Lunar Lander (video Game Genre)
Lunar Lander is a genre of video games loosely based on the 1969 landing of the Apollo Lunar Module on the Moon. In Lunar Lander games, players generally control a spacecraft as it falls toward the surface of the Moon or other astronomical object, astronomical body, using thrusters to slow the ship's descent and control its horizontal motion to reach a safe landing area. Crashing into obstacles, hitting the surface at too high a velocity, or running out of fuel all result in failure. In some games in the genre, the ship's orientation must be adjusted as well as its horizontal and vertical velocities. The first Lunar Lander game was a text-based game published under many names, including the ''Lunar Landing Game'', written in the FOCAL (programming language), FOCAL programming language for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8 minicomputer by Jim Storer while a high school student in the fall of 1969. Several other versions were written soon after by other programmers in F ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Minicomputer
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ''The New York Times'' suggested a consensus definition of a minicomputer as a machine costing less than (), with an input-output device such as a teleprinter and at least four thousand words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or BASIC. The class formed a distinct group with its own software architectures and operating systems. Minis were designed for control, instrumentation, human interaction, and communication switching as distinct from calculation and record keeping. Many were sold indirectly to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for final end use application. During the two decade lifetime of the minicomputer class (1965–1985), almost 100 companies formed and only a half ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Arcade Game
An arcade game or coin-op game is a coin-operated entertainment machine typically installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are presented as primarily games of skill and include arcade video games, Pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games or merchandisers. Types Broadly, arcade games are nearly always considered games of skill, with only some elements of games of chance. Games that are solely games of chance, like slot machines and pachinko, often are categorized legally as gambling devices and, due to restrictions, may not be made available to minors or without appropriate oversight in many jurisdictions. Arcade video games Arcade video games were first introduced in the early 1970s, with ''Pong'' as the first commercially successful game. Arcade video games use electronic or computerized circuitry to take input from the player and translate that to an electronic display such as a monitor or telev ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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People's Computer Company
People's Computer Company (PCC) was an organization, a newsletter (the ''People's Computer Company Newsletter'') and, later, a quasiperiodical called the ''Dragonsmoke''. PCC was founded and produced by Dennis Allison, Bob Albrecht and George Firedrake in Menlo Park, California in the early 1970s. The first newsletter, published in October 1972, announced itself with the following introduction: "Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people; used to control people instead of to free them; Time to change all that - we need a... Peoples Computer Company." It was published bimonthly. The name was chosen in reference to Janis Joplin’s rock group Big Brother and the Holding Company. The newsletter ceased publication in 1981. History PCC was one of the first organizations to recognize the potential of Tiny BASIC in the nascent field of personal computing when it published that language's design specification in their newsletter. This ultimately led to the design of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Creative Computing
''Creative Computing'' was one of the earliest magazines covering the microcomputer revolution. Published from October 1974 until December 1985, the magazine covered the spectrum of hobbyist/home/personal computing in a more accessible format than the rather technically oriented ''Byte (magazine), Byte''. The magazine was created to cover educational-related topics. Early issues include articles on the use of computers in the classroom, various simple programs like madlibs and various programming challenges, mostly in BASIC programming language, BASIC. By the late 1970s, it had moved towards more general coverage as the microcomputer market emerged. Hardware coverage became more common, but type-in programs remained common into the early 1980s. The company published several books, the most successful being ''BASIC Computer Games'', the first million-selling computer book. Their ''Best of Creative Computing'' collections were also popular. ''Creative Computing'' also published so ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Microsoft BASIC
Microsoft BASIC is the foundation software product of the Microsoft company and evolved into a line of BASIC interpreters and compiler(s) adapted for many different microcomputers. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first version of BASIC published by Microsoft as well as the first high-level programming language available for the Altair 8800 microcomputer. During the home computer craze during the late-1970s and early-1980s, BASIC was ported to and supplied with many home computer designs. Slight variations to add support for machine-specific functions, especially graphics, led to a profusion of related designs like Commodore BASIC and Atari Microsoft BASIC. As the early home computers gave way to newer designs like the IBM Personal Computer and Macintosh, Apple Macintosh, BASIC was no longer as widely used, although it retained a strong following. The release of Visual Basic (classic), Visual Basic reboosted its popularity and it remains in wide use on Mic ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Porting
In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally designed for (e.g., different CPU, operating system, or third party library). The term is also used when software/hardware is changed to make them usable in different environments. Software is ''portable'' when the cost of porting it to a new platform is significantly less than the cost of writing it from scratch. The lower the cost of porting software relative to its implementation cost, the more portable it is said to be. Etymology The term "port" is derived from the Latin '' portāre'', meaning "to carry". When code is not compatible with a particular operating system or architecture, the code must be "carried" to the new system. The term is not generally applied to the process of adapting software to run with less memory on the sam ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Hamurabi (video Game)
''Hamurabi'' is a text-based strategy video game of land and resource management. It was first developed under the name ''King of Sumeria'' or ''The Sumer Game'' by Doug Dyment in 1968 at Digital Equipment Corporation as a computer game for fellow employee Richard Merrill's newly invented FOCAL programming language. The game consists of ten rounds wherein the player, as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, manages how much of their grain to spend on crops for the next round, feeding their people, and purchasing additional land, while dealing with random variations in crop yields and plagues. ''The Sumer Game'' was inspired by ''The Sumerian Game'', a much more in-depth text-based economic simulation intended for children, developed from 1964 to 1966 by designer and elementary school teacher Mabel Addis and IBM programmer William McKay. Multiple versions of the game were created for the FOCAL language, but around 1971 David H. Ahl ported it to DEC BASIC and in 1973 published ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Early Mainframe Games
Mainframe computers are computers used primarily by businesses and academic institutions for large-scale processes. Before personal computers, first termed microcomputers, became widely available to the general public in the 1970s, the computing industry was composed of mainframe computers and the relatively smaller and cheaper minicomputer variant. During the mid to late 1960s, many early video games were programmed on these computers. Developed prior to the rise of the commercial video game industry in the early 1970s, these early mainframe games were generally written by students or employees at large corporations in a machine or assembly language that could only be understood by the specific machine or computer type they were developed on. While many of these games were lost as older computers were discontinued, some of them were ported to high-level computer languages like BASIC, had expanded versions later released for personal computers, or were recreated for bulleti ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Source Code
In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source code. The source code is often transformed by an assembler or compiler into binary machine code that can be executed by the computer. The machine code is then available for execution at a later time. Most application software is distributed in a form that includes only executable files. If the source code were included it would be useful to a user, programmer or a system administrator, any of whom might wish to study or modify the program. Alternatively, depending on the technology being used, source code may be interpreted and executed directly. Definitions Richard Stallman's definition, formulated in his 1989 seminal li ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Lexington High School (Massachusetts)
Lexington High School (LHS) is a public high school located in Lexington, Massachusetts, United States, serving students in ninth through twelfth grade. Campus Lexington High School's facilities are divided into four buildings. The Arts and Humanities Building contains most of the following departments: English, Social Studies, Fine and Performing Arts, and Physical Education. It also has the Donald J. Gillespie, Jr. Auditorium, the Ralph Lord Gymnasium, and a fieldhouse. Commons I and Commons II are used as cafeterias and meeting places. The library and the main administration office are also in this building. Thus, the Arts and Humanities building is informally and frequently called the "main" building by many students. The Science Building contains the Science Department. The building contains the Science Lecture Hall (SLH), also known as the Independent Digital Learning Center (IDLC), which is used for math competitions, study halls, and detentions. The World Language Bui ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Lunar Lander Rocket Gameplay
Lunar most commonly means "of or relating to the Moon". Lunar may also refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''Lunar'' (series), a series of video games * "Lunar" (song), by David Guetta * "Lunar", a song by Priestess from the 2009 album ''Prior to the Fire'' * Lunars, a fictional race in the series ''The Lunar Chronicles'' by Marissa Meyer Other uses * Lunar Magic, Super Mario World level editor * Lunar Design, or LUNAR, a San Francisco-based design consultancy * Hasselblad Lunar, a digital camera * Lunar, a brandname of Ethinylestradiol/cyproterone acetate, a birth control pill * Lunar C (Jake Brook, born 1990), English rapper See also * * * Lunar calendar, based upon the monthly cycles of the Moon's phase ** Lunar day, in such calendars ** Lunar month, in such calendars * Moon (other) * Luna (other) Luna commonly refers to: * Earth's Moon, named "Luna" in Latin * Luna (goddess), the ancient Roman personification of the Moon Luna may also refer to: Place ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Electronic Games
An electronic game is a game that uses electronics to create an interactive system with which a player can play. Video games are the most common form today, and for this reason the two terms are often used interchangeably. There are other common forms of electronic game including handheld electronic games, standalone systems (e.g. pinball, slot machines, or electro-mechanical arcade games), and exclusively non-visual products (e.g. audio games). Teletype games The earliest form of computer game to achieve any degree of mainstream use was the text-based Teletype game. Teletype games lack video display screens and instead present the game to the player by printing a series of characters on paper which the player reads as it emerges from the platen. Practically this means that each action taken will require a line of paper and thus a hard-copy record of the game remains after it has been played. This naturally tends to reduce the size of the gaming universe or alternatively to requi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |