28 Aug
2023
28 Aug
'23
2:30 p.m.
I forgot to mention that I was playing the Focal version on a PDP-8/L
coincidentally.
On 8/28/2023 4:16 PM, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote:
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(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
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
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