---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-hist...@elists.isoc.org> Date: Tue, Aug 8, 2023 at 12:56 PM Subject: Re: [ih] Larry Roberts & RD the first electronic mail manager software [was written in TECO on TENEX] To: <internet-hist...@elists.isoc.org>
Just a few years ago, I stumbled across an Annual Report that MIT submitted for one year's work in the early 70s. Since I was there at the time, I was curious how history recorded what we were doing then. Looking at the section for our group, I found a description of a revolutionary implementation of a teleconferencing system that allowed people to interact in real time using the ARPANET which had been completed that year. I didn't remember that we had built any teleconferencing system. Of course with age comes memory loss. But I remember lots of stuff we did then, but not a "teleconferencing system". A sign of encroaching dementia...? With further investigation... A bunch of us at MIT in Licklider's group spent a lot of hours getting multi-player MazeWar running on our fancy new Imlac minicomputers. Someone added a feature where players could trash-talk each other with a shared screen space trying to lure them into an ambush or gloat on another kill. MazeWars of course had nothing to do with whatever research we were doing. Gettings MazeWar going was just a lot of fun. We all thought MazeWars was just a cool hack and extremely addictive game. If curious, see https://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xerox-maze-war/index.html But the experience did reveal, to me at least, the importance of latency, and the difficulties of getting a bunch of computers to interact over a network. Imlacs had no I/O except RS232. So, our "LAN" was a star-shaped configuration with Imlac minicomputers connected via RS232 to our PDP-10 as the center of the star (7 floors away), and I had goosed the RS232 hardware well beyond its spec to achieve almost 100 kb/sec. I tried to convince BBN to upgrade the TIP hardware to support higher speed "terminals", but was rebuffed -- "The TIP supports terminals up to the maximum reasonable speed of 9600 bits/second." MIT's Annual Report touted Maze as a "teleconferencing system". Jack -- Internet-history mailing list internet-hist...@elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history -- Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxmoBr4cBKg Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos _______________________________________________ LibreQoS mailing list LibreQoS@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/libreqos
