Home
Miser was programmed in Commodore PET BASIC, by Mary Jean Winter, and released in August 1981 as one of the programs featured in CURSOR cassette magazine, Issue #27.
(Direct to PDF, Page 63 at archive.org).
The BASIC program source code, at line 62005, mistakenly credited M.J. Lansing as the author, and this was shown on the title screen.
There is no person named M.J. Lansing associated with this game.
The printed cover sheet that came with the CURSOR #27 cassette shows Mary Jean Winter as the author of Miser.
( See the entire cover sheet at archive.org. )
Later releases of Miser, in 1983, correctly attributed the author as M.J. Winter in the source code, and because of this, there was speculation on forums that Mary changed her name due to marriage. They just didn't see the CURSOR cover sheet from 1981, and were only referencing the BASIC source code listing and/or title screen.
M.J. (Mary Jean) Winter wrote several books on mathematical and computer related topics, such as 'The Commodore 64 Logo Book'. In that book, copyright 1983, she is described as a professor in the mathematics department at Michigan State University: M.J. Winter, Ph.D., Professor of Mathematics, Michigan State University.
Michigan State University is located in East Lansing, Michigan.
Knowing that, there is an article she co-wrote from April 1978, which predates Miser by 3 years:
The Arithmetic Teacher
Volume 25: Issue 7 : April 1978: Pages: 21–23
A Calculator Activity That Teaches Mathematics
Authors: Glenda Lappan and Mary Jean Winter
Digital Object Identifier:
(Points to National Council of Teachers of Mathematics)
https://doi.org/10.5951/AT.25.7.0021
I think someone at Code Works - publisher of CURSOR - just made a mistake and used Lansing instead of Winter while writing the BASIC source code for the title screen.
Lemon64.com member, 'born2code', relayed a message from Mary Jean Winter herself, on September 3, 2015:
I had an 8K (I cannot believe that number now) PET, with cassette player, and some magazine had an article on how to write such a program. Lots of the room names came from the stately homes in England that I had visited when on sabbatical and still had the guide booklets. I was a prof in the math dept of Michigan State and had just spent a year in London. We did a lot of touring on weekends. "RITNEW IS A CHARMING WORD" comes from my name.As I said before, with 8K I was limited to one floor. (of the game),
I used to teach in a summer program for kids at MSU and one year our project (I had the advanced group that year) was to create a similar adventure game. Not exactly numerical analysis, but computers were a hobby.
I wrote a couple of games for the C64 (ah, there was a great machine). One was called Sea Route to India. Within the last 10 years someone published an anthology of C64 games, which he managed to make run on a PC, and Sea Route was among them. I wrote another game for the Vic which was a single screen where the moon moved through phases and a character moved on the screen. The screen was pretty complicated: a river, mountains, towns, etc. Certain actions had to be done in the dark of the moon. I've forgotten the name.
A company called Dataquest published books I wrote under the name of The Computer Playground, for the C64 and other machines.
At some point, I switched to an interest in Math Ed, with the appropriate use of technology (calculators at the time). With a math teacher at Plymouth Canton HS, wrote several books - Algebra Experiments, Geometry Experiments, etc.
I've been retired for years. Now spend half my time in France.
If you'd like to revise the game for the modern world, go ahead. But send me a copy, please. I'll send you my address.
Mary Winter
Pretty neat - 34 years after she wrote the original program!
And here I am, in 2025, 44 years after the original was released, porting it to JavaScript so that it can be played in a browser, via the command line in Node.js, or via simple REST API.
In 2016, I ported Miser to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), using C#, in order to learn the language and the platform in general. Then I ran the program on Windows 10 IoT running on a Raspberry Pi 3B, which didn't require a single line of changed code.
Since I had done most of the work already, I decided to translate that C# code to JavaScript and publish it on GitHub, so that others could port it to their favorite language, or maybe a language they were just starting to learn.
I created a 'Miser Engine' which is stateless. The front-end can be anything you want; all you have to do is get a line of player input and send it to the engine, along with the previously saved game state. You'll get a text string back that looks exactly like the output from the original 1981 program, complete with the newlines embedded.
I never published an NPM package before, so I'll have to learn that to make it easy to npm install in node_modules.
The Classic Adventures Solution Archive (https://solutionarchive.com/game/id%2C359/Miser.html), has more information about Miser, including other ports, maps, and a few game solution files.
COMPUTE!, October 1982, Issue 29, Page 137 (archive.org, direct to page)
Review: CURSOR: Issues 23 Through 28
Marlene R. Pratto
Greensboro, NC
"One of the most congenial programs from these CURSOR issues is Miser, an adventure game. Miser was played continuously for two months at Erwin Open School, where it was the topic of both intense and casual conversations. Children exchanged information about what was hidden where. They used a thesaurus to look up alternative words when they could not make the computer take action. Some people think that personal computers will lead to fewer human conversations, but this program resulted in much conversation and cooperation.
Perhaps adventure style games have benefits beyond the social involvement and program solving. Because Miser and other adventure games have a restricted set of words that they understand, the player may know what to do, but not how to make the computer do it. This is similar to learning a programming language. The potential programmer may know what he/she wants the computer to do, but he/she must learn the words of the programming language used. Each computer language is a small subset of the language that humans know."
MISER - Can you find all the treasure while you explore all the rooms? (Needs 16k) By Mary Jean Winter
Edited by Andy Stadler.
MISER (Requires 16k machine.) MISER 'tis the game of Adventure, and will keep you occupied many an hour. There is treasure to find, and danger to avoid. We will only tell you a few of the commands, since discovering the commands is part of the charm of the game. You move by typing "N" to go North, "S" to go South, etc.). To find out what all you are carrying, give the "Inven" command. And to get your current score, type "Score".
Dedicated MISER freaks construct a map as they play so they know where they have been. And they are willing to try lots of different possible commands, just to see what the stupid machine really wants them to say. And they get rather excited when they think they've solved the puzzle.
In the book 'Commodore 64 Fun and Games'.
https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Fun_and_Games/page/n53/mode/2up
Mathematics Teaching 087
1979 reference to Mary Jean Winter and Glenda Lappan
Buildings and ~Plans – Glenda Lappan & Mary Jean Winter