> 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))
And the Mastermind variant "Word Mastermind" came out in 1972:
Wow! 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.
And JOTTO, a version that even used words like Wordle, is from 1955!
Yeah, 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.
Everything is a Remix https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series
In 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.
I 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.
I remember that AT&T store! Note that mall is
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 towards 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
This book: 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.
Crime pays;)
The 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.
CALL -151 changed the course of my life.
you can play it here: https://troypress.com/wp-content/uploads/user/js-basic/index...
The program is named "Word"
Always 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)
The 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.
It'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.
Yes? 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.)
1970s? Way too recent. MOO dates from the 1960s and Bulls and Cows predates computers.
Lawrence Hall is not a person, but a science museum at UC Berkeley. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Hall_of_Science>
We 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.
Not 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.
This is a case where the (2022) year thing really confuses!
That and using Dec instead of DEC. Was having trouble parsing the title on this one.
HN does way too much "helpful" title normalization. @Dang pls fix
DEC the company, not Dec the month. @dang
Why did the programmer set up his Christmas tree on Halloween?
Because OCT 31 == DEC 25