[jmorrison]

In the late 80s I worked on (to the best of my knowledge) the first multiplayer/networked AI-based NPC system for DARPA SIMNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMNET. So M-A-N-Y stories!

My most personal one was when we were first installing the system on-site at Fort Knox, in a massive building which housed about 90 4-person M1 tank simulators - all networked. 320 soldiers all participating simultaneously. (I also wrote the networking implementation for the simulators, and also helped integrate the custom image generators, which notably contained the first hardware-based texture mapping). The NPC system had Symbolics Lisp machine front-ends hooked up to a multiprocessor system running up to 256 separate CPUs on lightweight OS.

So we installed and booted up the system in the raised-floor machine room (remember them?), which took a long damned time. We were of course concerned about race conditions and memory leaks (the Butterfly was no less tricky to program than any other shared memory box with lots of CPUS). So we dropped down a company of Ivans (Russian tanks), and figured we'd let it run and go get fed (since we were tired and hungry - we might have been there all night - I cannot recall). When we came back into the building after lunch, lots of soldiers were running around, very pissed off, asking "who shot my tank?" and "will you please reset it?" So, I reset the tanks with the magic keyboard sequence, and retreated to the safety of the magnetic swipe-card-protected machine room to check on the Beast.

And lo and behold, there on the digital map display was the Russian tank company, surrounded by the digital corpses of many manned tank simulators.

The Beast was ALIVE. (I had, arguably mistakenly, initialized Ivan to be weapons-free when emplaced. I had also not known the soldiers would joyride through the vast terrain database during lunch break every day, shooting up everything around - none of which would have shot back before the Beast was delivered.)

It was a very Dr. Frankenstein moment.

[varjag]

Figure you are John Morrison mentioned on that page then?

It's impressive how far ahead of mainstream computing the system appeared to be in 1980s. Wonder if there's any technology gap of that magnitude anywhere now: things seem to have levelled out.

[jmorrison]

I must confess to having a more cynical view than that. I dimly recall some quotation (I cannot recall enough of it to Google it successfully) about somebody being naked, covered in dirt, surrounded by flies, and thinking it's normal. I concur that it describes our current state of computing, and that opinion is based upon the contrast between the non-mainstream technology I've been privileged to use and mainstream technology that circumstances have (more or less) forced me to use.

It's 15 years beyond 2001 - where is my HAL-9000? There are thousands of times more computing power in my kids' cell phones [insert obligatory reference to cat pictures here] than the computer I shared with 20 other geeks at MIT. The hardware guys have done their jobs - we software guys (for reasons that are probably worth discussing) have not.

My hobby stuff ("it's a hobby until you get paid") is done in Common Lisp wherever possible.

[varjag]

Oddly so is mine, although I only caught the tail end of CL popularity in the 90s.

Being underwhelmed by software is quite common in the trade. Sometimes at the day job I contemplate why my embedded Linux system is able to run at 32 megs of memory and in 8Mb of flash footprint, while the "off the shelf" Linux server box to the side of it eats 600Mb RAM just to idle in one console. It almost feels as we are forced for the lack of depth in systems development to push into the width just to keep the machines busy.