5 ms·
1973 implementation of Wordle was published by DEC (2022)
- msephton 1y agoDEC the company, not Dec the month. @dang
- satiated_grue 1y agoWhy did the programmer set up his Christmas tree on Halloween? Because OCT 31 == DEC 25
- thebruce87m 1y agoDo you know what 38,400 is in hex? 0x9600. That was a fun uart debug session.
- gedy 1y agoThis is a case where the (2022) year thing really confuses!
- voidUpdate 1y ago> While some have traced Wordle to Lingo, a game show that started in 1987, they’ve missed an earlier implementation: WORD was published in 101 Computer Games by Digital Equipment Corp. in 1973 Which comes after the board game Mastermind, which was created in 1970 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game))
- cachius 1y agoEverything is a Remix https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series
- UncleSlacky 1y agoAnd the Mastermind variant "Word Mastermind" came out in 1972: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5662/word-mastermind https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5662/word-mastermind
- oasisbob 1y agoWow! That box cover image immediately brings me back to digging through the family board game box kept under my parents' bed. Vividly remember it, it was one of those mysterious/never-played games.
- doodpants 1y agoBut Word Mastermind (like regular Mastermind) only tells you how many letters are in the correct spot, and how many are present but not in the correct spot. Whereas Wordle tells you specifically which letters fall into those categories. So it's not quite the same. (That's why Wordle only gives you 6 guesses, while Word Mastermind has 10 rows.)
- smcin 1y agoOk but in regular Mastermind, you get a white key peg for every code peg that is present but not in the correct spot.
- ghaff 1y agoYeah, a friend of mine mentioned the connection between Wordle and Mastermind which explained to me instantly why I really liked Mastermind (and even wrote an early Windows version) and Wordle--while being generally pretty indifferent to word games even though I'm a writer.
- jhbadger 1y ago
- oidar 1y agoyou can play it here: https://troypress.com/wp-content/uploads/user/js-basic/index.html https://troypress.com/wp-content/uploads/user/js-basic/index... The program is named "Word"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mwillis 1y agoAlways thought Wordle and similar computer games were just variants of Mastermind, forms of which go back many decades, if not further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)
- stronglikedan 1y agoThe popularity of Wordle (nothing new under the sun) indicates that there may be something to the phrase, it's not the idea but the implementation.
- II2II 1y agoIt's probably more of a case of, "what's old is new again." While implementation undoubtedly has something to do with it, Wordle probably caught on this time around due to it's digital packaging, the popularity of things seems to go in cycles.
- smcin 1y agoAlso the combination of the unique timing of the launch (late 2021) and the mass psychological/social effect of hundreds of millions of people worldwide working on the same daily challange, since they only published one per day, during Covid when lots of people needed a pleasant distraction.
- thaumasiotes 1y agoYes? Wordle is Mastermind; the only variation is that most guesses are illegal. (Technically there are also more colors. I submit that the number of colors is not considered part of the ruleset of Mastermind.)
- smcin 1y agoWell, Mastermind has 6 colors and 4 positions; Wordle has 26 letters and 5 positions. So at first it seems a larger solution space. In Mastermind all feasible candidates are equiprobable (assuming the cluegiver isn't biased), but in Wordle we can use external statistical information (how likely is 'Y' to be letter #2? any letter?). Since Wordle uses a dictionary of 2331 possible words + 10657 additional words that can be used as guesses (so 12966 words in total). Out of a theoretical total of 4K five-letter English words, or 26P5 = 65780 five-letter permutations of letters (most gibberish). As such, you can often still gain information from trying a candidate word which you know cannot be the solution word (e.g. one letter known to be wrong position or missing).
- loph 1y agoThis book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games I was exposed to this book in about 1975 when I was in detention in the math teacher's room. It set me on a path to programming.
- strangattractor 1y agoCrime pays;)
- smcin 1y agoCurious, what was your offence?
- musicale 1y agohttps://archive.org/details/101basiccomputer0000davi/ https://archive.org/details/101basiccomputer0000davi/ https://archive.org/details/ahl-1978-basic-computer-games https://archive.org/details/ahl-1978-basic-computer-games
- gbacon 1y agoThe screenshots bring back memories of keying in BASIC on an Apple ][ monochrome green screen. With that intro, the first time I used QBasic, I remember marveling at not having to use line numbers.
- emchammer 1y agoCALL -151 changed the course of my life.
- scythe 1y agoWe used to play Wordle in high school. Except it was called "the five-letter word game", and it was a competitive enterprise, in which several people would take turns guessing and the winner chose the next word.
- PaulHoule 1y agoIn 1980 they opened a new mall in Manchester, NH which was an hour from DEC’s headquarters and they had an actual DEC retail store that I bought a copy of that book from. Notably DEC machines like the PDP-11 gave a timesharing BASIC experience that was similar to having your own Apple ][ or TRS-80 but a little bit better, probably the best thing was saving your files on a hard drive.
- loph 1y agoI still have a PDP-11 Programming Card I bought at that Digital retail store. That was an interesting place. As I recall, there also was a AT&T store in that mall where you could buy... telephones.
- PaulHoule 1y agoI remember that AT&T store! Note that mall is https://www.simon.com/mall/the-mall-of-new-hampshire https://www.simon.com/mall/the-mall-of-new-hampshire They built it around 1980 when they built 93 as a ring road going around the city and I remember Sears immediately moving from a downtown location at the North End of Elm street to the mall and then most of the other department stores on Elm going out of business shortly thereafter. As much as I could complain about the anti-pedestrian development of Southern NH that wants to be like a human lung and have exactly one path through the hierarchy from here to there [1] I can say my family did profit from Rt 93 because it caused the neighborhood I was in to develop so that the value of my house went up 1500%. [1] this guarantees you'll encounter multiple traffic jams when multiple parts of the hierarchy get overloaded
- sixothree 1y agoNot directly related but there was a game called Muddled that focused on anagrams of 7 letter words that was such a time waster for me. Probably because seven letter words seem so much more fun.
- moomin 1y ago1970s? Way too recent. MOO dates from the 1960s and Bulls and Cows predates computers.
- TMWNN 1y agoLawrence Hall is not a person, but a science museum at UC Berkeley. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Hall_of_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Hall_of_Science>
- nopakos 1y agoThere is an effort to rewrite the games from the book Basic computer games in modern languages. The word game is here: https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games/tree/main/96_Word https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games/tree/m...
- spullara 1y agoit is amusing that they could have had a much better user interface for it back then even with just text.
- musicale 1y agoI think it's wonderful (and remarkable) that DEC employed David Ahl in educational product marketing, where he basically (indeed BASICally) bootstrapped the computer gaming field. After DEC killed its first microcomputer projects (not wanting to compete with its own minicomputer business) in 1974, Ahl left DEC to found Creative Computing and catalyze the microcomputer (and BASIC gaming) revolution of the 1970s. DEC later realized its mistake in ignoring the growing PC market, but never became a major player until they were eventually (and perhaps poetically/ironically) acquired by Compaq. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_H._Ahl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_H._Ahl Edit: I thought this companion guidebook was interesting and wonder if DEC ever published its sequels: https://archive.org/details/understanding-mathematics-and-logic-using-basic-computer-games/ https://archive.org/details/understanding-mathematics-and-lo...