121–124 of 124 posts
In the mid 70's I wrote a 2D vector graphics moon lander game for the Adage graphics terminal. You came in fast horizontally and had to use push buttons for the LEM side thrusters and main engine to slow down and land horizontally, resulting in either a crater if you were too fast, or if you ran out of fuel, otherwise you saw one or more planted American flags depending on the quality of the landing. Years ago I thre…
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Oy vey, "no chance" is putting it lightly. A lot of this BASIC code had roots in the 1960's-70's. Back then, editors ruled the roost of print magazines where this code often showed up within, and in books of collections of code they especially ruled with an iron fist. There was little notion that source code had to be dropped in verbatim with absolutely zero changes, so editors would make "judicious" changes in the s…
> They thought they were "helping" with "obvious" typographical and editorial decisions Sounds completely baffling. How does that thought process even work? What did they think the code meant? What changes did they make, anyway? Did they learn to not touch math equations before?
As it was explained to me, it was territory marking/office politics. Editors back then were very powerful when it came to decisions on content. They did not take kindly to anyone explaining/telling them they had no control over any portion of the content.
> What did they think the code meant?
This gets interesting. They were told it was for the computers, but upon seeing high level language artifacts that looked vaguely like English words, they grabbed their red marking pens and leapt into action, absolutely certain they were in the right as they had always been in the past. This was at the very beginning. Later, it got more nuanced.
> What changes did they make, anyway?
Early incidents had stories of galleys using non-proportional font forced to change to proportional font simply due to aesthetics. Red pens changing the contents of PRINT statements (because it said "print", and that was their domain, right?). Even later with more lessons learned and nuances started to creep in, this was way before programmer fonts made the scene, and the typical goofs one would expect from manual transcription were rampant. The pipelines did not exist yet back then for a long time to take raw source code and dump them into the non-digital typesetting systems at the time, so it was all laboriously transcribed from printouts by non-technical staff.
> Did they learn to not touch math equations before?
Very little cross-pollination of editors experienced with math-heavy technical writing, and those overseeing print products popularizing BASIC programming. BYTE magazine was revolutionary at the time for realizing this, and even they had some gaffs from time to time.
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It's not about the level of calculus knowledge for me - it's about building this from scratch with 1960's technology in 50 lines of basic and very little prior art. It's easier to be the second person to do something.
For accuracy, it was written in FOCAL, not BASIC.
If anyone is curious, in 2009, I discovered that Jim Storer was the author of the first Lunar Lander game and interviewed him about it (and also chronicled the history of the game beyond that). He later provided the source code, which was awesome. https://technologizer.com/2009/07/19/lunar-lander/index.html My favorite part is this: “After leaving high school I never thought about the game again,” says Storer. “Until…
a) thats awesome b) I am taking a wild leap in deducing you're the same retro-games Benj Edwards journalist that was part of the infamous Retronauts East team. Just wanted to say i always quite enjoyed your presence :)