[game_preservation] National Game Registry Blog

[Martin Goldberg]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 1:50 AM, Devin Monnens <dmonnens at gmail.com> wrote:

> Interesting. Thank you for clearing a lot of that up.

> Well, the quote from Baer is either from In The Beginning or Ultimate

> History of Games. I'm pretty sure it's from Kent's book as I can't find it

> in Baer's. The gist of it was that Pong had not been original invention

> while Bushnell building Computer Space in his home was some real invention

> work. Yeah, it must have been from Kent's book. I'll be able to dig it up

> tomorrow.


Yah, that stuff was written some time ago.  It could have been Ralph
simply wasn't aware of Ted's contributions at the time.



> Regarding the PDP-8's, it's true that it would have been possible for the

> students to build the games elsewhere (Dungeons and Dreamers has a few

> stories about biking to the college to play with the computer). However,

> they're still high school students working on the games.


Certainly, I wasn't debating whether they were high school students.
My concern is reading more in to it as far as ownership of mainframes
at the time.  It was far more common to have high schools having
remote timesharing access, for those that even had some sort of
computer program (which was highly uncommon in the late 60's and early
70's, but getting more common towards the end of that decade).


>But based on this

> article, Lexington HS at least had a PDP-8, which means there had to have

> been more. I'm going to assume this article is accurate. This was Fall 1969:

> http://technologizer.com/2009/07/19/lunar-lander/


Semi-accurate, there's a specific context here.  BenJ tends to be lax
on the fact checking at times, which he admits to.  (Either way I'm
glad he's out there writing and calling attention to these subjects).

Lexington had an EduSystem 50, which was a later model PDP-8 called
the PDP-8/E and running the (then new) TSS-8 OS.  TSS-8 takes
advantage of the 8/e's virtualization support to allow terminal access
with multiple virtual 4k pdp-8's running.  TSS-8 also includes built
in BASIC.  These were specifically tooled systems built and priced for
educational setups (small colleges and large public school systems) in
the early 70's.  Here's the manual if you're interested -

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp8/tss8/EduSystemHandbookJan73.pdf

It just so happens that Lexington HS in Massachusetts was the very
fist installation of this system (with the second being Northern
Arizona University).  No surprise, since Lexington was the
headquarters of DECUS and of course Massachusetts was where DEC was
located as well.  The PDP-8/E wasn't officially introduced until 1970,
and DEC was known for installing equipment locally for testing (just
as they did with the PDP-1 at MIT).  And even Focal 1.0 had just been
released in 1969.  So again, not a statement of the situation being
common.  In fact I think it helps tie even more of a perspective as to
why the original text version of Lunar Lander was able to spring up
from a high school during 1969.


> Interesting enough, there is one final mystery game, FOCAL8-169, Artillery.

> This looks like a precursor to the more famous two-player Artillery. The

> designer says it is based on the "GE Basic Artillery Game", which I assume

> means the original game was made in BASIC and then ported to FOCAL.


Yes, Focal of course shares similarities with BASIC.  And a lot of the
GE systems ran Dartmouth BASIC afaik.  What I find more interesting is
the claim in the comments area of the lunar lander article that
someone played an earlier interpretation of it in a GE mainframe
running Dartmouth BASIC in '67.


>I was

> trying to track down where it came from. It's possible the other game is in

> the DEC catalog of BASIC software, but I don't think so. Publication date is

> no later than Feb 1971 based on when it appeared in DECUS. This isn't the

> two-player Artillery, but a single-player version where the player is trying

> to hit a target:

> "In most computer games the situation is the player versus the

> computer. However, in this game, the computer is just

> measuring the skill of the player -- by testing his abi I ity with

> an artillery piece in coming within 100 yards of a target,

> whose distance was randomly selected."

> [12 Bit 1972 DECUS Catalog Update]

> 100 yards? Those must be pretty high-yield explosives!

> BTW, the DEC numbers for the other games I mentioned are FOCAL8-107 (NIM),

> FOCAL8-81 (Lunar Lander), FOCAL8-173 (Apollo II).

>


Here you go, including full source -

http://pdp-8.org/scans/an/decus-focal8/decus-focal8-169.pdf

Published Feb. 26th, 1971.

Lunar Lander running -
http://www.pdp8online.com/games/lunar_lander.shtml

Note that this site has actual file images dumped from DEC tapes as well.


Marty