Legends of Elsewhere Character Card Set 1

These are fantastic! Especially love Mario and Pac-Man

I remember playing lunar lander on the pdp-8 on a LA-36 printing terminal… (the old dec writer). The only 2 games we it at our school were lunar lander and adventure (no bloatware on a machine with 8K shared between the OS and your code!). But we really understood what was going on in the CPU (you could look at the lights on the case). Great machine to learn on (essentially a 400lb Arduino)

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Oh geez, that’s serious wayback machine time. It’s been decades since I thought about those days. I may be old. :thinking::scream:

My first experience with any of this was with my Uncle. He worked for Bell labs and when we visited , this was in the 70s, he had this thing that looked like a big typewriter with a phone coupler on it. No screen just a dot matrix printer. We would dial in to what ever a server was then. There was a list of games we could play. It would print you a maze, stuff like that. But the big game we played was Hunt the Wumpus! We would type in a command. Then it would answer in dot matrix fashion zit zit zit. I consider this the precursor to it all. Later, he also had one of the first touch screen monitors. Crazy…I miss Uncle Mort!

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Those games are still part of most Unix distributions (or are a trivial add on via the package manager). The Zork series were/are great games (open source now). I had a Sysop recently removing them from a distro and asked why (to get disk space back). I’m thinking this machine has almost 50TB of internal storage and you’re worried about a game that fit on a floppy disk for the Apple II?

I am externally grateful for Ms Titcomb our computer science teacher in high school who made us learn on the PDP-8, the “normal” students used the TRS-80s, Apple IIs of the day for learning about computers but she wanted us to fundamentally understand the CPU. So first semester CS-3 we could only program in assembly (12-bit) and we had to write a compiler. The following semester we graduated to FORTRAN 2; the machine didn’t have a built in boot loader, so the sequence of numbers to key in via the front panel were silk-screened onto the case! in a nice nod to history DEC eventually made the PDP-8 the keyboard controller for their later machines after creating a single chip variant. Comparing the machine to the Arduino is very apt, as there was a variant called the LINC-8 which was a pdp-8/I with hardware I/O built in. Was very useful in scientific computing.

For those fans of the PDP-8, there is a guy in Germany who sells a kit to make a PDP-8 (uses a raspberry pi as the actual CPU). I made one, not too hard to assemble, just basic soldering. It’s funny to think of how powerful even an older pi is compared to the pdp-8. And that the Pi is around $35, while the PDP was a very expensive departmental machine.

https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/2016-pidp-8-building-instructions

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Frogger has made an appearance in set 3 :slight_smile: