Space HoboThe latest #RetroAdventurers #podcast episode is a pleasant surprise for me this time, as it's one on which I neither recorded nor edited!
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:bjpufa66d36itb5rzn3p6vrn/post/3mhornx4o4c2i
The Wander System is a fantastic bit of #Unix #InteractiveFiction history, as well as originating in Washington State (where I grew up). I had no idea until listening to this episode that it pre-dated #ColossalCave by a couple years, because the version we all tried to play and gave up on early came from 1978.
Also it was easy enough to just read the game files for hints, as they were all in plain ASCII. I found from reading the sources that Tim Gilberts tried to build that it was installed to obscure these files via the setuid bit, which was a feature of even the original First Edition Unix on the PDP-7!
I wonder if anyone has any source backups of a pre-78 version, and how it might have looked before the boom in text adventures.
https://github.com/shmup/wander/issues ← And has this episode triggered new interest in maintaining The Wander System? @cibersheep submitted two issues since it dropped!
EDIT: seems like they got a PR landed in November, between episode recording and release, so it's unrelated interest in the system!
https://github.com/shmup/wander/pull/19 ← Well I have submitted a pull request based on Tim's observation during the episode.