In 1966, Walter Lewis Brown wrote his master's thesis at the University of Montana, in which he ...
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In 1966, Walter Lewis Brown wrote his master's thesis at the University of Montana, in which he describes
his management game MONABUS. The exact citation is:
Brown, Walter L., MONABUS - A Business Simulation Exercise, Master's thesis,
University of Montana, USA, 1966.
The thesis describes a very nice and simple round-based management game, where three teams of students
can make key decisions, like production volume, selling price etc., for the next time period for their
respective firms. The game administrator then feeds punch cards with these decision parameters into the
computer (an IBM 1620 back in 1966),
which then simulates their consequences on the market and on the three companies. The outcome is a printout
with financial statements and market data for the firms. The paper is handed over to the student teams as
the basis to prepare their decisions for the next period.
The thesis is nicely built-up. It contains an introduction, a manual for the participants, a manual for the
game administrator, decision forms, and instructions for the operating staff of the computer center.
Of course, the students were usually not allowed to directly operate the computer by themselves back then
:-/
I can tell you, that it is quite fun to play these kind of games. I had the pleasure to participate in such
a game at my university back in the 1980s. It was called MARKSTRAT (which still exists
today), also ran on an IBM machine
(a 4331 mainframe), and, even if it was twenty years later, we as students still had no access
to the machine itself, but just received paper printouts. I bet, the administrator even fed our decisions
into the machine via punch cards (just now the virtual ones, which VM/SP, our IBM's operating system,
emulated as part of its virtual machine engine).
Walter's MONABUS thesis luckily also contains the complete listing of his computer program written in the
programming language FORTRAN. This is now my translation of the original program to JavaScript.
I tried to keep the program similar to the original code, and also tried to keep the output and the way
of operating the game similar. You just read the printout, enter your decisions in HTML forms, run the
simulation, and then go back to the printout area to see the results for this period. I also plan to make
a "modernized" version.
The source code of my JavaScript program is available on
GitHub.
Have fun.
Norbert
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