[Am-info] Finally. A Game That Eludes Gates

[Joe Barr]

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Please excuse this rather off-topic reply.  It's just that I am
surprised to learn that Gates and I share(d) a common interest.

In the late 1980's, I used to hang around a small online service called
Portal, in (I think) Cupertino, CA.  I lived in the DC area at the time,
but like many Portal customers could afford the telephone bill each
month thanks to a deal called PC Pursuit.  $30.00 a month for unlimited
(but not in primetime) hours.

Anyway, one of the favorite things that the Portal crowd did was to play
games.  Trivia games, mostly, but others as well.  Out of boredom, I
decided to write an online bridge game.  I wrote it in MS Basic.  It
would deal the hands, count the tricks, and keep score.  It did have
trouble handling the comm port, though, so I hacked a driver from some
public domain MASM code I found on CompuServ.  It had written to be
called from C.  I changed it to handle calls from Basic and tidied it up
a bit.  It worked well enough to allow us hours of fun playing Chicago
style bridge.

PC Pursuit's flat rate offering died when Sprint bought it in 88 or 89,
so most of the Portal crowd I hung out with accepted a similar offering
from Bix and a great online migration occurred.  I remember uploading
that driver to the Bix online archive, but I have no idea what has
happened to it since.  May it RIP.

There was a fairly large and successful online bridge service available
in the mid 90's, and I played there off and on until I stopped using
Windows.  Just as well, there are not that many Goren players out there
any more.

See ya,
Joe Barr









On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 09:41, Fred A. Miller wrote:
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> Finally. A Game That Eludes Gates
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> Bill "Trey" Gates may be the world's richest man, a colossus in=20
> the computer industry, and a historic figure to rival Henry Ford,=20
> but when it comes to card games, he's strictly an amateur.
>=20
> Gates, a bridge fanatic who frequently plays the game online,=20
> attended the World Bridge Championship in Montreal last week, but=20
> was knocked out of contention well before the final round.=20
> Discussing his loss afterward, a characteristically unbowed Gates=20
> claimed he could probably defeat the best bridge software in the=20
> world.
>=20
> Braggadocio? "Bridge is a probabilistic game, and you can only=20
> make best guesses on how to proceed based on clues you get during=20
> the game. That annoys computers," confirms Paul Linkweiler,=20
> managing editor of "Bridge Bulletin," the official publication of=20
> the American Contract Bridge League. "Compared to the average=20
> player, most of them just stink." - David M. Ewalt
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> - --=20
> Fred A. Miller
> Systems Administrator
> Cornell Univ. Press Services
> fm@cupserv.org, www.cupserv.org
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