Message-ID: <4742ADB0.1030305@acm.org> Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:49:36 -0800 From: Peter Langston To: wolfpack@wolfpackempire.com Subject: The birthdate of Empire Greetings, I noticed your empire domain at wolfpackempire.com and in looking at your history page I saw that there may be some doubt as to Empire's "birthday." I may be able to help. My name is Peter Langston; I wrote that first Empire program while teaching classes in computer science and audio engineering at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. It was written in HP BASIC running on a time-shared Hewlett-Packard HP2000 system. I was on staff at Evergreen from September, 1971 to September, 1974; during that time I wrote a number of fairly large game programs. Empire ended up the largest although it started out small. I believe the order they appeared in was: 1971 CONVOY - two-player, real-time naval warfare simulation 1972 GALAXY - multi-player, real-time intergalactic trade/war simulation EMPIRE - multi-player, real-time intergalactic everything simulation 1973 STDREK - StarDrek - real-time 3D space battle (initially on teletype!) FF - Fast Food - real-time multi-player stock market simulation 1974 RACE - multi-player, real-time road racing game (also on teletype) ORACLE - ancestor of the Internet Oracle, it didn't really work until 1975 I got the first version of Empire running in mid-late 1972, so that's probably the most authoritative date for a "birthday". Since it started out as a little game program being shared between me and my students there was no concept of a "release date" -- it was more a matter of "What you working on?" "A game; you want to try it?" "Sure; what's it called?" "I wanted to call it DIPLOMACY, but we're stuck with 6 letters, so I'm calling it EMPIRE." Empire has been undergoing development and extension ever since! I hope that's some help. Best, Peter