On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 9:51 AM, Swift Griggs <swiftgri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Apr 2016, Pete Lancashire wrote: > > Star Trek was a quite common BASIC (game ?) program on at least the HP > 2000 > > time share systems, I've seen quite a few variations, on ran on RT-11. > > That reminds me of the "Space Travel" game/sim that Ken Thompson wrote for > the first copy/iteration of Unix. > > Did anyone ever actually run/see that? There are some screenshots online > but > I'm curious how the original Unix on that old PDP was hitting a > framebuffer. > I'm really curious to know how Ken & Dennis approched it, and how far off > from today's crazy graphics interfaces was it. > > I was just looking at that graphics system; Multics had a monitor system called XRAY that could see into memory and display live data on a PDP-8 with a 338 display. Looking at the space war source, it seems that it used an earlier iteration of the 338, but with the same basic architecture. It was a vector graphics display, the controller reading a command list from memory consisting on X/Y/intensity values being fed to ADCs connected an oscilloscope or monitor. I have some code that does an X-11 emulation of the Atari Tempest vector graphics display; I'm thinking of wedging it into the simh PDP8 code to emulate the 338 and PDP-1 displays. DECUS has PDP-8 software that runs on the 338, and the spacewar source is available, so that should be emulatable as well. -- Charles