Greetings from Kentucky. I'm a fellow retrocomputing and house rabbit enthusiast. I also have been in the *real* Colossal Cave (now part of the Mammoth Cave System) in my work with the Cave Research Foundation. Will and Pat Crowther (Will wrote Colossal Cave, aka ADVENT) were the first humans to use computers to reduce the survey data we record in the cave from polar coordinates (tape measured distance, azimuth, and inclination) to more-easily managed Cartesian coordinates. The real Colossal Cave had two entrances, the "Bedquilt" entrance, so called because a native American blanket was alleged to have been found there (doubtful, though these caves are stuffed with artifacts from the Late Archaic and Early Woodland native American cultures), and the Hazen Entrance, named for a famously unscrupulous manager of the Colossal Cave property for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which built a spur line to the cave in return for hotel receipts). Walking to the cave (and yes, I knew it was THAT Colossal Cave the first time I was taken there) is very reminiscent of the scenario depicted in the surface parts of Colossal Cave Adventure. Pat Crowther, Will's wife in 1972, pioneered the famous "Tight Spot" that led to the connection of Flint Ridge (already including Colossal Cave) Cave System with Mammoth Cave. She was looking for a place to pee when she found it, was one of only six Mammoth Cavers who were small enough to fit through the Tight Spot (deep narrow canyon only passable at the top), and she and future husband John Wilcox were on the connection team a few weeks later, on September 9, 1972 (I know, because I played John Wilcox on TV! :) ) My dad brought me a bad Xerox of the FORTRAN source for ADVENT when I was a kid, maybe in 1979. I think now it was published in Dr Dobbs Journal. So I played it in my head just by reading all the descriptions, and puzzling over the FORTRAN (all of this was very badly Xeroxed). I later got addicted to Zork.... then, in college, got recruited one frozen night in Louisville by a beautiful stranger who thought I just might be interested in exploring the longest cave in the world. So, like The Last Starfighter, one way or another, Colossal Cave Adventure recruited me into, for real, exploring and surveying the longest cave in the world, including Colossal Cave itself. Do I count myself lucky? Every day.

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

Thanks! I had no idea the game was based on a real cave in Kentucky. More on this very nice site about the history of the game here: rickadams.org/adventure/b_cave.html

@cosmicraysshotsintothelight

14 күн бұрын

You sound like you were the least of all the squares that were there. 🤪 Hehehe... just kidding.

Back in the Apple ][ days, my company was selling music cards. When Apple came out with their floppy disc drive for it, we wanted to include a disc with the software for the card (before that, it was cassette tape). We found that it took forever to format and copy a disc with the Apple ][, which was a real bottleneck in sales. So we ended up making our own hardware and software to duplicate the discs quickly. We discovered a lot of other people had the same problem, so we started a duplication service and also sold the duplicators. Eventually the entire business transitioned to disc duplication.

Who needs a high-resolution screen when you can read everything on your serial printer?

You're in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

Seeing a text adventure game being played on a giant ancient printer made my day. I wonder which HP it was engineer was that realized the problem of having a proprietary disc format that only its own controller card can create and put in the undocumented feature to make the card create one so you're not completely SOL. Whoever you are good sir we salute you

Seing Davids beardy face on the thumbnail and hearing Marcs intro just broke my brain. But what a legendary combo they are! Double Density it is! Mr Fancypants approve!

Juki bidirectional printing! I'm impressed!

@kevincozens6837

Ай бұрын

Yes, I also noticed that. :)

'Way back "when", I used to write programs for an old system known as a "COMMFILE" which ran CP/M from either one or two 8-inch disk drives. The system had a "disk copy" command but it was actually a chain copy command which would just copy each file one by one rather than actually duplicating the disk 1-for-1. The business I was working for had a need to copy a disk's contents exactly, sector-by-sector, so I wrote an "image" program (two, actually, because the second version did a verify after write) which did exactly what was needed. The final version would read an entire track then write it to the destination disk, overwriting anything already there, then did a read of each sector to compare them with the original before going on to the next track. It was needed for a database system where the database would be established, then only ever read from disk and never written to, and there was a need to be able to switch database disks without having to close and re-open the file each time. The only way to accomplish this without causing trouble was to make sure that the database was a fixed length and always occupied exactly the same sectors on the disk. The imaging program allowed an empty database to be copied to exactly the right place on the disk every time, and then data could be written into the empty spaces in the database with an index keeping track of where the next empty space was located. That program was rather fun to figure out and write.

Yes! Best way to end a Monday night! Usagi and Marc in the same room!

What?!? How dare you use a cheat map for Colossal Cave! That’s part of the fun (and challenge) of the game! 😀 Same with Zork. Ah, the good old days. Nice to see Mr. Usagi get around. 😅

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

Lol! I have to finish the video in less than a month, you know...

@b43xoit

Ай бұрын

If you were to play without a map, you would have reason to make your own map.

That that was was fun fun, Marc Marc. (Maybe MMFM really stand More More From Marc.)

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

You're you're welcome welcome.

@EricLikness

Ай бұрын

@@CuriousMarc I gotta say that 2019 haul o' equipment is paying off, not just in drives but in YT channel videos! So much ground to cover.

The 9825 was the first computer I programmed in 1978. It ran the acceptance tests for avionics flight hardware. This video brings back good memories. Thanks for sharing!

@ 23:10 ahhh, the distinct machine-gun rattle of the daisywheel printer 😊

@Ragnar8504

Ай бұрын

Haven't heard that in a loooooong time! I had one for my C64 in the late 90s but I don't think I've used it in 25 years.

Ah, fond memories of evenings playing the original Colossal Cave Adventure on a DECsystem-10 while waiting for a batch job to complete on an IBM System/360. A few years later adding an expansion unit and 5 1/4" floppy drives to my TRS-80 Model I allowed me to play Colossal Cave at home!

The "Double Density" floppy controller in the early Intel Intellec systems was also MMFM.

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

It does does! More details details here on bitsavers bitsavers: www.bitsavers.org/pdf/intel/MDS2/9800422_Intellec_Double_Density_Hardware_Reference_Jun79.pdf

Don't forget Moria, and Nethack! We ran those on the XT from a 5.25" floppy. Great "cave" games.

I used to work with those Dolch boxes back in the 486 days in the mid '90s. They are nice machines. We sold them with our proprietary hardware card installed. Drop it onto a membrane and place another on top of it, and drop that into an outer box and it is ready to ship almost anywhere without fear of damage. I think I had about five machines running SETI@home on them all day long. I had a BeOS box too. Life was fun toying with PCs back then. Shame all the magazines died out over here.

This brings back so many memories on so many different levels. I worked for EMI Medical from 1977 on the then ground breaking CAT Scanner. Our scanner had a Nova 850 (with a whole 32K of memory (on 4 19" square 8k core memory boards) a CDC (I think 5mb) disc drive and the main image display used 8" floppy drives. They weren't HP, but how many different ways can you build an 8" floppy disc drive? Over the years our kit more or less tracked the development of computers and equipment that is on display in the London Science Museum - as is the first CAT Scanner in the world, which I am absurdly proud to say I regularly looked after. I have been following your channel from the time you first started working on the AGC and, while many of your followers are from that era and training, we are able because of it, to fully appreciate just how talented and knowledgeable you and your team are. I can only claim to have been a "Field Engineer" and thus, basically 'systems engineer, because we did the electronics, often down to component level of course, the X-Ray side (140Kv stuff,) the computers (mostly DG Eclipse and later, the horrifically complicated displays for displaying and windowing 512x512 grey scale images and, over everything, the mechanical stuff. This included hydraulics, gearboxes, cantilevered patient tables and the rotating frame. We installed, maintained and repaired them and I later moved on to MRI's so, all the previous, plus intense magnetic fields and cryogens! Keep doing what you do, bringing back those memories.

Just like when I used to play Nethack for hours on an XT and an amber screen. Watching you play this... time slips by... "Damn your eyes!" -Young Frankenstein. I am teleporting back to reality now.

Thanks for changing your T shirt supplier. I've bought a few before and they all disintegrated in the washing machine. Happy now to get some more.

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

The Fourthwall ones are much better quality.

The RIFA didn't blow because you weren't wearing the right safety squints.

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

You have to wait until the end of the video!

@vincei4252

Ай бұрын

@@CuriousMarc Ah, thanks for the tip!

@RingingResonance

Ай бұрын

@@CuriousMarc Maybe try 500v AC to get some current through it? Don't forget the uni-brow wave.

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

@@RingingResonance Definitely AC would heat it up way more. No convenient 500VAC source though…

@Runco990

Ай бұрын

@@CuriousMarc Rifas only blow when you mistakenly leave the room for a cup of coffee.... when you return... SMOKE!!😉

OMG Full fancy-pants power and Usagi Electric Cooperation!!! This is a dream episode! 🤯

Neat watching the boustrophedon printing - makes it feel much faster and looks slick.

From using these drives in the late 1970s I remember we were taught to close the drive doors slowly to avoid crimping the centre holes on the diskettes.

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

That happens! These ones are the other way around, you need to close them fast and firmly to avoid creasing the hole.

@RaymondHng

Ай бұрын

Tech support story: The tech support person would instruct the user to insert the floppy and close the door. Then user gets up and closes the door to the office.

I suppose with enough work, an MMFM compatible floppy disk controller could be made. After all, the NEC floppy disk controller is likely just a microcontroller with a specific program burned into its ROM. Perhaps even an ATMega of some variant could be adapted to work in place of the NEC one.

@Ragnar8504

Ай бұрын

Very likely yes. Using the HPIB card and original controller is much easier though.

The Acorn BBC Micro has those RIFAs in the power supply (a switch mode supply which was somewhat uncommon on 8 bit systems at the time). Usually there is a pop then a cloud of white smoke billows out of the keyboard (under the hands of the surprised user) but the machine of course just keeps working. One of mine popped at a retro computing show, it was amazing to see how attuned to the magic smoke the arcade cabinet and pinball guys are, within milliseconds there was a dozen of them scurring around trying to identify which machine had just let out the magic smoke!

@Ragnar8504

Ай бұрын

These things were absolutely everywhere in European electronics from the 70s into the first half of the 90s. Everywhere. And not just equipment made in Europe, everything designed for the European market too. Audio equipment of all sorts, VCRs, computer power supplies (Toshiba T3100 among many others), vacuum cleaners, kitchen mixers, everything. They were meant to either keep mains noise away from sensitive electronics or keep noise (generated by brushed motors, SMPSs, etc.) away from the mains. Sometimes they were also used as snubbers across switch or relay contacts. Vacuum cleaners and other household appliances usually had larger metal can-style filter caps that tend to go with more bang and less smoke but some did have golden Rifas.

A hollow voice says "Plugh"

@dflood6111

Ай бұрын

xyzzy

When I hear the sounds of printers and floppy drives, I remember that computering once was quite loud :-)

@Ragnar8504

Ай бұрын

Oh yes! During my last few years at secondary school we had a computer in our classroom but the school didn't supply a printer. We briefly considered getting a normal printer of the day, i.e. an inkjet, but no one really wanted to pay for ink, so nostalgia nerd me scoured a near-free Epson LQ100 dot matrix printer with a perfect ribbon. In 2001 or so that was an amazing anachronism and glacially slow but the ribbon lasted for years and the print quality was amazing for a dot matrix printer. It also had a proper sheet feeder for A4 paper so we didn't have to mess with fanfold. Our room was on the third floor and even with the door closed you could hear the printer at the front door on the ground floor! We didn't plug the printer into the school-issued PC because I didn't have permission to install drivers on that NT 4.0 machine. Instead we had our private 486 DX/2 66 running Windows 3.11 and Word 6.0. Everyone loved that old PC because I'd installed a bunch of old DOS games. At some point another classmate dragged in a Mac IIsi his parents wanted to get rid of and we added another bunch of cool old games. Hard to imagine as I'm sitting on my couch, typing this into a dead-silent 2023 laptop!

I remember using an HP9830A machine in my school days. I still have some cassette tapes with programs on them that I was working on using that machine. I would like to find a way to decode the audio back in to source code some day (for fun). Having a map when you are starting the Adventure game takes some of the fun away from discovering thing on your own. I first played Adventure on some sort of DEC(?) machine via an LA36 DECwriter connected to the computer via an acoustic dial-up modem. I still have a copy of the Fortran source code and data on a pair of printouts that came off an IBM 1403 line printer. The printouts carry dates of 1979 on them.

The Rifa caps tend to blow after 10 minutes on power…. (At 240VAC) Leave it powered up for a while and it will likely let out the stinky magic smoke.

@radarmusen

Ай бұрын

Sound like a food preparation guide. Give it 10 min at 230Vac and it will open and let the Rifa odor fill your kitchen. Enjoy…

The way games were before us so cool reading and using your imagination... Seeing in action priceless.. Although you could not play this late at night lol

"High speed HP-IB", always with the jokes.

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

You have to put that in context. The HP-IB bus was orders of magnitude faster than anything around at the time, and ended up supporting hard disks easily. It remained competitive with SCSI-1. The format slowness here comes from the Z80 in the controller and the drive itself.

good to see you back on the air! Was getting withdraw symptoms

The text adventure brought back fond memories. I used to play them a lot on my C64, with a English dictionary on the table. This is how I learnt English when I was 10 back in '85

As long as this device continues to run, WIll Crowther will be with us forever.

I love the way the built-in printer has all the dignity of a supermarket checkout!

I used to work with CDC equipment all the time. We'd start disk formats before lunch :). Youngers can't appreciate the patience us old-timers had to develop as we waited for computers to do something...

@harvey66616

Ай бұрын

To be fair, the biggest difference these days is that "formatting" a disk doesn't generally mean the same thing as it used to, but instead just overwrites the root level directory information, i.e. "quick format". You can optionally perform a true format on a rotating media disk, or a "safe erase", and either will involve much more time, more similar to what we had to deal with "back in the day".

Light lamp with match. And on a teletype machine. That's love.

A Juki 6100 daisey wheel...they used Triumph/Adler wheels. I had one hooked up to a 64 for printing. Everytime someone wanted to do a resume or professional letter they would borrow it. Wish I had held on to it!

@Ragnar8504

Ай бұрын

I had a Brother for the C64, it used the same wheels and ribbons as my parents' CE-70 typewriter. Both are still buried somewhere but I somehow managed to lose all my C64 serial cables. The big downside of the C64 for all non-English speakers was the utter lack of non-English characters. Even though some software could add them on screen, I never got any printers to print them.

oh the old heathkit cap tester... I scored one at a garage sale when I was about 10 years old. I used it on my first testbench as a preteen. It is gone now, my mums old house burned down many years ago.

Maaaaaaaaaaan, that ain't no bloody April Fools! Seeing you two together again is so awesome. It's "Don't be vague, ditch that Sprague!", at least for me. Interesting ad though. It certainly has some audiophile vibes to it, just transferred to video. It's a nice surprise to see the printer print on the backwards motion in addition to the normal forwards. Saves time and energy, and is pretty fascinating. Reminds me of the 2000s when I played a Polish "single user dungeon" game named Otchłań (Abyss). These text-based games indeed have their charm. More volts on that RIFA please, discombobulate it into delightfully odorous destruction! "Do you want to start a new game?" -"Sure, why not. Let's play Global Thermonuclear War."

I've spent many thousands of hours programming in Basic on the IBM 5110 (4.25" floppy) and 5120 machines with 16k RAM, later upgraded to 32k RAM. The IBM 5120 also had dual 8" floppies. They were amazingly productive machines. The dot matrix printers were also quite useful.

Now THAT’S how you play a text adventure game! 👏 edit- I fired up my VIC20 just to play “The Count” via dot matrix printer, thanks for the inspiration! 😅

This this was a great way to start start my day. I miss those sounds... and the giant clunk when ejecting a floopy disk.

Wow! A drive slower than the Commodore serial drives (1541, etc) didn't think it was possible!

@Rob2

Ай бұрын

The drive for the Epson PX-8 computer (a Z-80 CP/M laptop) and similar devices was also very slow! It was connected to the system using an 38400 baud RS232 connection...

@marcd6897

Ай бұрын

Keep in mind, HP-IB was developed end of the 60’s. For that time it was really fast

@Rob2

Ай бұрын

@@marcd6897 Sure, but it was a mistake to use it to attach a disk drive (even a floppy disk drive). To control and monitor remote instruments, the purpose it was designed for, it was OK.

The satisfying clunk those drives make when you put in a disk is just glorious!

Great video, I loved seeing you rebuild all this tech then you decided to play text adventure with it, perfect thing to do!!

9 minutes format… This gives the Commodore 1541 some competition.

I’ve never seen a printer print backwards like that!

@wmlindley

Ай бұрын

Some daisy-wheels could do it automatically; with the original Xerox Diablo HYType printers you could send ESC 6 for reverse printing; ESC 5 would restore normal forward printing. This Juki is nice in automatically handling the proportional spacing in both directions, without assistance from the host computer. Once upon a time, I even wrote a program for CP/M that would emulate Diablo commands on an NEC Spinwriter 5500 that some government office had purchased with a "basic" controller card (your computer had to spin the wheel, fire the hammer, advance the carriage, and spin the platen with proprietary commands, far from ASCII !)

I recently had to read some of these discs, using low level image tools and some converters. The format is indeed something quite special! In my cause the disks are also not in the greatest condition, which complicates the process a bit. On a different note, in the late 70s there were some students at the NTH college in Norway (now NTNU) that managed to get someone to send the original PDP Fortran source for ADVENT to them.. on nothing less than punched cards. Of course the package was stopped in the customs. With the students failing to explain the context of what a computer program was to the customs officer, he decided to inspect himself in order to decide what tariff to use. Legend has it that when he saw the cards, he exclaimed "But these are used!". End result was that the students got it imported free of charge, declared as "paper maculate". It did not take them long to adapt the source to the NORD-10 at the college, including translating the entire game into Norwegian. Some stories also has it that the map was even extended a little here and there.

I love my Juki 6100. Still used all these years later.

I am reminded of the struggles with other disk drives which were very expensive back in the day; how did "they" ever allow drives that could crash their heads onto the market? Ah, Juki; I haven't seen that name for a long time. As with the Hyundai electric Ioniq 5 N 'sports' car which has fake external exhaust sounds worthy of a powerful petrol engine, someone will release a laserjet printer with good old dot-matrix sounds to drown out those superfluous office conversations thus opening up a new possibilities for printer-hood makers.

@harvey66616

Ай бұрын

_"someone will release a laserjet printer with good old dot-matrix sounds"_ -- seems like a great idea, probably not too hard to mod a regular printer with some kind of Arduino/RPi/ESP32/etc. device to handle the playback. But it will have to produce the sound for a lot longer than it takes to actually print the page on the laser printer, to get the full retro effect. :)

@SubTroppo

Ай бұрын

@@harvey66616 Get to it!

Thank you for attempting to explode the cap. It would be funny to have a text based game where you have to explore and battle in that creepy Xanadu bubble house of the future that used to exist in Florida.

Sounds like those are in fact modified modified fancy pants?

hp stuff is the best thing on your channel ! the game adventure game was great!!

Ha, ha! Remember to turn on lamp, or suffer the indignity of getting eaten by a grue! 😮

This is so terrific!!

There are times when that elevator music can be a life-saver! ;) "Tip me over and pour me out!!!" I love those HP "Desktop Calculators"... I remember them being my very first retro-computing experience back in 1985... before there was such a thing as retro-computing..... must've been retro-retro-computing. That printer is gorgeous! Is it a daisy wheel?

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

Yes, Daisy wheel printer.

I am in a maze of twisty videos, all different.

That is one machine gun printer noise. I love it.

Bob Stern's fashion statement has now firmly secured its place in history

Great fun! I had forgotten just how mechanically complex and noisy and s-l-o-w these drives were. And they're huge: two drives plus PSU barely fit in a full depth19" rack!

I only back like 4 creators on Patreon so seeing two of them together always makes my day! Love seeing you collaborate with David 😁

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

Awesome! Thank you!

Thank you!

Played Adventure in 1982 on a GE CT Scanner during it's istallation and testing.

That Dolch machine is sweet

Is it just me, or is the HP9895 dual 8" case every bit as big/heavy as the old PARC Alto 2.5Mbyte Diablo removable drive unit?! man, sakes alive. 4:40 and good ol' Sprague, who I recall were absolute key partners with Mostek, getting their ion implantation process perfected for the 4k and 16k RAM manufacturing. 👍 24:17 And the beauty of using a print terminal versus a video terminal is amazing. This is how to do compute, or games like Colossal Cave Adventure.

Always interesting interesting!

Thanks!

23:55 we can say this is a very noisy game 😆

Modified Modified FM - Now Faster Than 10 Minutes!

Great video! For imaging and writing back weird disks like those, maybe a Kryoflux, Supercard Pro or similar flux reader devices would be a nice tool to have. Cheers!

Right in the nostalgia.

Wonderful!

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

Many thanks!

The text output of the game feeding into a generative AI? That opens up new possibilities for vintage games!

AmazingAmazing! That printer!!❤❤❤

Ah, the memories I used to love playing text games. Thank you Marc.

modified modified properly properly repaired repaired xDDD

Wow, that daisy wheel clattering away. I think the last time I heard that was in 1983!

xyzzy!

perhaps one day engineers will discover MMMFM.

What are you doing Grandpa? I'm gaming dammit! Get off my lawn!

I need to replace the RIFA capacitors in the Schrack power supply in my old LeCroy 9410 oscilloscope. It hasn't been used in a few years and the last time I looked at it the caps weren't cracked...but better be sure to replace them before I next switch it on as those caps are in more than just the input...

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

Oh that's rude. You should let them free the magic smoke first. They can only do this once in their life ;-)

Since HP sells paper this interface makes sense.

Wouldn't a greaseweazle work with mmfm disks?

@rocketman221projects

Ай бұрын

It should be able to read and write raw flux images. It doesn't look like it supports MMFM, so it wouldn't be able to create mountable image or format a disk. Since the software is open source, someone could add support for HP's MMFM format if they wanted to.

It would be nice if you ran your audio through a high pass filter to remove the subsonic component. Many of your videos try to shake the house apart. Great content as usual though, thanks for the video!

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

You need to fix your audio installation...

I have played the Colossal Cave remake by Roberta Williams, and while it is good (nice eyecandy btw) it does not, and cannot beat this oldstyle text adventure gaming.

So it's a dual drive unit with its own processor and DOS, connected through an IEEE488 interface? I can see where Commodore got the idea for the CBM2040 and subsequent models.

And we all thought the 1541 was slow, but it turns out it was just the 9825 being slow to run format

I'm mostly impressed that there were games on hardware as old as when The Beatles had their prime time ... on what? a few hundred bytes clocked at a couple kHz?

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

You mean 600 kB on a processor running at 5MHz.

WOW!! Made in Mexico

Just give this rifa cap to electroboom

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

The poor thing would have no chance.

Used to play colossal cave on a Data General C350

Plugh!

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

You have been transported to the next episode.

I loved that game. Forty years later I still use "xyzzy," "plover," and "plugh" as throwaway passwords.

Did you try operating multi-master using both the 9825 and the PC? Should be possible if the PC properly implements 488.

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

This is way pre-standard. It’s actually pretty hard to make the drive work off a standard GPIB card. You need a special driver (XP) or direct hardware access (Win98) to make the non standard HP-IB features work. Kudos to Ansgar to have figured that out. We’ll go into more details in the next episode.

After we graduated to the HP 9826 in the early 1980s, the HP salesman brought us a boot disk that ran PacMan on the 9826 screen with keyboard controls. I got pretty good at it. I suppose if I look through your other videos, you might already have one where you are running PacMan?

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

I ran PacMan on the HP 2645… kzread.info/dash/bejne/ZqyKuI-bkrHSnaw.html

The HP engineers should have put the write button on the right side.

@CuriousMarc

Ай бұрын

You are so write about that!

Juki go brrrt, brrt brbbrbrbrrbrrrrrrrrtweeeee

Interestingly a quick Google search shows a bunch of gotek like usb floppy emulator s that claim to support mmfm some are calling it m2fm. Is it worth you modifying / sacrificing your faulty drive to house on of these gotek drives, allowing you to copy from real disks to and from usb images.