STAR was based on 1974's single-user, turn-oriented BASIC program STAR, written by Michael O'Shaughnessy at UNH. The games became popular, and the university often banned them because of their RAM use. The games had a program running on each terminal (for each player), sharing a segment of shared memory (known as the "high segment" in the OS TOPS-10). The university's computer system had hundreds of terminals, connected (via serial lines) through cluster PDP-11s for student, teacher, and staff access. The first large-scale serial sessions using a single computer were STAR (based on Star Trek), OCEAN (a battle using ships, submarines and helicopters, with players divided between two combating cities) and 1975's CAVE (based on Dungeons and Dragons), created by Christopher Caldwell (with artwork and suggestions by Roger Long and assembly coding by Robert Kenney) on the University of New Hampshire's DECsystem-1090. DTSS's popular American football game, he said, now supported head-to-head play by two humans. Kemeny wrote in 1972 that software running on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) had recently gained the ability to support multiple simultaneous users, and that games were the first use of the functionality. Real-time play requiring quick reaction.
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