I gave computer lessons from this book or the successor when I was 10 at my school: I converted them to MSX basic at home and tried to teach my classmates what computers are as there were none: my house and the school were the only places with a computer in my town and no one ever saw one before that.
I remember back in 1982 or 1983, I got a copy of More Basic Computer Games[1] from a bookstore in a mall. At the time, I had a ti99/4a and I was 13 or 14 years old. On the way home we stopped at a Pizza Hut, and I was flipping through this book, and I came across the chapter about ELIZA[2] and there was a sample conversation with this thing[3], and it was blowing my mind! Was this real? WTF? How does it work?
Eventually, I studied this thing and more or less figured out how it worked.
A few months later, I was taking French as a 9th grader, and I had to do a project. I elected to translate ELIZA to french. I borrowed from a friend a speech synthesis module for the ti99/4a. So, you could type French sentences into it, and it would speak French back at you via the speech sythesizer module[4]
Around that time, there was some kind of "show" or "fair" at which the students were invited to show off various projects or what not. So, I brought in my French ELIZA thing, with the borrowed speech synthesizer. But, this being Waveland Mississippi, nobody spoke French, so it wasn't much of a hit. Realizing this, I thought screw it, let's load up the English version. Oh boy, was that ever a hit! A crowd soon gathered (this was 1982 or 1983 I think -- computers weren't something everyone had even seen, much less talking computers, much less talking computers that appeared to understand English (and French!), at the hands of a 9th grader!), it was quite the spectacle, and they were shouting things, which I would dutifully type into my little ti99/4a. The crowd would fall reverently silent, anticipating the robotic voice (that nowadays we associate with Stephen Hawkings) and after the response, the shouting would begin anew. I remember one kid saying, "Tell it to fuck off!" Knowing a bit about how the program worked, I would rephrase their suggestions so as to produce optimal responses, so I thought about this, took a quick look around to see if any teachers were nearby, then typed in, "can you fuck off?" and it responded beautifully: "Perhaps you would like to be able to fuck off?", eliciting howls of laughter from the gathered crowd of highschoolers. And it went on like this for awhile. It was beautiful.
I have a friend who writes decent poetry. I asked him how he learned it. He laughed, and said he started by just copying existing poems to send to his girlfriend. Then he began modifying and customizing the poems. Then he just wrote his own.
Hah! So we can add the author of Empire to the list of uncounted thousands (Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?) of curious minds instructed and inspired by Ahl's work.
I spent a lot of time extending the Hammurabi program. My version of it is lost to history like a lot of my early stuff. I also wrote a lunar lander game, and an orbit game.
Same here — Hammurabi and King were what got me started writing games. I learned so much from experimenting with that core loop, and it got met interested in math, economics, and lots of other subjects. Fur Trader, Civil War, and Combat also.
I first saw the Digital Press version of this book around 1975 or 1976. I was in detention in my math teacher's classroom, seventh grade. To say that it was influential would be an understatement, this book set me on the path.
I did not have access to a computer at the time, but my dad would type my hand-written programs in on a DEC-20 at his work and show me the results.
