The repository should really mention the origin of the source code and the license. I'm always a bit skeptical about the legality of ancient source code suddenly popping up.
The origin is mentioned in their blog post. Very nice that Fujitsu has given the rights to release the source code. There are still parts missing, so let's hope that AOL will be as generous.
I'd be surprised if AOL still had the qlink code sitting around in an easily accessible format. I think that's more of an issue than the legal problems.
Hey gang, I'm the guy behind the MADE. I'm available to answer any specific Habitat questions you may have. Additionally, we're in #made on Freenode, where we frequently discuss ancient computers. Feel free to drop in if you have any thoughts or questions about the project.
What we really need is to start talking to AOL legal about QLink code, as we know they have the code, we just need to get it into a form we can publicly preserve. That means legal chatter time.
Reading the stories here shows how deep and rich the interactions between the players and the world were. It's basically a very retro Second Life; the original, in fact. Amazing achievement, and really funny seeing developers not 'cheat' to deal with their own mistakes and failures (e.g. trading Death's one-shot kill gun for money in a town square after Death was killed and dropped that gun, because he forgot to heal).
Lessons from Habitat is one of my preferred papers of all times. I discovered for the first time in the 90's [1], and re-read many times over the years, and it still impresses me how much they achieved with such low-tech.
I would love to see what a new edition of this Stanford course would present. That site was from 1998. Technology-mediated virtual worlds have grown quite a bit since. :)
Club Caribe. For people of a certain age... which is much older than the average HN reader, this was the pixellated magic of the internet. Your friends at school didn't even believe you when you tried to tell them about it.
I remember reading about this "game" in a Danish computer magazine back in the 80's. Wanted to play it really bad, but of course there was no Internet back then, so it wasn't possible.
Oh really? What kind of I/O? Something in my foggy memory said that first word there was used to control bank switching on the GeoRam memory expansion unit.
a cursory google search shows that apparently qlink has been reverse engineered ( http://orrtech.us/qlink/index.html ). I wonder if this would help them...
We use QLink Reloaded, and Jasmaz is in our IRC channel to help. The issue is that QLink uses a really byzantine system of communication with the server, where it's constantly going"57, 26, 23" and each of those numbers means a very distinct function. No one has a clue what those numbers mean, so QLink Reloaded is basically only the bits that could be reverse engineered in this black box situation.
We have modified QLink Reloaded for our purposes, though.
There are some interesting notes in the file at https://github.com/Museum-of-Art-and-Digital-Entertainment/h... re: architecture.