W.W.WUMPUS

Introduction

Why wumpus? It's the name of one the early computer games - "hunt the wumpus". Even if you're a gamer (which I'm not) you might never have heard of it. It was about the only game that was shipped with early versions of Unix. It had no graphics at all so you could even play it on a Teletype (a slow, hard copy terminal).

Site Structure

Currently there are three sites within the site, they are:

There's also a page of with a couple of really good downloads which people have sent me via mail. They're a bit big but really good fun.

There are plans for:

but both assume that I've got the time and inclination to sit down at the computer in the evenings and at the week-ends - that doesn’t happen very often when if spent a good portion of the working day with the things! One day perhaps…

"When I was young…"

When I say "early versions of Unix " I mean 6th and 7th edition back in the 1970's when Unix was available to the non-commercial world for the cost of a tape. Back in those days (when the computing world was young) Bell Labs used to post you a bootable 1/2" magnetic tape for PDP-11's. If you think about it why not? All you need for a bootable device is the ability to randomnly read/write blocks of data. Okay it's a bit slow but it sure beats putting in hundreds of lines of binary machine code via a switch panel.

The tape contained not only an executable of copy of Unix but the full source of the operating system, device drivers and all the utilities. You could get it for free if you were a non-commercial organisation but you couldn't buy it at all if you were commercial. The US anti-trust people wanted to stop Bell Labs taking over the world (well, the USA anyway) so they couldn't sell operating systems. This was before the split into AT&T and the Baby Bells.

How could they think that someone could take over the world by selling an operating system for a machine that had 64k segments like the PDP-11?

And finally…

Putt knot yore trussed inn spill chequers.