I played the graphics lunar lander on a PDP-9 with a graphics display
and push buttons (not the sw) in a back room in the Kiewit Computation
Center at Dartmouth in like 1972 or 1973, the same time I was playing it
in text on a teletype ASR-33 in Focal. Hand typed in and punched to
paper tape.
On 8/28/2023 4:06 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
On Aug 28, 2023, at 4:55 PM, Will Cooke via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 08/28/2023 3:48 PM CDT Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
Lander, in FOCAL? The only one I know is for the GT40, in assembler.
paul
Apparently the original version was in FOCAL.
https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~storer/LunarLander/LunarLander.html
Will
Interesting. And amazingly short.
I flipped through some of those articles. There's a version from around those
early times not mentioned, for the CDC 6000 mainframe computer. It used the
console display, dual green text displays that could also do graphics
(clumsily, because the API was a dot drawing one, not line vectors).
What's unusual about that one is that it's a pilot's point of view display --
it shows you the lander's instruments and a view out the windows, rather than
an outside observer view as the GT40 version does. I played it a few times, it
was hard -- I never managed to land it. One of the system staff (at University
of Illinois PLATO project) was rumored to have a fast way to land: flip upside
down, blast rockets, flip right side up, blast some more for a soft landing.
paul
