Project Delta

Here are some scans from output of my old Digital PDP 11/70 programs. These were written during my days at Project Delta, circa 1977-1980.

The graphics were from a 3D graphics/animation program which I put together. I didn't yet know about representing transformations as matrix multiplications, so figured out most of the 3D math by hand and by trial and error.

The double images are stereoscopic: if you can cross your eyes to make the images overlap, you'll get a 3D effect. Note the computer display floating above the face... that's the Tektronix storage-tube graphics display. Very high resolution but monochrome and you couldn't erase individual portions of the screen as you can with a CRT. Also note the Starship Enterprise. Any self-respecting computer geek of this era would have done the same:

One Summer while vacationing with my family at Lewis (Delaware) beach, I spent several days cycling back and forth to the U of D marine sciences offices. I was able to log in via their terminals, but no Tektronix display was available. So I wrote a rasterizer which displayed the 3D images on a teletype paper terminal. (Hey, it was that or the beach!) This is the 3D face rendered as ASCII O's:

I also scanned the output of my Parens program, which labeled multiply-nested blocks of parentheses. Back in those days, you would often encounter individual statements with nightmarishly-deep nesting of parentheses. (Due to limitations of the programming language - a BASIC dialect - or just poor programming practices?) The offending statement in this case belonged to someone else's program, honest!

Other stuff I remember writing at Delta: "Ants" - an AI maze-traversal program; "Spacha" - 2-person, 2D spaceship war game (kind of like asteroids, but 2-player and no rocks); "Moonie" - try to land spaceship on moon as it orbits the earth, by balancing your direction and thrust against the gravitational fields; "Hang" - hang glider aerodynamic simulation; Conway's Game of Life; numerous other programs, mostly graphics-oriented.