55-year-old bug in Lunar Lander

[rprosperi]

(06-16-2024 05:34 PM)ThomasF Wrote:  And the article states that

Quote:Storer later released the source code to the original game, written in FOCAL, on his website.

But the 41's programming language wasn't named until around 1983, and not available before 1979 ...

So not HP41 FOCAL language then, unless someone writes a FOCAL interpreter for HP FOCAL (FIFHPF) ... ?

Cheers,
Thomas

FOCAL was the name for a BASIC-like DEC interpreted language that ran on PDP-8 machines from the early 70's on (maybe even late 60's). This is the language the program was originally written in.

In fact, it's exactly because DEC owned trademarks for FOCAL as a computer programming language that HP never formally announced the winner (also FOCAL) of the 'name the 41 programming language' contest run in Key Notes. Research has shown that apparently more than one person submitted FOCAL for the contest, and the 'team' that evaluated the submissions liked FOCAL best of all submissions, so they selected a winner based on whomever submitted FOCAL first. It was announced in one of the latest versions of Key Notes that a winner had been been selected and would be announced in the next issue. (they needed time to check with Legal, do IP searches, etc. and it was in the process of doing this that the conflict with DEC's trademark was found and so that choice could not be used.

However all of this was happening at the same time that Henry Horn, Editor of KN was leaving HP and KY was supposedly changing to a new format (a monthly magazine) which ultimately never materialized and the winner announcement was lost in the noise and thus no formal winner was ever officially announced. But word somehow slipped out that "FOCAL" was the winner and has been used ever since.