Wanderland Lore [$09]

More about Wanderland Lore [$09]

By now it is the 1990's and the Internet is around, and so are voice-mail systems ("Welcome to Wandanet Telesystems. For Janet, press 1, For Julia press 2, for Squashy Lyndi press 3, for Tracy Wacy press 4, To leave a message press 0. You are 2653rd in the queue. Beep. Beep.") Anyway some random customer wants to run a voice-based MUG (multi-user adventure game) on an 0898 (premium-rate) phone number. So the GPO megastream (?) cable and multiplexers are fitted, and we get some Dialogic/Rhetorex voice-mail cards, and a 486-based PC. Resurrect part of the Wanderland source code, and record the voice prompts. Lots of fun :) By now we're coding in C++ (first Borland and then MFC). CPU's are a lot faster than they were in the 1980's, and hey we have loadsa RAM too :) Later on (about 2000) cable broadband arrives, so we run our own web server on an XP box, behind a Netgear hardware firewall. Customizing the user-agent string to avoid exploits. Resurrect the old procedure-generated storybot code, and make an "Anette's Boat Trip" story page (we used wandanet.co.uk, but that's long since gone). Added request and response parameters, so you could customise the names in the story. Ran the server ("Squish Park") until maybe 2010. Never got hacked (thanks to the custom code and the hardware firewall). ISP never moaned at us for running a server from our home broadband. In the end, most of the hits were from search engines and foreign hackers (caught by the IP filter rules table). So, this did get a bit too autobiographical. Whatever. And somewhat off topic. Eventually sold my house and moved out of Croydon to the East Midlands to retire. Recycled most (1.5 tons!) of my electronic junk. [TO BE CONTINUED??? MAYBE]