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The Natural Spread of ‘Medical Wars,’ From Your Calculator to Your Phone

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It is a file of in the late 1990s, the sixth season. You sit in the back of the classroom, listening intently to the Algebra II lesson, as you argue with the TI-82 drawing at school. The only math you are learning is that cocaine is more harmful than acid, and heroin can be beneficial on Coney Island.

Before anyone had a cell phone, millions of young people around the world realized Medical Warfare, a simple game of drug trafficking in New York City while fleeing Officer Hardass (yes, his name) and his ambassadors, human rights activists, or anyone else who tries to stop you from delivering drugs to starving customers. You have 30 days to buy low and sell well to make as much money as you can, or not enough to pay a shark loan.

Next year Medical Warfare will be 40 years old. During that time it has evolved from a DOS game game to a simulation game, a browser game, and – more recently – a smartphone app, sometimes known as Dope Wars on the contrary.

“The number of ports of the game still amazes me,” said John E. Dell, the playwright in an interview with WIRED.

Dell wrote the first edition of Medical Warfare on the TRS-80 of its most recent computer classes. He also said that he had just played at a friend’s house which involved buying and selling goods at various prices. Dell said he doesn’t remember which game, but it probably would be rich. He decided to turn the game into a one-size-fits-all game that included ludes, speed, grass, acid, heroin, and cocaine.

Dell’s teachers reluctantly gave him an A for the job.

“I clearly remember him putting a sad face on the paper,” Dell said. “She was not happy about it.”

Dell will re-record the game to DOS and download it to the bulletin board system (BBS), so computer users in the 1980s can connect, share files, or play online.

After graduating from high school, Dell forgot about sports and enrolled at the US Naval Academy, studying computer science when he began his military career.

Medical Warfare it continued to evolve as it was transformed into a real BBS game. It was also modified for early Windows versions, but this was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when computers were often reserved for the rich and / or nervous.

Medical Warfare it was really distorted (at a time when the word was not used to describe anything other than pathogens) when it appeared on a TI-82 photocopier-the same device that can be found in any high school mathematics in the 1990s and 2000s.

Jonathan Maier also wrote Medical Warfare on his graphing machine in 1993. Maier, a high school student, played the game with his classmates on a cable that enabled him to connect his graphics to his computer. From then on it spread to his friends, and then to the whole school.

“I knew it was hard when I went through a math class and saw the teachers playing on their own on a contraption that showed the math on the recording machine,” Maier said, in an email.

Maier explained that he was attracted to the game, like many of his peers, because of the restrictions on what was available at the time. Not surprisingly, the simplicity of the game was easy to understand even for ordinary players.

“All responsibility must go to the developer to receive the best games in the DOS format,” Maier said, referring to Dell. “I wrote a few other things and made even a few games on my own, but nothing was affected by viruses.”

Maier was a mechanical student at Georgia Tech when he heard that one of his high school students had changed his starting point, made a name for himself, and put it on one of the old file sharing pages that were in the late 1990s.

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