Comment My Anecdote (Score 2, Interesting) 154
In 1979, I was a CS student at Utah State University. On of my friends was a grad student in EE. He had access to the "EE grad student's locker room", which was mostly used by the department for storing crap they hadn't quite decided to throw away. Among said crap was an old Hewlett-Packard mainframe, gathering dust in a corner. There was a reel of tape mounted on its drive.
One night, just screwing around, we tried to fire up the HP. Lo and behold, it worked. We read out the tape, and I recognized it as octal code for the DEC GT-40, an arcane vector graphics box the CS department had (I was taking a graphics class at the time, and we had to code for the rotten thing).
Very very late the next Saturday night, we stole the GT-40, put it on a cart, and wheeled it across the parking lot to the engineering building under cover of darkness. Plugged it into the HP's RS-232 port, and downloaded the tape.
Nolan Bushnell's original Space Wars and Moon Rocket Lander, from when he was a student there.
Some fun. I should have kept that tape, but oh, well.
One night, just screwing around, we tried to fire up the HP. Lo and behold, it worked. We read out the tape, and I recognized it as octal code for the DEC GT-40, an arcane vector graphics box the CS department had (I was taking a graphics class at the time, and we had to code for the rotten thing).
Very very late the next Saturday night, we stole the GT-40, put it on a cart, and wheeled it across the parking lot to the engineering building under cover of darkness. Plugged it into the HP's RS-232 port, and downloaded the tape.
Nolan Bushnell's original Space Wars and Moon Rocket Lander, from when he was a student there.
Some fun. I should have kept that tape, but oh, well.
