Wallowing In Retro

Man, I'm wallowing in retro. While I was at the Computer History Museum for the Moore's Law celebration, I had some time before the talk to wander around their "Visible Storage" display. A nice volunteer seeing the giant smile spread across my face asked if he could help. I told him I really wanted to see a PDP 11/70 if they had one. This was my high school's computer donated by DEC that I hacked away on in 1983 or so. The volunteer lead me right to their machine. Next thing I knew I felt like I was 15 again. Oh man, they even had one of those teletype-like terminal printers. The only thing missing was how incredibly noisy the machine room was. Perhaps the exhibit should pump a mix of dot matrix printer noise, industrial air conditioning and the old disk drive chatter over speakers to complete the experience.

It was fate I guess that I'd run across an OS X port of Adventure. I picked up a nasty cold this weekend and before I knew it I was recreating a map of the caves that I had done back in the day. Only now I know enough to call it a finite state diagram. I did a search for a "map", having made one as a kid I didn't feel like I was cheating, but strangely I couldn't find one out there.

Links

1. Computer History Museum's PDP 11 collection. Adventure was originally written on a PDP 11 in FORTRAN. Unfortunately their website is not really set up for linking to a particular machine.
2. Play an 'old-school' adventure game, By Rob Griffiths, MacWorld, via RSS
3. Freeware Adventure from Lobotomo Software.
4. A history of Adventure
5. Happy 40th Moore's Law that I did.