Remembering Alan Kotok

Milktoast writes "Alan Kotok, one of the forefathers of gaming, died of a heart attack in May at the age of 64. He helped invent one of the first videogames and game controllers (Spacewar and the Joystick), and has been involved with the W3C for many years. His obituary is hosted at MIT, and there are thoughtful reflections at Ars Technica and Joystick101.org." From the Ars article: "While he didn't write any of the code himself, he did help to build the controller used to fly the ships in the game, and also supplied Stephen Russel with the sine and cosine routines from the DEC. Think about it: he designed a gaming controller when no one knew what that even was."

Comments

Spacewar Lives!

[Tackhead]

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View has a restored PDP-1, and yes, it runs Spacewar. Steve "Slug" Russell was part of the restoration project, and I'd bet good money that Kotok got to play it, barely two weeks before he died.

Thanks, Alan. Gamers everywhere are in your debt.

Re:Shoulders of giants

[drinkypoo]

If you look at the illustration on the Joystick101 page, he apparently came up with something that doesn't really qualify as a joystick, as it uses one lever for (presumably) the 'x' axis and a second lever for the 'y' axis.

"Back in the day", cars were controlled by some number of levers, before the invention of the steering wheel. After all, we went from reins to a steering device, and the only vehicle you actually steered back then was a ship. While large ships were using wheels, small boats typically just had a hand tiller.

In fact, the steering, throttle, gear shift, and clutch were all typically levers when the internal combustion-driven automobile was born.