1973 implementation of Wordle was published by DEC (2022) | Hacker News Reader

1973 implementation of Wordle was published by DEC (2022)

troypress.com

106 pointsmsephton38 comments

> While some have traced Wordle to Lingo, a game show that started in 1987, they’ve missed an earlier implementation: WORD was published in 101 Computer Games by Digital Equipment Corp. in 1973

Which comes after the board game Mastermind, which was created in 1970 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game))

And the Mastermind variant "Word Mastermind" came out in 1972:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5662/word-mastermind

But Word Mastermind (like regular Mastermind) only tells you how many letters are in the correct spot, and how many are present but not in the correct spot. Whereas Wordle tells you specifically which letters fall into those categories. So it's not quite the same. (That's why Wordle only gives you 6 guesses, while Word Mastermind has 10 rows.)

Ok but in regular Mastermind, you get a white key peg for every code peg that is present but not in the correct spot.

Wow! That box cover image immediately brings me back to digging through the family board game box kept under my parents' bed. Vividly remember it, it was one of those mysterious/never-played games.

And JOTTO, a version that even used words like Wordle, is from 1955!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jotto

Everything is a Remix https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series

Yeah, a friend of mine mentioned the connection between Wordle and Mastermind which explained to me instantly why I really liked Mastermind (and even wrote an early Windows version) and Wordle--while being generally pretty indifferent to word games even though I'm a writer.

This book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games

I was exposed to this book in about 1975 when I was in detention in the math teacher's room. It set me on a path to programming.

https://archive.org/details/101basiccomputer0000davi/

https://archive.org/details/ahl-1978-basic-computer-games

Curious, what was your offence?

Crime pays;)

In 1980 they opened a new mall in Manchester, NH which was an hour from DEC’s headquarters and they had an actual DEC retail store that I bought a copy of that book from.

Notably DEC machines like the PDP-11 gave a timesharing BASIC experience that was similar to having your own Apple ][ or TRS-80 but a little bit better, probably the best thing was saving your files on a hard drive.

I still have a PDP-11 Programming Card I bought at that Digital retail store. That was an interesting place. As I recall, there also was a AT&T store in that mall where you could buy... telephones.

I remember that AT&T store! Note that mall is

https://www.simon.com/mall/the-mall-of-new-hampshire

They built it around 1980 when they built 93 as a ring road going around the city and I remember Sears immediately moving from a downtown location at the North End of Elm street to the mall and then most of the other department stores on Elm going out of business shortly thereafter.

As much as I could complain about the anti-pedestrian development of Southern NH that wants to be like a human lung and have exactly one path through the hierarchy from here to there [1] I can say my family did profit from Rt 93 because it caused the neighborhood I was in to develop so that the value of my house went up 1500%.

[1] this guarantees you'll encounter multiple traffic jams when multiple parts of the hierarchy get overloaded

I think it's wonderful (and remarkable) that DEC employed David Ahl in educational product marketing, where he basically (indeed BASICally) bootstrapped the computer gaming field.

After DEC killed its first microcomputer projects (not wanting to compete with its own minicomputer business) in 1974, Ahl left DEC to found Creative Computing and catalyze the microcomputer (and BASIC gaming) revolution of the 1970s. DEC later realized its mistake in ignoring the growing PC market, but never became a major player until they were eventually (and perhaps poetically/ironically) acquired by Compaq.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_H._Ahl

Edit: I thought this companion guidebook was interesting and wonder if DEC ever published its sequels:

https://archive.org/details/understanding-mathematics-and-lo...

We used to play Wordle in high school. Except it was called "the five-letter word game", and it was a competitive enterprise, in which several people would take turns guessing and the winner chose the next word.

There is an effort to rewrite the games from the book Basic computer games in modern languages. The word game is here: https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games/tree/m...

you can play it here: https://troypress.com/wp-content/uploads/user/js-basic/index...

The program is named "Word"

1970s? Way too recent. MOO dates from the 1960s and Bulls and Cows predates computers.

The screenshots bring back memories of keying in BASIC on an Apple ][ monochrome green screen. With that intro, the first time I used QBasic, I remember marveling at not having to use line numbers.

CALL -151 changed the course of my life.

Always thought Wordle and similar computer games were just variants of Mastermind, forms of which go back many decades, if not further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)

The popularity of Wordle (nothing new under the sun) indicates that there may be something to the phrase, it's not the idea but the implementation.

It's probably more of a case of, "what's old is new again." While implementation undoubtedly has something to do with it, Wordle probably caught on this time around due to it's digital packaging, the popularity of things seems to go in cycles.

Also the combination of the unique timing of the launch (late 2021) and the mass psychological/social effect of hundreds of millions of people worldwide working on the same daily challange, since they only published one per day, during Covid when lots of people needed a pleasant distraction.

Yes? Wordle is Mastermind; the only variation is that most guesses are illegal.

(Technically there are also more colors. I submit that the number of colors is not considered part of the ruleset of Mastermind.)

Well, Mastermind has 6 colors and 4 positions; Wordle has 26 letters and 5 positions. So at first it seems a larger solution space.

In Mastermind all feasible candidates are equiprobable (assuming the cluegiver isn't biased), but in Wordle we can use external statistical information (how likely is 'Y' to be letter #2? any letter?). Since Wordle uses a dictionary of 2331 possible words + 10657 additional words that can be used as guesses (so 12966 words in total). Out of a theoretical total of 4K five-letter English words, or 26P5 = 65780 five-letter permutations of letters (most gibberish). As such, you can often still gain information from trying a candidate word which you know cannot be the solution word (e.g. one letter known to be wrong position or missing).

You’re supposed to play on hard mode where it prevents you from playing a word that cannot be the solution.

Lawrence Hall is not a person, but a science museum at UC Berkeley. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Hall_of_Science>

Not directly related but there was a game called Muddled that focused on anagrams of 7 letter words that was such a time waster for me. Probably because seven letter words seem so much more fun.

This is a case where the (2022) year thing really confuses!

That and using Dec instead of DEC. Was having trouble parsing the title on this one.

HN does way too much "helpful" title normalization. @Dang pls fix

it is amusing that they could have had a much better user interface for it back then even with just text.

DEC the company, not Dec the month. @dang

Why did the programmer set up his Christmas tree on Halloween?

Because OCT 31 == DEC 25

Do you know what 38,400 is in hex? 0x9600. That was a fun uart debug session.

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