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Dog Star Adventure
''Dog Star Adventure'' is a text adventure game written by Lance Micklus in TRS-80 BASIC and published as the cover article in the May 1979 issue of '' SoftSide'' magazine. It is historically notable as the first example of the source code to a text adventure being published, and as a result, many later text adventures are based on its concepts. The game takes place in the ''Star Wars'' universe, loosely following the plot of the movie during the action that takes place on the Death Star. Names of the various characters are changed to avoid copyright issues. The player has to gather a number of items to repair their ship, rescue princess Leya, and escape without being detected by the many Roche Soldiers. Release The game was simultaneously released on cassette tape by ''SoftSide'' publishing spin-off, The Software Exchange. A port to the Commodore PET was made by David Malmberg in 1980, with most of the names returned to their ''Star Wars'' versions. The original source was re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1979 In Video Gaming
1979 saw many sequels and prequels in video games, such as ''Space Invaders Part II'' and ''Super Speed Race'', along with new titles such as ''Asteroids (video game), Asteroids'', ''Football (1978 video game), Football'', ''Galaxian'', ''Head On (video game), Head On'', ''Heiankyo Alien'', ''Monaco GP (video game), Monaco GP'', ''Sheriff (video game), Sheriff'' and ''Warrior (arcade game), Warrior''. For the second year in a row, the highest-grossing video game was Taito's arcade game ''Space Invaders'' and the best-selling home system was the Atari 2600, Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS). Financial performance Highest-grossing arcade games ''Space Invaders'' was the top-grossing video game worldwide in 1979, having become the arcade game industry's all-time best-seller by 1979. The following table lists the year's top-grossing arcade game in Japan, the United Kingdom, United States, and worldwide. Japan In Japan, the following titles were the highest-grossing arcad ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hunt The Wumpus
''Hunt the Wumpus'' is a text-based adventure game developed by Gregory Yob in 1973. In the game, the player moves through a series of connected caves, arranged as the vertices of a dodecahedron, as they hunt a monster named the Wumpus. The turn-based game has the player trying to avoid fatal bottomless pits and "super bats" that will move them around the cave system; the goal is to fire one of their "crooked arrows" through the caves to kill the Wumpus. Yob created the game in early 1973 due to his annoyance at the multiple hide-and-seek games set in caves in a grid pattern, and multiple variations of the game were sold via mail order by Yob and the People's Computer Company. The source code to the game was published in ''Creative Computing'' in 1975 and republished in ''The Best of Creative Computing'' the following year. The game sparked multiple variations and expanded versions and was ported to several systems, including the TI-99/4A home computer. It has been cited as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adventure Games
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story, driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of genres. Most adventure games (text and graphic) are designed for a single player, since the emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. '' Colossal Cave Adventure'' is identified by Rick Adams as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include ''Zork'', ''King's Quest'', '' Monkey Island'', '' Syberia'', and ''Myst''. Adventure games were initially developed in the 1970s and early 1980s as text-based interactive stories, using text parsers to translate the player's commands into actions. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became pop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1979 Video Games
Events January * January 1 ** United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim heralds the start of the ''International Year of the Child''. Many musicians donate to the ''Music for UNICEF Concert'' fund, among them ABBA, who write the song ''Chiquitita'' to commemorate the event. ** In 1979, the United States officially severed diplomatic ties with the Republic of China (Taiwan). This decision marked a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy, turning to view the People's Republic of China as the sole legitimate representative of China. ** The United States and the People's Republic of China establish full Sino-American relations, diplomatic relations. ** Following a deal agreed during 1978, France, French carmaker Peugeot completes a takeover of American manufacturer Chrysler's Chrysler Europe, European operations, which are based in United Kingdom, Britain's former Rootes Group factories, as well as the former Simca factories in France. * January 6 – Geylang Bahru family ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1970s Interactive Fiction
Year 197 ( CXCVII) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Magius and Rufinus (or, less frequently, year 950 ''Ab urbe condita''). The denomination 197 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire * February 19 – Battle of Lugdunum: Emperor Septimius Severus defeats the self-proclaimed emperor Clodius Albinus at Lugdunum (modern Lyon). Albinus commits suicide; legionaries sack the town. * Septimius Severus returns to Rome and has about 30 of Albinus's supporters in the Senate executed. After his victory he declares himself the adopted son of the late Marcus Aurelius. * Septimius Severus forms new naval units, manning all the triremes in Italy with heavily armed troops for war in the East. His soldiers embark on an artificial canal between the Tigris ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including websites, Application software, software applications, music, audiovisual, and print materials. The Archive also advocates a Information wants to be free, free and open Internet. Its mission is committing to provide "universal access to all knowledge". The Internet Archive allows the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, but the bulk of its data is collected automatically by its web crawlers, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible. Its web archiving, web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains hundreds of billions of web captures. The Archive also oversees numerous Internet Archive#Book collections, book digitization projects, collectively one of the world's largest book digitization efforts. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bit Manipulation
Bit manipulation is the act of algorithmically manipulating bits or other pieces of data shorter than a word. Computer programming tasks that require bit manipulation include low-level device control, error detection and error correction, correction algorithms, data compression, encryption algorithms, and Optimization (computer science), optimization. For most other tasks, modern programming languages allow the programmer to work directly with Abstraction (computer science), abstractions instead of bits that represent those abstractions. Source code that does bit manipulation makes use of the bitwise operations: AND, OR, XOR, NOT, and possibly other operations analogous to the boolean operators; there are also bitwise operation#Bit shifts, bit shifts and operations to count ones and zeros, find high and low one or zero, set, reset and test bits, extract and insert fields, mask and zero fields, gather and scatter bits to and from specified bit positions or fields. Integer arithm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cardinal Direction
The four cardinal directions or cardinal points are the four main compass directions: north (N), south (S), east (E), and west (W). The corresponding azimuths ( clockwise horizontal angle from north) are 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270°. The four ordinal directions or intercardinal directions are northeast (NE), southeast (SE), southwest (SW), and northwest (NW). The corresponding azimuths are 45°, 135°, 225°, and 315°. The intermediate direction of every pair of neighboring cardinal and intercardinal directions is called a secondary intercardinal direction. These eight shortest points in the compass rose shown to the right are: # West-northwest (WNW) # North-northwest (NNW) # North-northeast (NNE) # East-northeast (ENE) # East-southeast (ESE) # South-southeast (SSE) # South-southwest (SSW) # West-southwest (WSW) Points between the cardinal directions form the points of the compass. Arbitrary horizontal directions may be indicated by their azimuth angle value. Determin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Array Data Type
In computer science, array is a data type that represents a collection of ''elements'' ( values or variables), each selected by one or more indices (identifying keys) that can be computed at run time during program execution. Such a collection is usually called an array variable or array value.Robert W. Sebesta (2001) ''Concepts of Programming Languages''. Addison-Wesley. 4th edition (1998), 5th edition (2001), By analogy with the mathematical concepts vector and matrix, array types with one and two indices are often called vector type and matrix type, respectively. More generally, a multidimensional array type can be called a tensor type, by analogy with the mathematical concept, tensor. Language support for array types may include certain built-in array data types, some syntactic constructions (''array type constructors'') that the programmer may use to define such types and declare array variables, and special notation for indexing array elements. For example, in the P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Level I BASIC
Level I BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language that shipped with the first TRS-80, the TRS-80 Model I. Background Tandy employee Steve Leininger had written the first draft of the NIBL (National Industrial Basic Language) BASIC interpreter for the SC/MP while employed at National Semiconductor . Unable to take that source code with him, he initially hired a consultant to write an interpreter. When that contractor failed to deliver, he adapted Li-Chen Wang's public domain version of Tiny BASIC for the original prototype of the TRS-80 Model I. This required only 2 KB of memory for the interpreter, leaving an average of another 2 KB free for user programs in common 4 KB memory layouts of early machines. During a demonstration to executives, Tandy Corporation's then-President Charles Tandy tried to enter his salary but was unable to do so. This was because Tiny BASIC used 2-byte signed integers with a maximum value of 32,767. The result was a reque ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microcomputer
A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (PCB). Microcomputers became popular in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of increasingly powerful microprocessors. The predecessors to these computers, mainframes and minicomputers, were comparatively much larger and more expensive (though indeed present-day mainframes such as the IBM System z machines use one or more custom microprocessors as their CPUs). Many microcomputers (when equipped with a keyboard and screen for input and output) are also personal computers (in the generic sense). An early use of the term "personal computer" in 1962 predates microprocessor-based designs. ''(See "Personal Computer: Computers at Companies" reference below)''. A "microcomputer" used as an embedded control system may have no human-readable input and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PDP-10
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especially as the TOPS-10 operating system became widely used. The PDP-10's architecture is almost identical to that of DEC's earlier PDP-6, sharing the same 36-bit Word (computer architecture), word length and slightly extending the instruction set. The main difference was a greatly improved hardware implementation. Some aspects of the instruction set are unusual, most notably the ''byte'' instructions, which operate on bit fields of any size from 1 to 36 bits inclusive, according to the general definition of a byte as ''a contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits''. The PDP-10 was found in many university computing facilities and research labs during the 1970s, the most notable being Harvard University's Aiken Computation Laboratory, Mass ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
