Hmm...a nodeshell I know something about...well..

MäK Technologies is a small-to-midsized software company in Cambridge, MA. It was formed by three ex-employees of BBN, whose initials were M, A nd K. (clever, no?) They specialize in distributed interactive simulation software, and have done a great deal of work on military training simulators around the world. Their products, IIRC, have stretched from code libraries for network simulation to a way-cool reality recorder which captures a packetstream off a network of simulators, and allows you to re-run the event sequence later from any point of view.

This is extremely useful, since until this product and its ilk came out, the only way to actually 'replay' simulations was to host the entire thing in one place and record it there. When networked simulation became a reality (notably with the U.S. Army's SimNet battle simulator) the 'post-game analysis' (or, if you were unlucky/failed, post-mortem) of an exercise became more difficult. In SimNet's case, with tank, jet, helicopter, and even ship simulators spread all over the country/world in realspace, collecting all that data for analysis was non-trivial.

In any case, they even made a brief foray into gaming; their name adorns the packaging for a way-cool but weak-selling game called Spearhead, which was essentially a desert armor simulator. Home computers had reached the point where they had to power to do what SimNet machines costing millions had been required to do in the mid-1980s. MäK contributed networking and simulation technology to that title. It may still be available near you on remainder; if so, I recommend it, it's lotsa fun.

Believe it or not, no, I never worked there.

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