Picking the right Laser for the User

Oh, yeah… Actually typed that one in from a book of BASIC games onto an Altair 8800, stored on 7-column paper tape – the original ASCII standard.

Now, that was a kit!

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Oh my gosh. Gorillas. Snakes. Scorched Earth(the tank one). Gotta be some other great games. My dad was big on finding loads of freeware games. Loader Larry. I had ST: Judgement Rights. 11 3.5" floppys - compressed. That took a while to install.

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I loved star trek back in the 70’s on the rolled white paper ( no CRTs then). The mainframe was an HP2000 I believe somewhere downtown. The other big “game” was , of course, Oregon trail… type “bang” … you’ll eat well tonight… LOL.

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THANKS! I had forgotten what it was actually called. Now I’ll have to play it again when I get home. ugh 7 more hours at work… :wink:

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I wrote a couple games for our machine in high schools, but had to take them off because the AV guy got tired of fixing busted teletype cases when people lost. Also, anyone else old enough for play by mail? (Galaxy II, on big green-and-white fanfold. )

When I was a kid I used to play a game in MSDOS that my dad called the game of turtles, where I had a turtle and if you gave a distance and an angle, the turtle moved and drew a line, so I could draw some basic figures.

Until college I realized it was Autocad for MSDOS :laughing: and the turtle was the pointer. :joy:

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@dan may owe your dad money for pioneering the first robot turtle then. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Sounds like the LOGO programming language developed at MIT in 1967… :turtle: :turtle: :turtle:

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yes!!!, that’s the one!!!

And this was the little turtle. :grinning:

https://teacherlearnstocode.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/logosqr1.jpg

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this is amazing.

And yes - Robot Turtles owes a big debt to the Apple II version of Logo, which was my second programming language (after C-64 BASIC).

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Wow amazingly cool!!!

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I had been mildly curious about the turtle selection. But I figured it was just a favorite animal for yourself or a kid.

Now seeing that it may harken back to this program, it is easier to see where it came from:

“Man, this program is awesome, but it does take a while to work. People may be upset about how slow it is”

“Well, are you upset by it being slow?”

“Not really, I expect it to be slow”

“Well, how can we make the user expect it to be slow?”

“Let’s replace the cursor with a turtle?”

“Wha? Wait… Huh… Just crazy enough it might work.”

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The Apple II turtle program was a staple of my middle school’s computer class. It was probably my first exposure to any sort of programming.

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I used KTurtle for nine years teaching K-8 computers. The ease of cross over from algebra, geometry and programming was so cool. I so wish I would have had computers when I was a youngster. Math really felt so static until I discovered programming and the magic of illustrating mathematics problems.

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Ooh! I have a fun middle-school computer class story! In 8th grade I had already taken one year of computer lab and was in the advanced class. We were using those apple computers that had the monitor built into the case (but had a separate keyboard and mouse). I think for programming we were using Basic. I did write a program where you moved a guy around and shot arrows at rabbits… but that’s not really the story I want to tell.

So, I was in the advanced class and I knew that everyone else that used the machine were beginners. Each student had a folder for their own work that we all left on the desktop. So one day we decide to see how many folder windows we can open. The magic number was something like 12… or 20. I can’t recall specifically. But then I closed one of the previously opened folders, and I was then able to open up the next folder in the chain.

So I dropped the beginner student folders somewhere in the 20-30 folder range.

The aftermath is that it took the teacher like 4 hours to figure out what the problem was and what the solve was. I had to write a 5-page essay on computers (by hand), but it could be completely plagarized. So I pulled out this reference book that I had at home and started copying the computer article verbatim until I hit 5 pages. Small price to pay for what was an awesome prank! (at least in the nerd/computer world)

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