Archive

The game of Dixonary began on 4 July 1989 and has been around for over 30 years. Since it is a game of exchanged messages, among upwards of a dozen players, that adds up to a lot of emails.

This archive of the game is something that few players will ever want to consult. It is here primarily to back up the claim on Wikipedia that Dixonary is the longest-running online game in the world. But it does also serve as a resource for such things as establishing the precedent for the unwritten rules by which the game is played.

Dixonary began before there was a World Wide Web, and it has seen online services, web forums and message protocols—and the software that went with them—come and go. To consult the entire history of the game you need to deal with several websites and negotiate several data formats. The game started in the Tapcis forum on CompuServe. The forum supported the program Tapcis, which was an offline reader that went online and downloaded forum messages at computer speed, stored them on disk, then disconnected and allowed the user to consult them later at human speed. This was important in the days when network connectivity was dial-up and charged by the minute: CompuServe used to charge up to $50 per hour.

Proper records began in Round 49. Rounds 49 to 1569 are available below in archive form. These files began life as raw ascii CompuServe message streams, but are presented here as xml to make them accessible to modern tools. They are verbatim records, but were redacted at the time to omit messages not strictly related to the gameplay. The xml will render the messages in a rough approximation of how they would have appeared in an offline reader like Tapcis. To see view them, download them, unzip the xml files inside, and view in a browser.

Rounds to 979 were produced from the archives contributed by Russ Heimerson (1945–2010), founder player and longtime scorekeeper. Rounds 980-1569 were produced from the archives contributed by Scott Crom (1927–2013), another founder player.

Rounds from the post-Tapcis era are available as follows.