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Alto Trek
''Alto Trek'' is a computer game, developed by Gene Ball and Rick Rashid for the Xerox Alto while they were graduate students at the University of Rochester during the late 1970s. It is one of the first computer networking, networked multiplayer video game, multiplayer games. Gameplay ''Alto Trek'' is a multiplayer game where each player uses their own Alto workstation to control a starship. The objective of the game is to destroy the enemy without being destroyed. A player can choose between being a Klingon, Romulan, or Starfleet, Terran. The game can be played by one player, but there will be no enemy to destroy. There is no central server that maintains the game state. Each Alto "multicasts" its game information on the shared Ethernet that all players must be on. The "multicast" address on which to rendezvous is a function of the number of stellar systems in the game. Development The manual for version 2.1 is dated August 1979 and authored by Allen Wells, Bob Baldwin, and St ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gene Ball
Gene Ball is a computer science researcher and computer programmer. Ball obtained a bachelor's degree from the University of Oklahoma, and attended graduate school at the University of Rochester, completing a master's degree and finishing his doctorate in 1982. While at Rochester, he met Rick Rashid, and together they created Alto Trek, one of the earlier networked multiplayer computer games. In 1979, along with Rashid, Ball worked as a researcher Carnegie Mellon University. In 1983, he left academia for two years, spending 1983 and 1984 designing software at Formative Technologies. In 1985, he became an assistant professor at the University of Delaware at Newark. From 1991 until 2001 he was a researcher at Microsoft, leading the Persona Project, which focused on developing lifelike computer characters that could conversationally interact with users. References *Contributor biography in ''Emotions in Humans and Artifacts'', by Robert Trappl Robert Trappl (born 16 January 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
