Re: Xyzzy

Article: 7854 of alt.hackers
From: michael@okjunc.junction.net (Michael Dillon)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Xyzzy
Date: 22 May 1995 01:56:14 GMT
Organization: Okanagan Internet Junction, Vernon B.C., Canada
Lines: 67
Approved: srf@gcos
Message-ID: 3poqvu$6i8@felix.junction.net
NNTP-Posting-Host: okjunc.junction.net
Status: RO

In article <3pipuh$82p@eccdb1.pms.ford.com>,
Clinton Pierce (R) <cpierce1@cp500.pto.ford.com> wrote:
>>"xyzzy" was the "God Code" of the first real
aventure game "Advent".  It's
>>use since then is kind of a tribute.
>
>And the backing is from the Jargon File:
>
>:xyzzy: /X-Y-Z-Z-Y/, /X-Y-ziz'ee/, /ziz'ee/, or /ik-ziz'ee/
>   adj.  [from the ADVENT game] The {canonical} `magic
>   word'.  This comes from {ADVENT}, in which the idea is to
>   explore an underground cave with many rooms and to collect the
>   treasures you find there.  If you type `xyzzy' at the appropriate
>   time, you can move instantly between two otherwise distant points.

Wow... That reminds me of the time I ported Adventure to the Honeywell 6000
GCOS timesharing
system at the University of Waterloo back in the late '70's. I'll tell more
in my..

ObHack:

I got a card deck of the FORTRAN source code from the University of Western
Ontario which had a
DECsystem 10 running TOPS. Most of the port was pretty straightforward,
but there were some
wierd I/O commands that weren't understood by the GCOS FORTRAN compiler
although it was pretty
obvious from the code what they should do. So I wrote my first REAL assembler
program; a couple
of GMAP subroutines to accomplish the I/O and get the game operational. I
can still remember one
all night session on 2741 printing terminals with REAMS of paper all over
the floor.
Fortunately, by that time the MFCF folks had wisened up and weren't handing
out boxes of free
blank white paper any more (great notepaper that stuff :-) and we were using
the backs of old
computer printouts.

It's a small hack, so I'll add on another reminsicence. In 1981 I moved
across the continent and
took the first job I could find because I needed money for the next month's
rent (not to mention
food). This crazy Scotsman set me in front of an ONYX system running the
OASIS operating system,
neither of which I had ever seen before. He said it was a new system and
there was a problem
getting it going. Their programmer had quit two weeks ago and they were
desperate. He gave me a
photocopied set of manuals and asked me to figure it out. When it booted,
some message or other
came up and the manuals said that meant it was not a bootable disk. The
Scotsman swore up and
down that it was not possible, he had bought the machine a few days ago in
Seattle and he had
SEEN it boot just fine.

So I pored over the manuals and found that there was a built-in debugger. I
traced the boot
ROM's and discovered that it was attempting to load a certain file and
failing. But I noticed
that in looking for the file, it had loaded a directory listing and the file
was indeed listed
there along with tons of other files. However, there was this test instruction,
that didn't like
one byet in the directory entry. So I changed the byte, reran the boot and
lo and behold! It got
farther and then failed with a file not found error. Sure sounds like that
same wierd byte
causing a problem, so I got back in the debugger and changed that byte in
each directory entry.

Now everything booted and ran perfectly. I did some experiments and found
that the byte
indicated that a file was deleted, so I accused the Scotsman of accidentally
deleting the files
but he denied it. He really was a crazy guy, but I worked there for two and
a half months until
one day, the RCMP commercial crime people showed up. It seems that OASIS
had to be purchased for
each CPU and this second ONYX system that the Scotsman bought, he had tried
to outfox the sales
guys in Seattle to steal a copy of OASIS. He demanded that the sales people
demonstrate the
machine running OASIS so he knew it worked. But the salesman must have
deleted all files just as he
shut down the machine to pack it up. I was kind of naive at the time and I
had called tech
support at OASIS to help reolve the initial install problem. They had called
back after I fixed
it and I told them all was well, but I must have given out a serial number
or something.

The Scotsman never did get arrested. He left the country and was picked up
by Interpol and sent
to Scotland to face trial for some other fraud cases he had been involved
in. It's kind of funny
how I solved his big problem and screwed him as well, all in the first day
at work...

--
Michael Dillon                                    Voice: +1-604-549-1036
Network Operations                                  Fax: +1-604-542-4130
Okanagan Internet Junction                     Internet: michael@junction.net
http://www.junction.net  -  The Okanagan's 1st full-service Internet provider

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