[game_preservation] National Game Registry Blog

[Devin Monnens]

>

> Yah, that stuff was written some time ago.  It could have been Ralph

> simply wasn't aware of Ted's contributions at the time.

>


That seems the logical conclusion, yes. Memory is slushy.



> 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.



Yeah, that makes a lot of sense now. I suppose it would be best to know how
the classes were conducted as well. But timesharing vs. ownership I don't
think makes too big of a difference for high school programming classes
because in either case the students are learning to code.



>

> 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.

>


Yeah, I just read that now that you mentioned. I would take that claim with
a grain of salt, but it's certainly worth investigating. My guess is he
mistyped the date or misremembered. We hadn't even tested the lunar module
until 1968, so I don't think there would have been enough data at the time
to build a game on landing on the moon. I'm not saying it's completely
impossible, but he'd need some physical evidence to back that up. December
1969 seems like a more logical date.



>

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

>

> Published Feb. 26th, 1971.

>


Hey, this has an interesting reference in it as well:

1 - Computer De-cis-ion s
Acknowledgements
Computer Games Section
March 1970 Page1 5
Article by Dennis Van Tassel

So this dates the artillery game the FOCAL version was based off. It also
brings up an interesting source that now needs to be tracked down. Computer
Decisions is a journal, but none of my libraries have a copy form 1970.
Prospector (which searches university libraries in the CO area) doesn't have
a single library with one from that year (earliest is Sept 1970). I wonder
if anyone here has a copy...

Can't find digital copies, but holy cow, look at this guy's bookshelf:

http://www.vintage-computer.com/magazines.shtml

<http://www.vintage-computer.com/magazines.shtml>

-- 
Devin Monnens
www.deserthat.com

The sleep of Reason produces monsters.
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