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by anonymousiam
532 days ago
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On my first job, I did some field service work. I was 17 and it was 1979. Asteroids appeared in arcades that year, but I had become unbeatable at Space Wars (released in 1977) by then. The Battlezone video game was released in 1980. One day I visited a computer lab at the Northrop plant (before the Grumman merger) in Hawthorne, CA to upgrade some hardware. (This location later became the SpaceX headquarters up until they moved to Texas six months ago.) While in the lab, I saw an F18 cockpit mock up connected to a flight simulator with a vector display. The computer running it looked like an HP1000 (2100). While chatting with the nerds in the lab about it, they offered me a chance to fly in it. I got in, took off, and flew around for a while until I flew past the simulation boundary and it crashed. After they reset it, I flew a bit more and then tried a landing on the simulated 10,000 foot runway. I managed to land without crashing into the tank they had placed in the middle of the runway. I saw a very similar looking tank a few years later when I first played Battlezone. I always wondered if one of the Battlezone developers had "borrowed" the 3D model for it from Northrop. https://www.retrogamedeconstructionzone.com/2020/04/battlezo... |
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