Retro-game (OT)

[Geoff Bannister]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, Barry Arrowsmith 
<arrowsmithbt at b...> wrote:

Kneasy:
> Those that struggled and cursed with pre-GUI computers (ah! that  
> heady day when you up-graded to a PC-AT with 1 Meg RAM and a hard  
> disk all of ooh! a massive 30 Meg) may remember with nostalgia the  
> old text-based adventure games.
> Well, if you've a Mac running OS X there's one buried deep in its  
> innards, lurking in the UNIX emacs text editor.
> 
> Go to Utilities - Terminal, fire it up and type in
> emacs -batch -l dunnet
> Hit Return and:
> "You are at a dead end of a dirt road. The road goes east. In the  
> distance you can see that it will eventually fork off."
> 
> If you're a Mac user you probably knew about  this already. So why  
> didn't you  tell me?
> 

Geoff:
And what about the (in)famous Star Trek based game where you had to 
use your fingers, your head or a calculator to work out the angle at 
which to fire a photon torpedo?

I first met this on a computer called a Triton which a friend of mine 
(currently deputy Network Manager at the National Physics Laboratory 
in South-West London) put together from a kit about 1978....

It had installed RAM of 1K (yes - one Kilobyte) and ran a language 
called Tiny Basic and - joy - also ran ST.

You may be encouraged to know that I am seriously giving thought to 
upgrading to a Mac in the near future - not because of your 
exhortation - but because my eldest son is 
perverting/corrupting/persuading me against PCs. (Doesn't take much 
doing - I still hanker after the good old days of teaching when we 
standardised on Acorn Masters).