Super Hi-Res Chess

Super Hi-Res Chess "Cattlecar Galactica."
Developer(s)	Bruce Tognazzini
Platform(s)	Apple II
Release	1978
Genre(s)	Novelty
Mode(s)	Single-player

Super Hi-Res Chess was a practical joke computer program for the Apple II written by (then) Apple Computer applications programmer Bruce “Tog” Tognazzi in 1978, early in the history of the Apple computer.

Function

Super Hi-Res Chess was created as a joke program, purporting to be a chess game in high-resolution (hi-res) graphics but instead promptly crashing the appplication with a syntax error when opened. The program then appeared to return the user to the Applesoft BASIC command line input mode. However, when the user attempted to use any BASIC or Apple DOS commands, humorous results would occur since “Super Hi-Res Chess” was actually still running. The program’s true function was to imitate Apple's command line processor, and to "parody" actual AppleSoft BASIC error messages by displaying “silly” error messages instead.

Tognazzi later expanded the program to include both the LISP and UCSD Pascal language syntax, redistributing it under the name "Cattlecar Galactica” (a pun based off the 1978 science fiction television series Battlestar Galactica).

The program's name appeared in the directory of the floppy disk, but opening and listing this file revealed no useful contents. Instead, the user found only hundreds of page-feed commands and a small amount of seemingly random code. That's because that's all there was. The actual program on the disk was hidden in plain sight. It was called "Apple soft," for Applesoft BASIC, the name of Microsoft's floating-point BASIC licensed by Apple in the early years. Because programmers expected to see a copy of Apple soft on every disk, they would never even suspect they should look there for the program. Naïve users, on the other hand, were just as likely to look there as anywhere else, giving them the upper hand in discovering the actual program.

The way out of the program—the goal of the game—was equally stacked against programmers. The magic word for escaping the program and gaining access to the code was "egress," with sufficient clues that English majors could easily escape, but programmers unfamiliar with the word could not. (English majors often found their way out within about 30 minutes; some programmers took a week or more, working their way through the disk by track and sector, looking for clues in the underlying code.)

Tog had barely started on the program when a group of other Apple programmers gathered around to play with it. Steve Jobs happened upon them, yelled that it was a complete waste of time, and sent everyone back to work, forbidding Tog to work on it anymore. Based on this admonishment, Tog did little else but work on it for the next seven weeks, releasing it free to the Apple II user groups, which rapidly spread it around the world. The story of Steve's intervention appeared in the movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley, where the program was referred to as "a parody of BASIC."