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I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game

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Re: I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game

#71

Post by smarks »

Wow, pretty amazing. I remember playing this game after somebody ported it to Wang 2200 BASIC sometime in the mid 1970s. I didn't figure out how to land it myself, but I remember being shown the technique of coasting for the first several turns before applying maximum thrust. I don't recall the term "suicide burn" though. (Or maybe that term came in later when the Kerbal Space Program became popular.)

I also remember this lunar lander game running on a couple terminals at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, California, also in the mid 1970s. I don't know what computer it was running on though.

I never looked at the source code for this program. I had no idea how sophisticated the math was. I wouldn't have understood it anyway, as I was too young in the mid 1970s. Then again, I'm not sure I'd be able to understand it now....

Re: I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game

#72

Post by mhh__ »

WalterBright wrote: post #53
Closi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It needs access to a computer, creativity, and an impressive amount of capability for a high school senior. This is 5 years before pong - you are inventing game concepts from scratch rather than standing on the shoulders of giants.

> and an impressive amount of capability for a high school senior It's only impressive because very few (none?) high schools teach calculus at the level required for his implementation. High schoolers are quite capable of handling that kind of calculus, it's just that the high schools don't teach it.

The UK stopped including calculus as part of physics even!

I got told off for doing an integral.

Re: I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game

#75

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

ck2 wrote: post #66

vaguely related 1962 Spacewar video game on a PDP-1 on punchout PAPER TAPE blew my mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar%21 video of game is at 30 second but whole thing is a great watch https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Restored...

When I made the proposal to restore the CHM's pdp-1, the reason was "Spacewar!"

Re: I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game

#76

Post by scrame »

benjedwards wrote: post #13

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…

dude,that's awesome!

Re: I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game

#79

Post by scrame »

realslimjd wrote: post #6
jihadjihad wrote: post #3

Pretty cool, the offending line seems to be 08.10 [1]. I thought it was a little odd that he mentioned "impressive for a high school senior in 1969" multiple times throughout -- honestly I would imagine that growing up in the Space Age would have had a massive influence on technically minded folks, reminds me of that movie from a while back called October Sky. In the interview in TFA with the game's author he mention…

There were on the order of hundreds of high school students with computer access in the US in 1969, and even fewer with computer literacy. Growing up in the Space Age probably was inspirational, but that doesn't change the fact that computers basically didn't exist to the general public at that time. Unlike now, software development wasn't a widely known career. There wasn't a CS major in the US until 1962. I think t…

yeah bill gates at lakeside in Seattle was one of like 3 high schools in the country that had a computer.

Re: I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game

#80

Post by nox101 »

benjedwards wrote: post #13

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…

That's awesome

I just wanted to add, there's also mechanical lander games that pre-date lunar lander

I can't find a picture. IIRC the machine was something like this

https://content.invisioncic.com/r322239/monthly_10_2015/post...

Except it had terrain and pits. A pit would light up and you needed to land in the pit (your ship landing would depress the button in the center of the pit). If you didn't aim well your ship would hit the edge of the pit, tilt, and you'd fail. If you did hit the button then the light would go off and a different pit would light up.

-- update --

now that I think about it, maybe the controls were more like UFO catcher where you'd align at the top and then press "land".

Anyway, it used to be at Disneyland at the Main Street Arcade.

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