When I was writing the I Speak Jive post, the first thing I had to do was find those old programs. It turned out to be harder than I thought. I found online versions but it took a while to find this GitHub repo.

On the way, I seemed to recall that these might be bundled with a bunch of old BSD games so I took a look at the BSD games package for Linux. While I didn't find the filters, I found a whole bunch of old programs that I hadn't played with in years along with a few that I never knew existed. To me it felt like an interesting project and lesson treasure trove so I wanted to share.

I think this makes more sense to do as a video so I can actually show the programs as they run so check out the video at the end of this post.

In the video I talk about controlling the cursor on the screen so that students can write programs like the ones I demo. That can be done in a number of ways. You could use a library like lanterna for Java or curses or ncurses for C but you can also just use Ansi Escape codes. Basically you print out special escape squences to move the cursor, clear the screen and even set text and background colors. For example, to move the cursor to the middle of the screen and print Hello you would use this: System.out.print("^[[12;40HHello"); The first ^[ is actually the ascii code for the escape character. I enter it in Emacs by typing Control-q then hitting the escape key. Other editors will have a way of doing the same.

So here you go – old BSD games. I hope you get as many ideas out of this as I did.

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