> While some have traced Wordle to Lingo, a game show that started in 1987, they’ve missed an earlier implementation: WORD was published in 101 Computer Games by Digital Equipment Corp. in 1973

Which comes after the board game Mastermind, which was created in 1970 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game))

This book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games

I was exposed to this book in about 1975 when I was in detention in the math teacher's room. It set me on a path to programming.

In 1980 they opened a new mall in Manchester, NH which was an hour from DEC’s headquarters and they had an actual DEC retail store that I bought a copy of that book from.

Notably DEC machines like the PDP-11 gave a timesharing BASIC experience that was similar to having your own Apple ][ or TRS-80 but a little bit better, probably the best thing was saving your files on a hard drive.

There is an effort to rewrite the games from the book Basic computer games in modern languages. The word game is here: https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games/tree/m...

you can play it here: https://troypress.com/wp-content/uploads/user/js-basic/index...

The program is named "Word"

The screenshots bring back memories of keying in BASIC on an Apple ][ monochrome green screen. With that intro, the first time I used QBasic, I remember marveling at not having to use line numbers.

1970s? Way too recent. MOO dates from the 1960s and Bulls and Cows predates computers.

Always thought Wordle and similar computer games were just variants of Mastermind, forms of which go back many decades, if not further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)

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We used to play Wordle in high school. Except it was called "the five-letter word game", and it was a competitive enterprise, in which several people would take turns guessing and the winner chose the next word.

it is amusing that they could have had a much better user interface for it back then even with just text.

This is a case where the (2022) year thing really confuses!

Lawrence Hall is not a person, but a science museum at UC Berkeley. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Hall_of_Science>

Not directly related but there was a game called Muddled that focused on anagrams of 7 letter words that was such a time waster for me. Probably because seven letter words seem so much more fun.

DEC the company, not Dec the month. @dang