The guy living across the hall from me at Georgia Tech in about '80 had bought an Apple II with a 50hz power supply. He was an electrical engineer and rigged up a new power supply for US grid. All he had was the motherboard and a keyboard, the screen was an old TV. The memory was a regular audio cassette player. He had a game called "Orbital Mechanic" and we played with it quite a bit. It turns out that the paths of objects thrown from one orbit to another are not so intuitive - so it was a real challenge to toss a wrench from Astronaut A in orbit 1, to Astronaut B in orbit 2. That game used WASD for aiming the throw, and when I later began playing PC games, I wondered if that old game might have been the originator of the concept or if it goes even further back.
The guy living across the hall from me at Georgia Tech in about '80 had bought an Apple II with a 50hz power supply. He was an electrical engineer and rigged up a new power supply for US grid. All he had was the motherboard and a keyboard, the screen was an old TV. The memory was a regular audio cassette player. He had a game called "Orbital Mechanic" and we played with it quite a bit. It turns out that the paths of objects thrown from one orbit to another are not so intuitive - so it was a real challenge to toss a wrench from Astronaut A in orbit 1, to Astronaut B in orbit 2. That game used WASD for aiming the throw, and when I later began playing PC games, I wondered if that old game might have been the originator of the concept or if it goes even further back.
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