This predates the Internet so maybe I’m in the wrong category, but I just stumbled across what must be the first online go server, and I thought I’d write about it here since there doesn’t seem to be any information about it anywhere else:
This was apparently written by Mark Pavicic and “Herman ” way back in 1976 on PLATO, a time-sharing system that allowed multiple users to run games, educational, and communication software on a single mainframe computer. I remember using PLATO a few times in elementary school and have been reading about its history, so today I thought I would try logging into an emulator:
After I got online there and went to BigJump with the full list of available programs, I discovered 0playgo on the 3rd or 4th page. There’s a simple interface for setting up a pre-arranged match with another player on the system - up to 10 “channels” of custom games are available. After the game starts, you play moves by entering coordinates:
At the end of the game you can type pass but it doesn’t appear that there’s any scoring system. There’s also a bot you can play against, but it mostly just plays random moves (“except for captures”). There is no undo feature, score estimator, rating system, or even player accounts.
There a color version for modern PLATO terminals (I’m not sure when if ever these actually existed):
I don’t know who this person is, maybe it’s from the team that set up the emulator? Or it could be something more ancient, from before 0playgo existed.
I think I found a photo of a remote game played via Tektronix 4010 terminals between people in Taipei and a professor in Hsinchu National Chiao Tung University. The date of the photo is
June 7, 1976. Although we don’t know what the mainframe or minicomputer was running behind it. And the description says they expected to play remote games in August that year with players in London.
The interface looked different, but it was in the same era.
I am not sure. I went to the archive of the Hsinshu National Chiao Tung University for their mainframe and minisupercomputer, they said they had a CDC Cyber 170/720 (which can run the same PLATO system on it), but it was too late, and they only operated it from 1981 to 1988. Before that, it was supposed to be DEC(PDP)-10 mainframe. However, in the record, there is an entry that says NCTU assembled its first mini(super)computer in 1975 (not sure what architecture it was based on), hence it is entirely possible that the backend system and hardware were custom-made by themselves, and the “remote Go game” function was part of the tech demo.
It’s the same girl and the same terminal, just taken from a different angle. The girl’s name is 田麗華, and that picture was taken in Taipei instead of Hsinchu. And the article said the program is proprietary and written by two students (陳永建 and 梁恆盛) of Prof. 謝清俊 (and took them half a year to compete). And the operator would input and report the response coordinates where players can play on a real board. We can even see Mr. Ing Chang-ki himself on the third photo watching the game on the side. And the two players are president of the “China Weiqi Association” at the time 于錫來 playing as white in Taipei, and Prof 蔣亨進 playing on the the side as black in Hsinchu. (with a komi of 6)
The article also says, this is not the first “remote games” they tried, they already did one in the previous year, on Oct 19, 1975 called TELEX tournaments across the Pacific ocean with the other side in the US. But it wasn’t done via computer terminals, but using telegraphs and telephones to "communicate with each other)
Examples of games playing using teletypes via telegraphs. I couldn’t find the one for Go games though, it might be written somewhere in some old magazines.
Interesting. What was the point was of the computer setup for these matches if they still required a technical operator? Why not just call in the moves by phone?
I wonder if they intended for it to be used directly, but the players themselves objected at the last minute, or couldn’t figure it out, at least on the Taipei end.
The article actually explained it, that even the night before the game, the programmers were still debugging, and all the way to 1:35 PM that day, and finally seemed to work for the 2 PM game (I suspect still had some hidden bugs yet). The early terminals and programs were extremely prone to errors, and most people didn’t know how to operate them or what to do when exceptions arose (remember, many people hadn’t seen a computer before at that point). And indeed, they could have just used a telegraph or telephone like last year, but as I suspected, it was some kind of tech demo for the new minisupercomputer/mainframe system at the time in Taiwan (I found some master’s thesis by prof 謝清俊’s students in 1979, and they were all related to a Chinese operating system called 天罡 developed by NCTU, where OS was in very early phase at the time. And this might be some kind of application running on an early version for it)
I figured that in the age of BBSes there must have also been ways to play Go online. Did anyone here find a way to do that in the 80s? Here’s a candidate I found for a second Go server, 8 years after 0playgo:
” way back in 1976 on PLATO, a time-sharing system that allowed multiple users to run games, educational, and communication software on a single mainframe computer. I remember using PLATO a few times in elementary school and have been reading about its history, so today I thought I would try logging into an emulator:
