My trick for successful landing the CDC Cyber/6000 series lunar lander
version was to set the initial height above the moon's surface to the
minimum height of 1' and then let it drop. I never successful landed from
the default height above the surface. It was seriously difficult.
On Tue, 29 Aug 2023, 5:06 am Paul Koning via cctalk, <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On Aug 28, 2023, at 4:55 PM, Will Cooke via
cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
> On 08/28/2023 3:48 PM CDT Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk(a)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