I have been following some discussions on Adventure, StarTrek, and other games around back in the 20th Century. If you look on the CBT tape you will find a number of Computer games from back in the 1970s; WUMPUS, RoadRace, Eliza, Lunar Lander, etc. Thought it was about time to clue folks in on some events. Back in the 1970s the Air Force assigned me to the Pentagon to work on an IBM 360-75J & OS/MVT/HASPIII. Along the way we were blessed with the first IBM 303X shipped; namely a 3032 serial number 6. Along with it came all the DASD and tape plus an IBM 3850 MSS (35GB) with a bunch of Virtual IBM 3330 (100MB) drives.
On both machines we implemented TSO with the IBM 360-75 turned into an unclassified dial-up Time Sharing machine. I was on the hunt for utilities and TSO Command Processors to give us added functionality. I came across a tape of computer games. It was tempting to try them out but whether the Air Force would buy it was another story. So I went to my Air Force and DOD Civilian management to ask if I could maintain the source code on our system. The idea was to use it as barter for getting SHAREWARE or Open Source code today. The position I took for all this code was it showed programmers how one could write Interactive code. Some was in FORTRAN, COBOL, ALC, and PL1/F. Plus some had a mix of languages. Yep, one language was calling another language as a subroutine. Look at the code and a programmer is jumpstarted seeing code which actually worked. Besides I could barter the game code to entice others to send me their TSO CPS and utilities. They actually agreed and I got myself 3-4 IBM 3330V disk packs in the MSS and I was in business. The deal was to maintain the code, get to check it out and it was not to be played. Indeed I was the only one who was allowed into it. I had gone out to the keeper of the TSO Mods tape for SHARE and when he returned to me an empty tape saying he did not have anything, I started adding TSO CPs to the collection. Along the way I became the defacto keeper of the TSO Mods tape. In the Washington DC area we had the Goddard Space Flight Center along with other agencies with a bunch of great coders. Then the Air Force hired a contractor from PRC named Bill Godfrey. He had a big collection of code and as soon as it hit the Air Force computer, I asked if I could amass it and distribute the code. Bill is the original creator of TSSO and the first I know to write code to schedule an SRB in ALC program and giving the code away. So now I had TSO CPs, general Utilities and had picked up some tape utilities from a prior assignment in Denver, CO adding to it the Game collection and I could offer much in trade. I had distributed the TSO and Utilities to the SHARE and CBT tapes. The collection grew. Along the way I turned over the TSO Game file to CBT and Sam Golob with the provision it was not to be publicized it was coming from the US Air Force for it might cause others to question my chiefs judgement. Sam did a great job, packaged it up and now it was saved elsewhere besides on my IBM 3330V volumes. As happens in Washington, Political Correctness happened and having even the source code on a system was forbidden. Following orders the game collection was purged. But it lived in CBT land. I left the Pentagon in 1982 and headed to Texas taking along my OS/MVT DLIB packs. Now MVS was well established and IBM was now charging for Fortran, PLI, etc. So I unloaded my MVT DLIBs onto the IBM 4341 MVS system and extracted and packaged up a number of IBM MVT (FREE) Compilers; FORTRAN- G, FORTRAN-H, RPG, PL1/F, and maybe COBOL. I sent them off to Sam Golob and now people had the compilers to use for the TSO games. In the 1990s, I heard from a Blue Cross company they still were using IBM 360 RPG in production systems. Sam engineered some magic to get the Fortran-H and PL1/F compilers to run beyond MVS/XA. As I understand the Fortran-G and RPG run unchanged even today. I understand he may have added PASCAL. My point in all of this is to thank all the people along the way who made the effort to contribute the code. My part was just to get the code, check it out, figure out the installation, maybe document it and package it all and send it out. It was impressive that in the Pentagon, management actually accepted the story I told to go out and barter for code. It really did work. People would trade one program and get the whole collection. Then I would add their one piece and it grew. Hopefully it continues today. Looking at others code gave me a leg up because having to invent code from scratch is tough. Expanding others code is far easier. If one looks at what the Health Checker does and other ideas, most have come from folks like you. IBM is not dumb for they look at all this code to and I am sure if someone had access to IBM's code, traces of our free code would be seen. So in the days when you are thinking those in Washington are not responsive to your needs, well, back when we felt your pain and did something about it having great fun along the way. Jim Marshall P.S. Getting the first of a new generation of IBM computer, the IBM 3032, made us a showplace besides being in the Pentagon. But 6 months later IBM shipped the first IBM 3033 to Singer up in New Jersey, we were obsolete and never got the IBM 3032-AP/MP we hoped would come. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
