Benj Edwards of Technologizer has a nice summary of the history of Lunar Lander and the High School student who wrote one of the first computer games of all time. It started so many of us using computers, able to replicate lunar landings, so soon after we all watched images of the first man to step on the moon. I played this one for the first time in 1972 and it started me thinking, of imagining. That was a big deal, everyone knew computers counted things, but beyond what was being done at the time with computers it was easy to see more, especially when I wasn’t constrained by understanding how it worked, yet. I hope my students become as inspired.
The Atari Lunar Lander was the most popular version to date of the 'Lunar Lander' concept, surpassing the prior Moonlander and text-based games, and most later versions of the concept are implicitly or explicitly based on the Atari version.
Please read the article at the author’s site. I have copied it here as I am going to use it for class and many of these articles disappear within a school year. Even so, my students will be directed to read as long as it stays available. Lunar Lander games abound on every platform. Along with Tetris and Pac-Man, the game–in which your mission is to safely maneuver your lunar module onto the moon’s surface–is one of the most widely cloned computer games of all time. But did you know that game players began touching down on the moon in Lunar Lander just months after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did so on July 20th, 1969?
Today’s versions of Lunar Lander are easily taken for granted; they’re generally regarded as dinky games you can get for free–”Who would pay for that?” But the mother of all realistic space simulations wasn’t always perceived that way. In 1969, it was, in its own way, a sophisticated, ambitious piece of digital entertainment. And during the BASIC era of the 1970s and 80s, many programmers cut their teeth by attempting to program their own version of Lunar Lander. David Ahl, founder of magazine, called it “by far and away the single most popular computer game” in 1978 (and he was only talking about the text version!). Indeed, Lunar Lander was one of the early computer games that helped define computer games. The Eagle Lands YOU ARE LANDING ON THE MOON AND HAVE TAKEN OVER MANUAL CONTROL 500 FEET ABOVE A GOOD LANDING SPOT.
YOU HAVE A DOWNWARD VELOCITY OF 50 FT/SEC. 120 UNITS OF FUEL REMAIN.
Among the millions who watched the was a 17 year old Massachusetts high school student named Jim Storer. In the fall of 1969, around the time of the, Storer took his inspiration to class with him. There, he programmed a simple text-based simulation of humanity’s greatest technological achievement on his school’s. “Lexington High School had a PDP-8,” Storer recalls. “It had 8 Teletypes, a small hard drive, and 12KB of main memory, where 8KB was used by the system and 4KB time shared by the users.” Storer wrote his new program, “Lunar Landing Game,” in, a programming language for the PDP-8 that was similar in some ways to BASIC (both were introductory languages known for their ease of use). His simulation was simple, yet powerful: underneath lay a realistic set of equations Storer believes his father may have taught him.
Lunar Landing Game’s gameplay consisted of a turn-based question and answer session, asking the user for the rocket fuel burn rate at each turn, which the user would then enter as a number from 0 to 200. The constraints against you were simple: HERE ARE THE RULES THAT GOVERN YOUR SPACE VEHICLE: (1) AFTER EACH SECOND, THE HEIGHT, VELOCITY, AND REMAINING FUEL WILL BE REPORTED. (2) AFTER THE REPORT, A ‘?’ WILL BE TYPED.
ENTER THE NUMBER OF UNITS OF FUEL YOU WISH TO BURN DURING THE NEXT SECOND. EACH UNIT OF FUEL WILL SLOW YOUR DESCENT BY 1 FT/SEC. (3) THE MAXIMUM THRUST OF YOUR ENGINE IS 30 FT/SEC/SEC OR 30 UNITS OF FUEL PER SECOND. Fonts apk download.
(4) WHEN YOU CONTACT THE LUNAR SURFACE, YOUR DESCENT ENGINE WILL AUTOMATICALLY CUT OFF AND YOU WILL BE GIVEN A REPORT OF YOUR LANDING SPEED AND REMAINING FUEL. (5) IF YOU RUN OUT OF FUEL, THE ‘?’ WILL NO LONGER APPEAR, BUT YOUR SECOND BY SECOND REPORT WILL CONTINUE UNTIL YOU CONTACT THE LUNAR SURFACE.
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Along the way, Jim Storer created one of the earliest computer games–one of a handful of text-based PDP-8 games of the 1960s, and one of the first computer simulation games ever. In less than 50 lines of code, Storer captured the imaginations of an entire generation of programmers with a gripping space drama composed of nothing more than simple text statements. Storer submitted his game to PDP-8 maker DEC, which was always looking for innovative and interesting uses of its computers. The programs were usually distributed for free or used as demonstrations to potential clients, serving as a powerful marketing tool. At DEC, an employee named David H.