was a wee tot, but I played a version of Empire on TRS-80s in my (Portland, Oregon-area) school’s computer lab around 1980/1981. I loved it then and it gave me my first education in programming b/c it was possible to use the “break” button and restart the game at a specific line so you could skip the code which determined whether or not you encountered a disaster that turn. My very first cheat code. An older student showed me how to look through the entire program and manipulate variables in my favor (infinite gold!) if I needed/wanted. Which, of course, I did. Not so much because I really wanted to win and couldn’t, or even that I thought winning that way was somehow valid. It was the mere idea that I could make a machine do what **i** wanted instead of what it was normally going to do.
Blew my tiny mind. I’d love to play that game again. Hell, I’d even just love to read through the code and see if anything triggers any memories.
xohjoh2n@#1:
Which version?
My port to PWB V7 UNIX/C. So I guess it’s “mjr’s version.”
There were several projects going on to try to assemble a version, and I got stuck into doing my own (because I was young and stupid) and discovered that the decompiled object code was nearly impossible to debug. I think my version is about half done – it worked but it was a mix of decompiled code and re-implemented code.
Now that I think about it, it seems like it was such a humongous mass of code at the time. But stuff like systemd nowadays is apparently pushing nearly 1m lines of code (which is absurd) so the whole thing was probably tiny compared to a small application nowadays.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden@#2:
I loved it then and it gave me my first education in programming b/c it was possible to use the “break” button and restart the game at a specific line so you could skip the code which determined whether or not you encountered a disaster that turn.
That was the BASIC version! The real old thing!
There was/is still a branch of multi-player EMPIRE for UNIX kicking around somewhere out there, I bet. What happened is that someone had a version that was (if I am remembering right) VAX assembler. 11/780 instructions. And a grad student at Waterloo (I think it was) was working on a decompiler, and they ran it through – turned it into this great big wad of computed GOTOs – even if ( … ) statements were output as a compare and jump. I did a lot of learning C by turning that garbage back into reasonable code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1977_video_game)
… so it sounds like it was not the PSL version of EMPIRE.
I met Walter Bright at USENIX once; he was one smart guy. He told some really funny stories, too, including one about when he wrote the Datalight C Compiler, at that time, the magazines would test your compiler code generator using sieve of eratosthenes for first 1000 primes. Bright says he built a recognizer for the parse tree of sieve, that would output code that would just spit out the answer. That’s a totally legit compiler/optimizer! It’s just very specialized.
So, based on:
I’m guessing it’s a branch somewhere off that line…?
So what’s the relation to this: http://empire.sourceforge.net/ if any?
Empire was written from scratch in 1984 in Pascal on an HP3000, where it was released to the HP3000 Contributed Library.
I think that’s the Walter Bright version. Bright did code like nobody’s business.
Again, these old program seemed huge at the time but they were relatively tiny compared to what’s running now. I seem to recall the old version of ELITE fit on a single floppy. My first firewall product fit on a single floppy and it included an entire operating system release. Something that was 20,000 or 40,000 lines of code was “large”. I actually believe that was surpassing the ability of humans to maintain and comprehend, so you can imagine what I think of today’s applications.
Speaking about unmaintainable apps, how about that Iowa caucus, huh?
The floppy version of Elite was the *big* version: 100kB storage (single-sided 40 track) and random access meant it could fit in whizzy extra features like basic missions. (Checking: the game image was 53kB, the sources still fit onto a single 100kB disk.)
The tape version had to load once and fit into RAM: 32kB minus video memory, which it used split-screen mode changes to get both a high resolution b/w wireframe display and lower resolution 4-colour for the console and still only use 10kB, minus system usage, so about 20kB tops for the game code. The disk version would have had to use overlays from the 53kB disk into that 20kB.
Heh! My daughter worked on the compilation of that stick!
coragyps@#10:
My daughter worked on the compilation of that stick!
Well, it sure came out great!
I played Empire on a VAX-780 in the early eighties, and nowadays I can just do “aptitude install empire” in my Debian Linux and 10s later empire is installed, and it’s the same thing as far as I can remember. It says “EMPIRE, Version 5.00 site Amdahl 1-Apr-1988”, though, whatever that means.
OK.
I donate the price of a ticket to ride a bus.
And I donate the price of a loaf of bread to get a loaf of bread.
And so forth.
—
starblue, Amdahl was an IBM-compatible line of mainframes by Gene Amdahl, who first worked at IBM. I worked with those for over a decade, back in the day.
There are, it turns out, many quite different games called “Empire”
The one that I,in a strange co-incidence, was *also* playing on TRS-80s in 1980/81 in a Portland-area school was based on Hamurabi, and was a text-based resource management game. We changed all the instances of “grain” to “weed” I think, which made it uproariously funny. But mainly we played Deathmaze 5000.
Best as I know, the ur-game was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
(I first played it on a PDP-11, so it was second-generation)
@Andrew Molitor:
YES! This must be it. I had only heard of the Evergreen College-developed game and how it had many variants so I thought that, given the game I played was actually **called** Empire, the differences must be explained by the “many variants” phenomenon.
But if you were playing a game called Empire in Portland and I was as well, and both were resource-management games on a TRS-80, then very likely we were playing the same game. I wonder if we were at the same school?
If you were at Oregon Episcopal School, then we were. Which would be a strange coincidence indeed!
Oddly enough, I cannot really remember any of the computer-lab friends I had there, although I remember my stoner friends tolerably well given then substantial interval.
Strange it is, then! You were almost certainly older than I, though. I was consistently the youngest person in the lab when I went. Maybe you were even one of the folks who introduced me to the game?
Seriously? WTF. We have grown so apart, you and I!
I guess. I mean, maybe we hated one another in high school? I do not recall the experience as all wine and roses.
I am 54, but was always 1 year young for my grade. I was at OES for 10th and 11th grades, during which time I would have passed from 14 to 16, and those years were, um, 1980/81 and 1981/82 respectively. I cannot recall the name of the chemistry teacher who ran the thing, but looking back I see many things that I was a) blind to at the time and b) which probably would not pass muster today. A fine fellow.
If your curiosity overwhelms you, I can be reached at [email protected] and you have my solemn word that I will not dox you, out you, share your personal info, or otherwise interfere in your life no matter how vigorously we might disagree on any particular topic or topics. It’s at least 50:50 that I will respond “nope, don’t remember you a bit” because my memory apparently works that way.
Obviously, of course, one might google “Andrew Molitor” and recover more or less every stupid thing I have ever said. I am the one who turns up most when one googles, although no longer the only one.
Have we grown apart? I was one of the 4th or 5th grade tots invading the computer lab during those years, but we both ended up here, liking science and (presumably) being lefties. It’s interesting, anyway.
I’ll drop you an e-mail later today
Perhaps you have forgotten, but I am am at present evidently a, uh, I forget your precise phrasing, something like a “transphobic fuckmook” and so it seems unlikely that the we have grown together in the intervening years ;)
FUCK. YOU ALMOST DIED ON THE GODDAMNED MOUNTAIN. FUCK. FUCK. FUCK.
I always felt like I dodged a bullet and I missed it by 5 years.
yes, I had indeed forgotten. Maybe if we were discussing trans* issues I would still hold that opinion, but I’m also a person who can disagree – stridently – on an issue or issues and still recognize that someone is closer to me now than at some time in the past. After all, maybe we disagreed on even more issues then? Do you seriously believe you’re more cissexist now than you were in 10th grade? I kinda doubt it. :)
If I had stayed at the school, yes. I’ve often thought of that. But I was constantly beat up while I was there. It was mostly classism, some anti-nerd stuff, probably some gender-based harassment, but honestly the big thing that set me aside immediately when I arrived was that my mother had purchased my blue corduroy pants at Sears. People went apeshit over the fact that my pants bore the “Toughskins” label. I remember forcing my mom to use a seam-ripper to remove all traces of the label, thinking that would prevent me from getting beat up, but it was too late. I only lasted a couple years there and moved on as quickly as I could.
I can recognize that they had an ambitious academic program that has some intellectual merits, but there was no way I was going to benefit from staying in that school, with how toxic it was for me.
It’s a small world after all,
it’s a small world after all,
it’s a small world after all, it’s a small small small small world!
Well I don’t recall anything specifically, but I dare say I was a bit of a shit to you at some point or another, and for that I apologize. I was, I suspect, low enough in the hierarchy to do a bit of lashing out at little kids.
I don’t know it it’s heartening or appalling to imagine that one or more of your contemporaneously aged tormentors probably froze to death in a snow cave a few years later, but I imagine it’s something you’ve pondered.
Although that kind of thing is completely normal for adolescents, one of my reasons for retreating to the computer lab was that the older kids mostly ignored me. While there might have been some back and forth between the older kids dissing the tots, it wasn’t like people felt the need to make sure I heard any mockery. So you should feel secure in the knowledge that to whatever extent our paths directly crossed (and I’m sure we at least saw each other in the lab, it’s not like it was full to overflowing with random folks), I found being mostly ignored with an occasional helpful comment about “do you know how to do this in BASIC?” to be vastly superior to my experiences in the lunch room or down on the blacktop at the bottom of the hill. So to the extent I have any memories of older kids at all, they aren’t bad memories. You’ve got nothing to apologize for or worry about on my account.
As for the Chem teacher, IIRC wasn’t Mrs Pratt’s room right next door to the computer lab? I don’t remember if she ran it or if there was another chemistry teacher present, but I thought she taught chemistry and her room was there. I could be getting the name wrong, but I don’t think so.
Yes. My feelings about it were (and, I suppose are) complex. At the time I was dealing with a lot on my own. I hadn’t come out as trans*, but late-teenager/pre-adult phases sure helped bring out exactly how uncomfortable I was and how fucked up it was trying to create meaningful relationships that I could feel good about. My guy friends all played D&D and wanted to be in a metal band. And I liked D&D and I played in the band with them for a while. But they were also full of the typical, unexamined sexism of the time. And while I was also full of it, I was uncomfortable with it and didn’t like that about myself and challenged it in both myself and them …which made some things difficult. And my friendships with women sometimes worked well, but other times didn’t. I’ve never been super femme. My best friendship was with someone who wasn’t really a tomboy, but was fairly athletic and rode horses all the time. I didn’t have the experience or the money to do the same, and she also didn’t live very close, so even that friendship wasn’t what it could have been.
So I was mostly a loner, but not a grudge holder, and it had been several years since I’d seen them when the accident happened. I was pretty clear that several of them were terribly shitty kids to me in those earlier grades, which made it impossible to mourn them in any uncomplicated fashion, but there were also people I didn’t know who might have been good folks, and even the crappy people might have changed, so…?
Thus I was in a very distant place, both generally and with respect to the kids who died on Mt Hood. That might have been fine, of course, except other people who knew I had been to OES kept asking me about them and what I felt about them dying and generally seemed to assume I must be heartbroken. And while I wasn’t glad anyone had died, I wasn’t heartbroken. But I didn’t feel like I could say that, because how cruel is that to say that you’d known someone in 5th grade and now they’ve died in 11th and you … just don’t have any big feelings about it at all? So of course then I felt like crap for NOT feeling the weight of the tragedy and blah, blah, blah.
Very angst. Much teenage.
I would love to have those Pacifica archives. Is it still something one can get?
I worked at KRAB (FM, Seattle) in my wires-and-pliers days back in the late ’70s, and I still have a fondness for alternative radio.
billseymour@#27:
First off, let me congratulate you on the excellent coat of arms.
I would love to have those Pacifica archives. Is it still something one can get?
It’s no longer on offer on their web site but I was able to get mine by emailing the contact address for the donations and asking if they’d be willing to send me the USB stick in return for ${whatever}. It wasn’t much, in terms of awesome/$/hr, I think I donated $125.
Marcus Ranum @28
Thanks. In the absense of U.S. law relating to personal heraldry, there’s nothing to keep one from simply “assuming arms”, which is what I did. (If anyone cares, it’s registered with both the American College of Heraldry and the United States Heraldic Registry.)
What you can’t see in this image is the crest:
The image I like most I commissioned from Lorrie LeJeune, the artist who did the O’Reilly “animal book” covers. I wanted to get the phœnix right. 8-)
Not part of the symbolism: from the point of view of a C ideologue, C++ is sinister and beyond the pale.
@billseymour:
from the point of view of a C ideologue, C++ is sinister and beyond the pale.
I still grouse that ANSI C’s stupid. Don’t even get me started about C++.
Header files should never include header files! There lies madness! If you can’t do it with make(1) you’re probably trying to do something stupid, and should stop!