Loading and running Hunt the Wumpus on Univac 1219B military mainframe

Univac designed this computer to control radar and weapons on a U.S. Navy cruiser or destroyer ship. No surprise that someone made Hunt the Wumpus for it. :)

[nathanokun]

Programmers are people who have, usually, quite a sense of humor. When TERRIER used the US Navy C-152 computer (UNIVAC 1219B with 32-kbytes of 18-bit memory), to identify which version of the program was running (not really needed on a ship, but it sure helped at our test facility!), the two top-center registers on the front of the machine had a light pattern displayed that was unique for each program (set during the short dead time between the 32-times-per-second program cycle rate). In most cases the pattern was something simple like an alternating on/off light in a zig-zag or some other such pattern that just needed a couple of instructions to do. One day we got a new program from the main programming company contracted by the Navy to write the TERRIER fire-control and test software (we at NSMSES did small changes to correct bugs and minor updates only in-house and sent them to the ships as tape "patch" changes in-between major fire-control system upgrades from that contractor, which did not happen often). We turned it on and instead of the simple alternating light pattern, the upper register had a single light sweeping slowly back and forth: A Cylon Warrior eye from Battlestar Galactica! They must have known that we were using the same Techtronix Company equipment used in that show -- for real in our case -- and one of their programmers created a small routine to create this display, which was a much longer piece of code than a mere reverse on/off lamp sequence. We laughed quite a bit for some time over this...

[ludinom]

This is awesome. See Wikipedia, under Hunt the Wumpus: "At some unknown point it was ported to run on a UNIVAC 1219B used by the US Navy for firing solutions." I assumed that it was a joke.

[vadinhopsc]

A teletype model 35 printer working perfectly! HAHA. I had this same model as a console for a U-9400 at our local army administration. It worked until 1989, when the 9400 was turned off for the last time and went scrap.

[zymurgynet]

When will we see DOOM running on it! :P