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The Flexipede Revisited

Hugh 'Ras' Riddle: I didn't see it as significant as I do now. Tony Pritchett: I didn't think of it that way either.

Tony's Fortran deck included a large set of data cards giving all the positions of the flexipede legs An earlier program must have pre-calculated these to save time in short development runs. The graphics package used was unknown initially but eventually it was clear that it was a low level set of routines that just took coordinates defined on the 1023 by 1023 grid of the microfilm recorder and output vectors given the start and end positions. It was by stepping through the animation frame-by-frame, in conjunction with examining the program and trace output that we discovered some transcription errors in the data cards and worked out how the flexipede is lengthened when the solipod (effectively solipede) is swallowed.

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