Commercial History
In 1978 Alan E. Klietz wrote a multi-player game called Scepter, and a later version called Milieu using Multi-Pascal (which Alan made to work on his own) on a CDC Cyber operated by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, which was used by high school students and some state colleges in Minnesota for educational purposes. Most CDC mainframes had only "128K words (60 bit words) of memory and 110/300 baud teletypes or modems." Playing on a faster connection, 2400 BPS or the rare 9600 BPS could give some advantages in game play. Scepter was inspired by the single-player computer games Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork, as well as non-computer RPGss such as Dungeons & Dragons.
Klietz ported Milieu to an IBM XT in 1983, naming the new port Scepter of Goth. Richard Bartle's MUD1 was already running at Essex, but Klietz was unaware of this at the time. Scepter supported 10 to 16 simultaneous users, typically connecting in by modem, and ran on the QNX operating system (a Unix-like operating system). It was programmed in the C programming language, with nonportable QNX extensions for 8086/80286 memory segmentation.
Scepter (as well as an unfinished advanced MUD by Klietz called Screenplay) was first owned and run by GamBit (of Minneapolis, Minnesota), founded by at least Klietz, Bob Alberti (Senior), and Bob Alberti (Junior). Scepter of Goth was handled as a franchising business: franchisees paid for the right to run the system in a certain area, and a system was provided to them. Franchisees then administered the system and collected fees from users. Users would then dial in to play; while a franchisee could accept calls from outside their local phone call area, the extra charges this imposed on users meant that users tended to use the franchisee that was local or at least closest to them. Each franchisee would set their rates; most charged a certain fee per hour (typically $2–$4 per hour), since only a limited number of users could play simultaneously.
Read more about this topic: Scepter Of Goth
Famous quotes containing the words commercial and/or history:
“It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)