Talk:Maze War

Personal memories

I was struck by the illustration on the Wahrman page, of the eyeball in a corridor; it's not captioned, but the placement implies that it's the Imlac version. I'm pretty sure it's not, that it's the Alto version.

I played both. Circa 1977, I got Spencer Love to loan me a Tech Sq key (I still have two; both the semi-unpickable Medeco, and the later one), and went in at night with a visiting young lady (visiting someone else, not me) to play Maze. I don't remember the display, but I don't think it could have had the eyeball; the Imlac was not bit-mapped, but only vectors. When the Alto donation arrived at MIT some years later, I did play that version too, but only a bit.

I do dimly recall a hack involving Bob Baldwin (now gone, sadly; an inveterate hack-meister) involving a large (4' or so diameter) black balloon painted to resemble the Alto Maze eyeball. I don't recall if it was actually deployed (and if so, where and when), or merely planned, though. Jnc (talk) 17:14, 17 November 2022 (CET)

Yes, that's the Alto eyeball. It's not the first time I have seen the eye retroactively imposed on the Imlac game. I think there are some false memories going around.

I think it was pretty cool to find a Logo version. A more elusive one would be one supposedly at ArchMach, which I only saw mentioned in passing in an email.

Altos in Tech Square: was there just one, or several? I only know it as a front end to the Dover, running Spruce.

More memorabilia! Would it be possible to see photos of those keys? Larsbrinkhoff (talk) 17:33, 17 November 2022 (CET)

The DigiBarn page has an image of the Imlac game display here; alas, it doesn't seem to show another player, just an empty maze.

We had quite a few Altos; almost one per office on the fifth floor, for large parts of the floor. And some down in LCS HQ, I would guess. I don't recall about on other floors.

Not much serious work got done on them, as I recall: Dave Clark did a TCP for it, and a TFTP spooler for the Dover; I don't recall what else. IIRC, mostly they were used for document preparation, using the Xerox tools (Bravo, etc), since our native tools couldn't take advantage of the full capabilities of the Dover. Although all the in-house text formatter tools (troff on the UNIX machines; Scribe; etc) were quickly adapted to produce output on the Dover (usually via post-processors). Although everyone learned a lot from seeing them work.

In addition to the Dover and 'personal' Altos, we also had a file-server machine (I forget which kind; I can look at the Alto book and try and work it out, if it's important); it had a Trident drive. It came pre-loaded with tons of stuff; I have PUP documents which were printed from it.

That server got me in hot water; when we first tried to bring it up, it wouldn't. IIRC, it wanted to get a time packet from a PUP router, and we didn't have any. So I sent off an email message reporting the problem; in it I made some passing reference to 'Xerox Brain Damage' (after 'Honeywell Brain Damage', q.v. the 'Jargon File'). I thought I was being funny, but others didn't; Jerry Saltzer called me in and chewed me out, and as a result I had to send off an apology to people at Xerox.

I'm not sure if I know where the keys are; I'll have a quick look, and if that fails, keep my eyes open. Jnc (talk) 18:42, 17 November 2022 (CET)