Pleasant@Rutgers (10/12/82)
HUMAN-NETS Digest Tuesday, 12 Oct 1982 Volume 5 : Issue 92
Today's Topics:
Computers and People - Motivating non-Technical
People to use Computers (4 msgs),
Programming - Games and Heuristics (5 msgs)
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Date: 31 August 1982 22:16-PDT (Tuesday)
From: GANESHA at OFFICE-1
Subject: HUMAN-NETS Digest V5 #90
Take away their typewriters, scratchpads, calculators, file
cabinets, and 3x5s! Make 'em use the little beasties.
Andrew Scott Beals
There's no better way to make them refuse. Remember,
Work consists of what a body is obliged to do, while
play consists of what a body is not obliged to do.
Mark Twain
(I think that was how it went....)
Making computers into work would be the worst possible thing...
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Date: 1 Sep 1982 0327-PDT
Subject: Re: HUMAN-NETS Digest V5 #90
From: BILLW at SRI-KL
I think the best way to get non-technical people to start using
computers is to have their kids play games.... Then they play
games... then they start reading SF-LOVERS and what not (every
little network MUST have a BBOARD or bad-joke mailing list type
arrangement.) Then they start replying, and they learn how to use
the text editors and so on....
WW
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Date: 1 Sep 1982 1347-MDT
From: Walt <Haas at UTAH-20>
Subject: Re: getting non-technical people to use computers
I once worked at a company that designs and manufactures automatic
warehousing machinery. I showed the chief mechanical engineer some
of Applicon's literature for their CAD systems. He refused to even
consider using such a system; he said "I don't type". Period. If
I'd really cared maybe I could have talked him into a mouse and
lightpen setup, but I didn't care enough to try.
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Date: 3 Oct 1982 1211-PDT
Subject: Travelers' Computers.
From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow
Reply-to: Geoff at SRI-CSL
a203 0920 03 Oct 82
AM-Focus-Travelers' Computers, Bjt,820
TODAY'S FOCUS: Placing Computers in the Air and in Hotel Rooms
Laserphoto Cartoon NY6
By NORMAN BLACK
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - John Q. Public, a sales manager at a major
corporation, is working at his computer terminal in New York when he
gets an order from the boss - get out to Los Angeles and help close
a major deal .
Two hours later, Public is on the airplane. He checks in by
phone for some final instructions, then pulls out a portable
terminal provided by the airline and resumes work. When he's done,
his latest sales report is transmitted back to New York, from 40,000
feet in the air.
Later that night, Public checks into a hotel. He flips on a
small computer terminal in his room, reads several ''electronic
mail'' messages waiting for him from other sales agents and files
his own report back to New York on the Los Angeles contract.
Sound farfetched? Guess again. The computer age is arriving
faster than you think.
Dallas-based Travelhost Inc. plans to begin placing small
computer terminals in hotel and motel rooms in January. The company
is convinced it can entice hotel operators to place 500,000
terminals in the field by mid-1985.
An unrelated company, Airfone Inc., hopes to begin testing the
nation's first commercial air-to-ground telephone system next month.
Assuming the experiment works, Airfone officials say it's a small
step from an airplane telephone system transmitting voices to a
phone system transmitting computer data.
Some preliminary tests indicate that the idea is feasible, says
John D. Goeken, founder and president of Airfone, a Washington,
D.C.-based company that is now 50 percent owned by the Western Union
Corp.
Officials of Airfone and Travelhost, although approaching their
ventures from different perspectives, are focusing on the same
travel market. The development of video teleconference facilities,
allowing corporate executives to meet via television, will never
completely replace the need for face-to-face meetings, the officials
say.
''This will be the first amenity introduced for the hotel
industry in the last 30 years that's significant enough to help push
the industry into a new future,'' says Dr. Lee H. Smith, president
of Travelhost. ''... this will become a vital service to the in-room
traveler that allows him to avail himself of some very good
travel-related services in an easy fashion.''
Travelhost and another Dallas company, the Quazon Corp., have
already developed a simple, ''user friendly'' computer terminal for
the new service. Quazon will manufacture the devices, with the first
to be available in January.
Smith says the terminals will prove attractive to hotel
operators because they'll receive a payment every time a terminal in
one of their rooms is turned on. Travelers, meantime, after punching
in a credit card number, will be able to send and receive electronic
messages; make airline reservations; check addresses and menus at
restaurants; peruse the offerings of merchandisers, and check the
stock market and latest news reports.
''If a person can count to 10, he or she can operate this
Travelhost terminal,'' Smith claims.
Travelhost has yet to announce how much the service will cost
the traveler, although Smith says the rates ''will certainly be
competitive with what's out there now for home computer users. A
rough ball park might be $20 an hour during peak time and $7 or $8
during non-peak.
''Portability isn't here yet for computers, and we think the
timing is absolutely right and that we can ... capture a significant
share of the market,'' he adds.
While there might not be many people carrying portable computers
now, that is clearly something envisioned by Airfone. The company
says that one day airline travelers will be able to use their own
terminal or a portable device provided by the airline to work during
flights.
''Our main concern right now is the in-flight telephone
system,'' says Stephen Walker, the joint venture liaison for Western
Union.
''But computer data transmission is one of the next steps,'' he
continued. ''There's no trick to that, really.''
If you have the equipment to attach a computer to a telephone,
he adds, ''it doesn't make any difference whether the phone is on
the ground or in the air.''
Bill Gordon, Airfone's director of network planning, says the
company has been developing the air-to-ground telephone service
since 1974.
''But it took us until 1979 to ask the Federal Communications
Commission to authorize the service and allocate frequencies,'' he
added. ''The FCC hasn't done that yet, because they want to see the
results of our experiment. We've got licenses now to build 37 ground
stations and we're reaching the point of putting the gear into the
airplanes.
''The airlines are very interested in this,'' Gordon concluded.
''They want to make the transportation time for their passengers as
enjoyable and productive as possible.''
ap-ny-10-03 1219EDT
***************
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Date: 1-Sep-82 21:07:32 PDT (Wednesday)
From: Hamilton.es at PARC-MAXC
Subject: Re: MazeWar game for Altos
I'm pretty sure MazeWar does use PUPs. When you boot, there's a
"Host" option that lets you specify an arbitrary network address on
the Internet in order to join that machine's game. Thus it should
be possible to play between say, England, Rochester, and El Segundo,
although the response might be a bit sluggish if some players are 4
or 5 hops away.
It is true that it's possible to "cheat" by running a kludged-up
version of the program. That's why the sources have been
(informally) carefully guarded over the years.
Kudos should go to the author of MazeWar, Jim <Guyton @ Rand-AI>.
--Bruce
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Date: 2 September 1982 0034-EDT (Thursday)
From: Craig.Everhart at CMU-10A
Subject: Re: MazeWar game for Altos
I stand corrected. Jim Guyton already pointed out my error
privately; enclosed are some of his remarks about how it gets the
job done. My comments were based on my bad memory of having peeked
at the network traffic; I apologize for any damage done by my faulty
memory.
Craig Everhart
- - - - - - - -
Date: Wednesday, 1 Sep 1982 20:19-PDT
Subject: Re: Mazewar
From: guyton at RAND-UNIX
Every player simply sends a single pup to every other player in the
game on every change-state. 90% of the time this is in response to
the player moving -- which is very infrequent compared to the
capacity of a 3Mbit Ethernet (and the Alto).
Each packet is not acknowledged; the assumption is that most of them
get through and the ones following a lost packet make the lost one
out of date anyway. Not entirely true, but good enough for a game!
Of course the small number of people allowed in a single maze does
help keep the communications overhead down. But the limit was to
prevent crowded mazes, not because of communications.
The only broadcast msgs are those when someone tries to join a game.
To join a game on another network you have to supply net#0# as the
duke-rat host number. It has been a long time since I left Xerox
and even longer since I leaked a version of mazewar to the
universities; but I think that that version "supported"
multiple-network games. Certainly the current version does.
-- Jim
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Date: 6-Sep-82 15:06:06 PDT (Monday)
From: Reed.ES at PARC-MAXC
Subject: Re: HUMAN-NETS Digest V5 #89
"As I've overheard it, the main program for the game resides
on a Gateway, with relatively low-bandwidth screen
"transactions" being sent to the individual players'
machines (vs. fully updating each screen remotely)."
-- Ciccarelli.pa@PARC-MAXC
Mazewar operates as follows:
Up to 8 players may play. There are indeed three windows, but you
didn't describe them quite correctly. The top window shows the rat's
eye view of the maze: looking down the corridors as if you are in
the maze. The middle window is the bird's eye view you describe, and
the bottom window is also as you describe it.
Each game. when started, searches for existing mazewar games on
the local net (or a net specified by the user). If none are found,
it establishes itself as King Rat. Other games starting after the
King Rat game hook into the King Rat, which maintains the game's
database. The King Rat is listed first in the scoring area.
A game will also establish itself as King Rat when it can't enter
an already in-progress game. Thus multiple games may exist. A user
may choose which game to play by specifying the host number of the
King Rat of the game desired. This is usually found out by agreement
among the players, but the searching algorithm simplifies it.
No gateways are involved except as they fulfill their normal
functions of linking networks together.
"There is no centralized service for MazeWars; in fact, I
think it's impossible to play the same game on different
Ethernets, since the packets it uses aren't Pups, and
therefore aren't transmitted by Pup gateways."
-- Craig.Everhart at CMU-10A
This is totally incorrect. A game may be played between any machines
that are connected over any number of gateways. (I once played a
game where I was in Rochester, NY, and one opponent was in El
Segundo, CA, and a third in Palo Alto, CA. The response time was not
much worse than in a local net game.) The data packets themselves
are stuffed into Pups and transmitted/received as any other Pup is.
Your claim is more accurate for TREK (see below) than for Mazewar.
When Mazewar was first introduced, the net traffic it engendered
resulted in the management at Xerox edicting that people would not
play during working hours. It was a very popular game. The inventors
even had programs which could smash an arbitrary Mazewar program (by
sending a quit packet to it) when people were deemed to be causing
problems.
TREK's speed depends noticeably on the number of players playing,
although I don't think this is because of net traffic so much as
machine limitations. TREK operates by sending all packets to a
standard address, and each instantiation of it listens to that
specific address. This caused a lot of problems early on since the
standard address was not always available on a given net, and since
a TREK game is limited to a single network (multi-network addresses
were not supported; this may have been fixed, but I don't know), you
couldn't always predict when TREK would interfere with someone on
your network. Of course, one could always reserve specific addresses
for TREK, but that kind of thing doesn't always sit well with
network administrators.
TREK's use of distributed databases essentially results in every
machine having a copy of certain public information. Certain other
information is not public - like the state of damage to a given ship
(all the outside games see is the level of the shields and perhaps
some erratic movement.) This has certain advantages, like preventing
the game from being dependent on the status of a particular
participant. However, just choosing random addresses is not a good
idea, as we found out. Better would be to have the initial game use
it's own address. A machine need not be up in order for other
machines to listen for packets sent to it. And the fact that that
game established its own address as a valid destination for game
packets is an indication that the machine is not going to be
interfered with. Of course, if the game outlasts the initial
machine's involvement (since that player quits before the game is
over), the use of its address would be a performance problem. In
this case some mechanism should be established for switching the
broadcast address to one that is currently involved in the game.
-- Larry --
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Date: 1-Sep-82 10:10PM-EDT (Wed)
From: Nathaniel Mishkin <Mishkin at YALE>
Subject: Speaking of home video games
I see that various non-(video game manufacturers) (e.g. US Games)
are finally making "software" (i.e. cartridges) for other people's
(e.g. Atari) video games. Does anyone happen to know how these
people got or figured out the format for the cartridges and the
code? I'm curious whether it took this long since the introduction
of cartridge-based games for some grunt to disassemble (i.e.
uncompile) some ROM (would have been great fun). Or maybe they got
a license (less fun).
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Date: 30 Aug 82 22:23:53 EDT (Mon)
From: Steve Bellovin <smb.unc@UDel-Relay>
Subject: network games
The best network game I ever saw was the POLI-SCI Digest. I didn't
learn as much from it as I learned from games like HUMAN-NETS and
TELECOM, nor is it as funny as USENET -- but oh the gamesmanship....
--Steve
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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