I have various BASIC versions of Spacewar and spinoffs that ran on our PDP-11/40. -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces@classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Bob Shannon Sent: Friday, July 16, 2004 9:27 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: VCF East 2.0, Day one. First off, I'd like to thank all the people who worked to put this together formally, and also a very special thank you to all those who just showed up and lent a hand! I'm very impressed with this years event overall. It seems to me we had a very different mix of people looking at the exhibits, as compated to VCF East 1.0. I had the oppertunity to spend some time talking with a younger programmer who worked at Sun. His experiance in the modern software world left him rather impressed at the sight of a running minicomputer that was running totally home-grown software, from the device drivers up to the file system. He really took the time to think and ask some excellent questions about the process of writing a O/S and programming language for a machine without an already running O/S, and my reasons for building a native ATA disk controller for my old CPU's. From his perspecitive, this is something thats nearly impractical with modern hardware. How do you bootstrap a workstation without even BIOS code or low-level drivers in ROM? In hindsight, I wish I'd halted the machine, and shown him how to enter binary machine code I found it facinating to see how much the very concept of a computer has changed since the early days. I think I gained a better understanding of the evolution of machines than I'd had before I'd been exposed to his perspecitve. There was also a good deal of good deals going on in the parking lot and hallways. I did miss a few exhibits from the last VCF East, I was really looking forward to seeing spacewar running on the Imlac and DPS-116(?). Would anyone have sourcecode for Spacewar, for any old mini? I'd love to port it to my HP's.

RSTS/E. The early versions were text based and you could run them on an LA36 DecWriter or ASR-33 teletype. A friend of mine converted one to run on a VT50 terminal where it would update the screen. I might be thinking of a star trek game because the VT50 version was called TVTREK.BAS, but I think one of the text based games was called SPACWR.BAS. I have old program listings from 1978 and I think I have soft copies of some of these. I'll check. Ashley -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces@classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Zane H. Healy Sent: Friday, July 16, 2004 10:00 PM To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org Subject: Re: VCF East 2.0, Day one. Really? Did you have some sort of graphics adapter hooked up to the /40? What OS did they run on? Zane

Oh sure... go ahead and drag me into this... Yes, I have a copy of a spacewar game for the GT40... it was written by a friend of mine from college, circa 1978... It does run on the GT40. In addition, I found the sources for the roses program as well as the lunar lander. I can put them up somewhere if there is interest (and once I check for copyrights...) Megan Gentry Former RT-11 Developer +--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+ | Megan Gentry, EMT/B, PP-ASEL,ST| email: mbg at world.std.com | | Member of Technical Staff | megan at savaje.com | | SavaJe Technologies, Inc. | (s/ at /@/) | | 100 Apollo Drive | URL: http://world.std.com/~mbg/ | | Chelmsford, MA 01824 | "pdp-11 programmer - some assembler | | (978) 256 6521 (DEC '77-'98) | required." - mbg KB1FCA | +--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+