9 Apr
2022
9 Apr
'22
12:29 a.m.
On Fri, 8 Apr 2022, Clem Cole wrote:
[...]
Also in other news, not Unix related, but PDP-11 and
the computer
graphics world. We lost Jack Burness a few weeks ago. Jack was the
author of the original "Moonlander" for the PDP-11 with which many of us
wasted many hours trying to pick up "a Big Mac with fries" at "Mare
Assabet." [Note: There was no WWW/Wikipedia in those days to find it,
but to look up Assabet River, so many people naively thought it was a
legitimate lunar landmark - its the River that the DEC Maynard bldg
sits]. He was a larger than life person [his joke's mailing list was a
whos-who of the computer industry - it was an honor to be on it]. We all
have a passel of stories about Jack. I have written separately about
Jack a number of times and if you have never looked at the source to
Moonlander, you own it yourself to read it. Remember he wrote it as a
throw-away demo for the GT-40 for trade show [his integer
transcendental funcs are quite instructive]. As one of the folks on
the Masscomp Alumni list put it, 'Jack was someone that just does not
deserve to die.'
I have fond memories of playing it on the GT-40, and if Andrew Hume is
reading this he'll remember reverse-engineering the code and modifying it
for three-play operation; I think Peter Ivanov also implemented reverse
gravity...
Eventually DEC Field Circus stopped replacing GT-40 switch registers if
they'd suspected that they were used for playing it :-)
The GT-40 had a primitive loader; it was Craig McGregor of the CSU (UNSW)
who used it to download an 8-bit loader for things like Lunar Lander (I
only wrote a simple "Life" program for it, using the light-pen).
-- Dave