Sep 29, 2026, 10:39 AMIt had an ASCII version of a Star Trek game, which I was always improving. The original was a variant of the classic BASIC game Super Star Trek.
Good times, man. Good times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(1971_video_game)#Super_Star_Trek
That's probably the same "Star Trek" game I played on my uncle's teletype.
By the time I actually got to college, the usual interface was a video terminal. We had mostly VT-220s, a few VT-100s, and some "Adam" dumb terminals, especially at the telescope.
We also had a few classic Macintoshes in the computer lab at that point.
The main Astronomy department computers were running BSD Unix or VMS.
And of course, we had those big 9-track tape reels and readers -- I had one for my senior research data. I probably still have it somewhere. But I haven't seen it in a long time!
Played that game endlessly in the high school 'computer lab' on a teletype machine connected via telephone acoustic coupler.
Ah yes. "Acoustic coupler" -- that's what that phone handset cradle thing is called.
Yup. Still have a box somewhere of paper tape reels of some BASIC programs.
@mastodonmigration @TerryHancock @nyrath after one year of us doing that on wet games days the school worked out that they could buy two of the new fangled micro computer thingys for less than the phone bill.
FWIW - should you want to play them, the "Adventure" and "Star Trek" games are still available in Debian in the "bsdgames" package:
https://packages.debian.org/trixie/bsdgames
Of course, for the full experience, you'll have to buy a teletype and hook it up to your computer. But they work well in a terminal emulator window.
You can find Infocom games on the Internet Archive today.
Debian has multiple "Z-code" interpreter programs that can run them. I think I've used "jzip" and "frotz".
"Inform" is a language for writing your own text adventures in the same style -- there are tutorials, examples, and FOSS "text adventure" / "interactive fiction" games.
Sep 29, 2026, 7:44 PMArticle about a 1983 Infocom text adventure game named "Planetfall", found in a 1983 issue of Softline magazine.
It was ground breaking at the time, but now is common place.
Sep 29, 2026, 6:42 PM@TerryHancock @nyrath if you happen to still have a PDP-11 in the closet, I've written some instructions on how to compile the Colossal Case Adventure from the original FORTRAN. https://trmm.net/Advent/
@nyrath @TerryHancock Here's a new web site chronicling the evolution of Star Trek: