{"id":3142,"date":"2011-05-11T09:10:12","date_gmt":"2011-05-11T14:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/?p=3142"},"modified":"2011-05-18T15:51:27","modified_gmt":"2011-05-18T20:51:27","slug":"my-intro-to-computer-messaging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/my-intro-to-computer-messaging\/","title":{"rendered":"My intro to computer messaging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I arrived at the University of North Carolina in 1977, I had had no experience at all with computer messaging systems. In fact the term &#8220;email&#8221; wasn&#8217;t invented yet. 1977 was the year that the first of the RFCs regarding email was issued (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.rfc-editor.org\/info\/rfc733\">RFC733 &#8211; &#8220;Standard for the format of ARPA network text messages&#8221;<\/a>). Although the Computer Science Department was nearby, those of us working on the IBM 360\/75 had to be content with a non-networked mainframe and its primitive time-sharing system CALLOS which called nothing much but allowed for some simple messaging and light weight programming. CS would soon be using UUCP (<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/UUCP\">The Unix to Unix Copy Program or occasionally and more properly Protocol<\/a>) developed by Mike Lesk, but for the moment even their email was mostly on the same computers. Usenet&#8217;s invention was only a few years off (2 or 3), but CALLOS was about as good as one could hope for &#8212; if one&#8217;s hope weren&#8217;t too high.<\/p>\n<p>Somehow I managed to get to share responsibility for CALLOS with Martin Feinstein and tried my hand at a few scripts that I used to create games which were more like question answerers than games. I never got very far but I was heavily influenced by the folks I saw obsessively playing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rickadams.org\/adventure\/a_history.html\">&#8220;Adventure&#8221; aka &#8220;Adventure Cave&#8221;<\/a> on the teletype machines. Nothing on CALLOS could approach the complex Fortran-based Adventure with its dwarves, canaries, dragons and the secret word passed on from player to player &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rickadams.org\/adventure\/c_xyzzy.html\">&#8220;XYZZY&#8221; <\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Years, not so many years, later a City Planning student, Howard Cherniak, who had completed the Adventure give me a printout of the Fortan code. I have no idea where it is now nor do I know what became of Howard. Perhaps he has returned to the edge of a dark forest typing <i>downstream<\/i> and hoping to rejoin the cheering band of friendly elves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I arrived at the University of North Carolina in 1977, I had had no experience at all with computer messaging systems. In fact the term &#8220;email&#8221; wasn&#8217;t invented yet. 1977 was the year that the first of the RFCs regarding email was issued (RFC733 &#8211; &#8220;Standard for the format of ARPA network text messages&#8221;). [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noemail","category-general","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3142"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3161,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3142\/revisions\/3161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}