10+ years ago, I had one of those life defining experiences when I placed "Spacewar!" for the first time.
It was running in a Java-based PDP-1 emulator inside of internet explorer (a PDP-1 running in a browser!)
The browser was running on a remote multi-user Citrix NT box and displaying on my NEXTSTEP box (running on Intel PC hardware!) through an X windows emulator.
The shear number of abstraction levels that were required for me to experience Spacewar! was amazing, and spoke to how far computing had come since the first PDP-1
I'm definitely looking forward to visiting the museum next time I'm in the bay area.
Ray
----- Original Message ----
From: Ken Sumrall <k_lists@scrapheap.net>
To: vectorlist@vectorlist.org
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2007 12:12:31 PM
Subject: Re: VECTOR: Videogames Turn 40 Years Old from 1UP.com
Heh, it all depends upon which "first game" you count from.
IMHO, the first video game was Spacewar!, conceived by Steve "Slug"
Russell, Martin "Shag" Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen in 1961. It was written
by Steve "Slug" Russell, Martin "Shag" Graetz, Peter Samson and Dan Edwards
and was essentially complete by February 1962. This was all done on the PDP-1
computer in the AI lab at MIT.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a member of the PDP-1 restoration
team at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, and we have
Spacewar! running again, and demo it on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays of the
month. If you're in the Bay Area, you should come see it some time. It's
an amazing machine, even if I am biased towards it. :-)
Other folks will point at "Tennis for Two" as the first video game. It was
made by William Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory for visitor's
day in 1958, using an analog computer and relays. It didn't really enforce
any rules, so I personally think of it more as a demo than
a game, but I don't want to detract from the accomplishment. It is very
cool, and I would really like to recreate it someday. :-)
The first computer game (not video game) was OXO, a tic-tac-toe game on the
EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge, written by Alexander S. (Sandy)
Douglas in 1952. It displayed the game board on a CRTwith 35 x 16 resolution.
More information on all 3 of these games can be found on wikipedia.
Ken Sumrall
k_lists@scrapheap.net
Franklin Bowen wrote:
> Saw this and found it interesting enough to pass on:
>
> <http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=5&cId=3159462>http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=5&cId=3159462
>
>
>
> --
> Franklin Bowen (Franklin@Bowen.net)
> http://fmbbowen.com:39353/ (if this URL does not work for you, try
> removing the :39353)
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> chris@westnet.com
>
>
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Received on Wed May 30 14:35:10 2007
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