Subj : Re: what's classic now?
To   : Dan Cross
From : Richard Falken
Date : Fri Jul 09 2021 07:08 am

  Re: Re: what's classic now?
  By: Dan Cross to Richard Falken on Fri Jul 02 2021 01:41 pm

 > On 01 Jul 2021 at 06:13p, Richard Falken pondered and said...
 > 
 >  RF>   Re: Re: what's classic now?
 >  RF>   By: Dan Cross to Richard Falken on Fri Jul 02 2021 03:01 am
 >  RF>  > That doesn't sound right to me.  Rogue began life on a VAX
 >  RF>  > running BSD Unix, not 6th Edition.  Adventure almost certainly
 >  RF>  > made an appearance on the PDP-11 pretty early on, perhaps in
 >  RF>  > the Research days, but rogue would have come later; after all,
 >  RF>  > it uses curses.
 > 
 >  RF> I sourced that information from the Early Roguelike Gallery. John Elwin
 >  RF> is trying very hard to keep a living museum of early rogue(likes) so if 
you have a valid
 >  RF> source for that claim, he will LOVE to hear about it
 >  RF> and make the necessary corrections.
 > 
 > Well, the original authors were Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy,
 > with some input from Ken Arnold.  Arnold wrote the curses
 > library that they built Rogue on top of at Berkeley.  Rogue is
 > from 1980, 6th Edition Unix was '74 (tapes went out in '75),
 > 7th Ed was '78 (tapes distributed outside of Bell Labs in '79),
 > and 32V (Unix ported to run on the VAX) later in '79.  Joy
 > and Baboglu did virtual memory support in 3.0 BSD (before
 > TCP/IP!) towards the end of '79.  Ken Arnold wrote curses while
 > at Berkeley, where he was a student from '79 to '83.  The
 > earliest reference to curses that I can find is from 2.79BSD,
 > which is April 1980, though there are claims that there was
 > a paper written in 1977; I'm not sure I buy that, though, as I
 > can't find a good source for that time frame.  In the original
 > curses paper from 2.79, Arnold gives credit to Bill Joy for
 > what is obviously termcap, which was done for `vi`.  So I
 > think it's safe to assume that the work that went into curses
 > was probably done ~1979.
 > 
 > 2.79 also includes a document from Michael Toy describing
 > rogue; Glenn Wichman has a history document describing the
 > history of `rogue` here: http://www.digital-eel.com/deep/A_Brief_History_of_Rogue.htm
 > Note the references to starting with curses; so whenever
 > Rogue was written, it post-dates curses, and a lot of
 > contemporary accounts put it in 1980: 6th Ed was long in
 > the tooth by then.
 > 
 > I found a site called "rlgallery.org" which is a "Roguelike
 > Gallery" and has some history notes that claim development
 > in 1981 through 1983, but with no citations save some really
 > sketchy link to a gamesutra article.  I can't find any references
 > to 6th Edition beyond the rlgallery.org notes, but that doesn't
 > make a lot of sense to me, as I said before: if that early
 > work were done on a PDP-11, I imagine it would have been running
 > 2BSD (any college in the UC system could have gotten the tape).
 > 
 > So yeah. I'm not buying that it was originally written for 6th
 > Ed.  That just doesn't make a lot of sense.

I forwarded this message to ElwinR. He says he has evidence from the RRP that 
Rogue V3 was
developped on a PDP-11, and that it was Rogue V4 what was done on 4BSD on a 
VAX. He also agrees
he lacks reliable citations for claiming Unix V6 was the first platform on 
which Rogue was
developped so he is going to make some corrections on his site.

Cheers!


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