Slashdot Mirror

Babylon 5, considered at the time as one of the most progressive scifi shows of the era, showed people on space stations standing in line to get newspapers dispensed by computers. It was inconceivable even then that computers would replace printed media.

And another from this incredibly interesting 1972 Rolling Stone article: "One popular new feature on the Net is AI's Associated Press service. From anywhere on the Net you can log in and get the news that's coming live over the wire or ask for all the items on a particular subject that have come in during the last 24 hours. Plus a fortune cookie. Project that to household terminals, and so much for newspapers (in present form)."

A good example of a tangible feedback is the four 4's problem.

http://www.wheels.org/math/44s.html

Get them to try it by hand first, it's hard. Then get them to write a program to exhaustively search for solutions. The language is secondary to the task. I wrote a simple program to do this back in grade 7 in plain old Microsoft Basic (C) 1981, the Basic which uses line numbers and goto's and fit within a few k of RAM.

Why didn't he just use a computer for this?

Actually he was a computer - that's what they called people who did mundane computations before machines took over their job.

A noughts and crosses/tic tac toe game on the EDSAC system, was possibly the first ever computer game, created in 1952 by A. S. Douglas at the University of Cambridge, though not really a true video game like Tennis For Two,

Then you call the Vortex Blaster.

I found the sticker and held it above a lighter. No change even when it was quite hot. Black rectangle with green bars across the top and bottom, except that the bars fade irregularly. Beats me what it's for, unless I've got a cheap clone and the real one is supposed to impress upon the toucher's consciousness an unpronounceable, unspellable symbol or something.

Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with "essentially perfect fidelity." So much for record stores (in present form). From SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.

However, when it came down to actually doing it, and learning to code, they all, except for one, said "We're just more interested in playing games."

Hrm, sorta like those goof-offs at MIT who developed Space War, huh?

Of course, we all know that nothing good ever resulted from that effort...RIGHT?

If the Internet is not a requirement of prior art, then this little bit is interesting.
from The Origin of Spacewar
Slug tells me that there is a Lost Version of Spacewar! There would be, of course. He says the game is pretty much like the original, but the scoring is much more impressive. After each game of a match, cumulative scores are displayed as rows of ships, like a World War II fighter pilot's tally. Slug says he saw this version for a short time on the PDP-1, but never found out who produced it or what became of it

Granted, it's probably just legend, but I found it of note after reading this slashdot article.

That Rolling Stone article is fantastic. I like the Alan Kay quote near the end where he says that most of computer science can be mastered in just one year. An eerily clarvoyant piece.

Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)

from my blog at kisrael.com

Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)

from my blog at kisrael.com

Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)

from my blog at kisrael.com

At the end of may I wrote up spacewar for my kisrael.com quote/link blog:

Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)
--

At the end of may I wrote up spacewar for my kisrael.com quote/link blog:

Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)
--

At the end of may I wrote up spacewar for my kisrael.com quote/link blog:

Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)
--

Where did all the time go?

Within weeks of its invention Spacewar was spreading across the country to other computer research centers, who began adding their own wrinkles. There was a variation called Minnesota Hyperspace in which you kept your position but became invisible; however if you applied thrust, your rocket flame could be seen.... Score-keeping. Space mines, Partial damage - if hit in a fin you could not turn in that direction. Then "2½-D" Spacewar, played on two consoles. Instead of being God viewing the whole battle, you're a mere pilot with a view put the front of your spaceship and the difficult task of finding your enemy. (Perspective could be compressed so that even though far away the other ship would be large enough to see.) Adding incentive, MIT introduced an electric shock to go with the explosion of your ship. A promising future is seen for sound effects. And now a few commercial versions of Spacewar - 25 cents a game - are appearing in university coffee shops. Steve Russell still dreams: "Something which I wanted to do is get some interesting sort of fleet action. There are some versions of Spacewar which allow two, three ships, but as far as I know no one has been sufficiently clever to set things up so there are ships with noticeably different characteristics that could fight in interesting combinations."

This all started out with a real-time minicomputer game called Space War, popular back in the early 70s. (Here's an ancient Rolling Stone piece.) Atari's first project was an embedded version of Space War for pinball arcades and bars. The official Atari story was that Pong was invented later because users (especially bar patrons) found Space War too complicated to learn. Actually, Pong was released first, in order to test some of the circuitry developed for Space War. The first prototype appeared in a bar in Sunnyvale. The next day, Atari got a phone call complaining that the prototype was broken. Nothing was actually broekn, but the coin mechanism had turned itself off when its receptacle filled up with quarters. The rest, as they say, is history.

__________________

This appeared in Rolling Stone back in 1972. It's written by none other than Stewart Brand. Spacewar.

-Vercingetorix

Ah, the ultimate would be the Gray Lensmen.