T-Rex and Pluvialis teamed up this morning and caused me to guffaw, then reminisce a bit. The laughter you’ll have to take on faith; unfortunately, I’m going to subject you to a couple ‘way back when’ stories. I first played Adventure on a Honeywell DPS6 or DPS8 – I’m not sure which hardware we were running at that point. I do remember the model number of the glass teletypes we used – the usual Honeywell suspect – VIP7814s (VIP = visual information processor, I believe). The system software used to control and communicate with the terminals was the time sharing system (TSS – everything must be reduced to initials).

The systems software person was an wonderful guy named Jack. At one point he was fighting with a really gnarly bit of mis-configuration; stuff that absolutely should have worked and absolutely did not. One night during this struggle, he had a work nightmare. As he told it, for a grand finale, he sat bolt upright in bed, yelling “It’s time sharin’! It’s time sharin’!” His wife, who obviously was awake at this point, turned to him and asked (with the look that causes all men to start looking for a means of egress), “So… Who the f*ck is Sharon?”

There was a legendary systems programmer in the General Electric/G200/Honeywell world: Guy Wayne. He apparently liked his cigarettes and his coffee; this was back in the days when one could smoke just about anywhere – an exception being a raised-floor computer room with Halon fire suppression equipment. So, if Mr. Wayne had not finished his smoke, but needed to go into the computer room, he’d carefully put the cigarette out and pocket it to be finished later. One day he came back out of the machine room and got into a conversation with someone. After a few minutes, Guy was informed that there seemed to be smoke coming from his jacket pocket. Without missing a beat, he took his coffee cup and poured his coffee into the pocket. Problem solved.