“WarGames” Magazine Identified | Hacker News Reader

“WarGames” Magazine Identified

mw.rat.bz

300 pointsm_walden77 comments

Probably the coolest part of that article was the realization that I could read some arbitrary magazine from 1982 on my browser within seconds. Archive.org really is an amazing organization, and I was also happy to find out that they're matching donations 3:1 due to anonymous generosity after their recent fire-y setback [1]. Do consider donating!

[1] http://archive.org/donate/

Well this makes me feel old. The answer was clear enough from that one freeze-frame[1]. When I was a kid, the local public library had a stack of Creative Computing magazines. I remember that cover.

[1] http://mw.rat.bz/wgmag/09_Front_Cover.png

Lol, I didn't recognize the issue, but that 'Creative Computing' logo is quiet distinctive. I have mixed feelings about that era. Pre internet, information was so hard to come by. I tried to start 6502 assembly programming back then, but lack of resources in small town, mid west made it damn near impossible. Then I 'discovered' girls and my interest in computing waned, so there you go :)

Even without looking, I could tell David would be reading either Creative Computing or BYTE.

;-)

I love what archive.org is doing. I grew up with these magazines.

If it is that easy, why is it that this information did not exist on the net until now? I am someone who had the interest and took time to put this together in a nice presentation.

I for one really appreciate your effort and dedication. I know it's a trivial or even frivolous pursuit but having wondered the same thing, I'm glad to have the "issue" resolved. Now time for a Real Genius / Wargames double feature.

Thanks for the effort! I was a regular reader of BYTE magazine (and Nibble!) but never knew Creative Computing.

There was also a TV series with a similar theme (war dialling) at that time. I can't recall its name...

I was a regular reader of BYTE magazine and Creative Computing. Nibble, not so much since I did not have Apple II class PCs. I believe that the TV series you refer to was Whiz_Kids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_%28TV_series%29

Whiz Kids it was indeed. Too bad it's not available for watching online. Thanks for taking the time to answer!

You did an impressive job. Thank you. The reason this information did not exist in written form is that it was fairly obvious to those who knew Creative Computing and could readily identify the magazine, to the point of nobody thinking about writing it down. I knew Creative Computing (it was one of my favorite computer magazines, along with BYTE and Nibble) and if someone asked me, I would readily identify it.

Now, I believe there is a lesson here. Those who were into computing at that time know a lot of stuff that never got written down. Maybe we should talk more with younger computer geeks who never heard a teletype (I love the sound they make) or have no idea we elders like to stay within 80 columns because of IBM punchcards.

You may have questions we can answer. Let's get them asked.

If you're ever in Seattle, stop by the Living Computer Museum sometime. You can interact with mainframes, Teletypes, punch cards, etc. Lots of fun.

Here are some photos I took last time we went:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mratzloff/sets/7215763439619459...

I included descriptions on most of these, if you're curious about anything in particular.

It's on my list.

About your photo set, it's a great collection. I'm enjoying them a lot. Thanks for pointing us to it.

It's also fun to stop by the Museum of Communications [0], about 3 miles down the road, to see old working telephone exchanges and such. There's a lot of commonality between the two. (They are only open on Tuesdays, first Sundays of the month, or by appointment.)

The MoC runs its own BBS off of an AT&T 3B2 model 500 [1], which can be accessed via telnet.

[0] http://museumofcommunications.org/ or http://www.scn.org/telmuseum/

[1] http://museumofcommunications.org/?page_id=164

[2] full disclosure: my dad was involved in forming the Telecommunications History Group, which is the parent organization for the MoC.

It was "that easy" for one person with screwed up priorities who happened to have a fairly visually-oriented memory at the time, i.e., me.

It's not like I recognized the date from the cover or anything. I didn't track anything down; you did all the work.

I hope I haven't hurt your feelings.

No, not at all. I hope I did not sound like I was upset. I was just trying to convey that it may seem easy when you see the answer, but it was a bit tricky to find the answer.

This film got me into computer programming. As a young kid, I was mesmerised by it. Matthew Brodrick saved the world, got the girl and got to play with the coolest tech at the time. What more could any boy want? I still think I owe Matthew a pint of good Ale or a Raspberry Pie for single handedly launching my career.

The novelization by David Bischoff was good, too. As a 15-year-old kid, it was the first time I'd ever encountered the idea of nihilism.

My father only agreed to have kids if we lived near what's now known as the research triangle. Same line of thinking as prof. Falken: go out early. I was born in '78, so guess I don't owe my life to a movie, but it's an interesting tie in.

To be honest, I'd probably end up where I am with or without that film but the early memory of it is so strong with me that I keep making that connection (for that warm fuzzy feeling). I was born at '76 and that tech to me seemed so far out futuristic for many years. It was only in the 90s that before I got my first modem.

This post got me thinking about my old hobbies as a high schooler in the late 80s and I remembered war dialing. It was trilling to come home after school and see what my dailer had discovered while I was away. With a few weeks of dialing, I covered all of prefixes in my local exchange. Found a back door into my high school's library (but never could guess or shoulder-surf the password, sadly) and found a terminal server at the local university where I could telnet out without any authentication.

I was just now googling around for war dialers and came across this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/iwar/

Looks pretty awesome and supports SIP/IAX2. I may have to give it a shot. Surely there are still some interesting back doors out there.

Yes! The war dialling in this movie was great, as was the hacking (or 'cracking' if you're gonna be precious about it). Also there's a scene where David needs to make a call without change and hacks a payphone using a technique that worked IRL.

Arguably one of the only two truish-to-life hacker movies ever made (the other of course being Sneakers, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435).

TL;DR: It's "Creative Computing Magazine (September 1982) Volume 08 Number 09"

PDF for those looking to read it: https://ia601602.us.archive.org/6/items/creativecomputing-19...

That really doesn't do the article justice.

Pretty sure tl;dr is not intended to do such

Interesting seeing page 7 an add by Microsoft selling a compiler for the Apple][.

Microsoft sold hardware for the Apple ][. In 1980.

http://apple2info.net/index.php?title=Microsoft_SoftCard

At one point this was MS's biggest selling product.

I wish people would stop submitting "TL;DR" comments here. What's the point? Enabling people who didn't read TFA to post anyway?

If the article was particularly dull or uninformative I'd understand but in this case it's very well researched and full of interesting bits of lore.

If you can't stand to read more than two sentences in a row I suggest you stick to twitter.

I appreciate the TL;DR in this case, as I could have done without the rather odd egoistic intro. in the article. One would think the author had just solved P=NP.

"I have performed a real world hack...Through the use of my knowledge of computer magazines...my sharp eyes...I have overcome the limited amount of information available...and with complete certainty...I finally achieved my goal on 2013-02-24 at 5:30pm."

I mean, it is cool and of novel interest, for sure. The intro a little over-the-top, perhaps?

My take on that was that he was poking fun at himself.

At face value it sounds like inflated ego, but I think his tongue was firmly in his cheek.

Given his comment here[1] I don't think that's the case.

Clearly the author is very proud of himself after years of wondering about it, so it's understandable why he feels this is a big achievement. I'm sure all of us have these little things that we'd like to know, and the cool thing about the Internet is that every year it gets easier to discover the answers.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6944786

Any chance someone has an original copy of this? I'm wondering how much it would fetch at an auction.

Probably not very much - look on Ebay, computer magazines of similar age show up all the times; huge amounts of people have garages full of old computer magazines, and the demand is fairly low. Only way it'd fetch a "high" price would be if someone managed to hype up the connection to the movie to ridiculous levels.

The 'Pinball Construction Set' program was advertised, I cant remember the page. I had that program on a Commadore 64 and it was phenomenal for what it did in <40k memory.

It even had a movable cursor using keyboard with drag and drop. It was written by a guy named Bill Bulge best I remember and have always wondered where this guy is today? given how advanced his software was way back then.

According to Wiki, he's working for Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Budge

Budge has placed the source code to PCS for Apple ][ and Atari 800 on GitHub:

https://github.com/billbudge

Wow thanks... I'm going to download and take a peek. I have great memories playing with that game.

Unless you've worked a lot with 6502s or their brethren, it's going to look like a dense mass of gibberish. Not a lot of comments but excellent use of variable and label names.

Budge's assembly is some of the most clever and compact code I've ever seen for these kinds of processors.

I thought this was funny: Oddly, Budge doesn't like to play arcade and videogames very much. In fact, he says it was "sheer torture" to play pinball steadily for months while working on his construction set. http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue57/computer_game....

Another one I remember was Arcade Game Construction Kit that in hindsight blows me away with its power on the C64. A full dev-kit for platformer and top-view games including sprite editor/animator, level-editor, tile-editor, sound-editor, etc. All windowed.

I spent days in a beanbag chair with a comfy Epyx joystick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Epyx_500XJ.jpg oh my god that form-factor needs to come back) making games.

Yeah, I have one of those Epyx joysticks too. It's great.

A Speedlink Competition Pro USB looks a bit like this and is available (though not at Amazon anymore).

Interesting, I know that stick as the Konix Speedking.

Not complaining, the more names I find for it, the better chance I have of finding one.

http://www.virtualapple.org/pinballconstructionsetdisk.html

...that cursor is actually really hard to use. I guess mice have spoiled us all.

I get such a strong sense of nostalgia from old computer magazines like that. I'm not sure why. Maybe because they tended to depict computer system setups which you would never actually see in the real world, just some future utopia. Compared to today's magazines where the computer work stations are much more familiar. Or maybe this is just what nostalgia is.

This reminds me of the time I bought an old 1972 issue of Rolling Stone magazine on eBay to be able to cite the Spaceware article (also available online) [1] in my bachelor's thesis on Smalltalk as evindence that the culture at Xerox PARC was somewhat unorthodox in the seventies.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548719

I picked my first Silicon Valley apartment based on the fact that it was the location mentioned in War Games.. I also purchased my house in Sunnyvale... that movie had a bit too much influence on my life ;)

How does the Internet Archive get the appropriate rights to make these scans available?

The Sonny Bono copyright act has a specific exception for libraries and archives who make available digital reproductions of works which are no longer commercially available at a reasonable price. Details at: http://www.copyright.gov/docs/nla.html

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. I'm not affiliated with the Internet Archive. I am, however, a packrat with a scanner.

That exception is only during the last 20 years of the term of copyright. The copyright extension was for 20 years, so basically the exception kept the old rules for libraries on stuff that wasn't commercially exploitable.

It's possible that the magazines were published without a copyright notice; and the works were not registered. It wasn't until March 1st 1989 that published works were automatically granted copyright. It's also quite possible that the owners of the rights have granted distribution rights to the Internet Archive; that is common too.

The magic of the magazines from that era is that they were full of articles from people showing "look what I did with my computer!"

Dr. Dobbs from that era vs the current or even worse, last decade's, shows the difference.

Some of HN is now a feed of that kind of attitude and enthusiasm, which is why we all waste so much time here.

Related to the Jade Computer Products ad that is in the "real" magazine: Does anyone know why so many computer shops had clusters of stores in both Dallas and southern California? I remember dealing with Jade (which was in Addison, not Dallas, though I guess they had a Dallas post office address) and seeing their ad list just the one store here. SoftWarehouse/CompUSA did the same thing for awhile but in reverse; a bunch of stores in north Texas and one or two near Los Angeles. Fry's went the other way for a long time, like Jade. MicroCenter is the only computer outlet brand, off the top of my head, that didn't have that kind of store allocation in the late 1980s into the 1990s.

Just one of those oddities from when I grew up, I suppose.

If I had to guess: http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/company/factsheet.shtml

"The company’s headquarters is located at 12500 TI Boulevard, Dallas, Texas 75243."

Closeness to regional shipping hubs (rail / air)?

Bravo.

I am surprised to see a pistol in the Apple ad in Figure 16.

It's not really an Apple ad, just an ad for a book about the Apple computer, published by Creative Computing.

Very cool. Just reading this article makes me want to go back and watch that movie again. Those were some pretty cool times to be into tech.

One year later I got a TI99/4A, a modem and tried to emulate David. I was literally fascinated by the film, especially its first part.

I bet you were using the Terminal Emulator II cartridge, which with the Speech Synthesizer attached could read you the text coming across, just like David does in the movie.

The Speech Synthesizer was the coolest thing about the TI99/4A. Well, that and Tunnels of Doom.

wondering if the cleaned up video on the bluray master makes all of this digging moot. based on the quality of the transfer (which can be seen in screenshots on bluray.com) id bet the shot of the magazine cover as he walks by would be clear enough to see exactly what title says. work smarter, not harder.

What fun would that be?

Exactly!

Also, I think that the magazine will still be out of focus since the camera was focused primarily on the father.

That Elephant floppy disc ad brings me back to the days of poring over the latest issue of 80 Microcomputing.

Wonderful. I was a child when I saw this movie the first time, and it's one of the things that piqued my interest in computers (besides having access to an Apple ][).

Too bad the sequel was even worse than Tron's. Don't watch it if you haven't yet.

I loved the Tron sequel. I can't quite imagine making a comparison like that though - both Tron and the sequel were extremely light on story and works primarily with the combination of concept and art. In both cases the story itself is enough for about a 5 minute short.

Tron: Legacy to me is some interesting ideas coupled with a movie length absolutely fantastic Daft Punk music video, while the original excited me for the computer graphics and the ideas it presented.

I have my fingers crossed for a Tron 3, with Quorra in our world...

Seconded! I enjoyed the Tron sequel. I almost leaped out of my chair yelling "EMACS!!" in the office scene. Almost..

Here's an article about some of the visual effects in Tron (and emacs!): http://jtnimoy.net/?q=178

That article is almost more enjoyable than the movie.

>"Tron: Legacy to me is some interesting ideas coupled with a movie length absolutely fantastic Daft Punk music video, while the original excited me for the computer graphics and the ideas it presented."

Spot on.

The key with Tron: Legacy is appreciating it for what it is rather than faulting it for lacking things which it never claimed to have.

The Tron squeal was awesome!

Ahhh, those were the days when your main source of new source code to play with came from print publications.

For those talking about sequels, FYI... There is a WarGames sequel on Netflix but I made it 3 minutes in before abandoning. Can anyone recommend it?

Tangentially related: is the movie any good?

Yes.

Well, I'm glad that mystery has been solved...

So do I

Zegats! I think I used to own that issue.

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