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.

Shoulders of giants

[lawpoop]

"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. " [emphasis mine]

Okay, look, I'm not trying to downplay Kotok's contribution, but is it really fair to say that a game controller was something totally unimaginable? Were there any flying vehicles around back then that were piloted at least in part with some kind of stick? So wouldn't it kind of make sense that you move the ships in a simulation/video game with some kind of stick? If someone walked in him, say, a retired military pilot, would they have said "What the hell are you making? I have no idea!" or "Oh, are you building a controller?"

It seems to me that you could say he stood on the shoulders of giants rather than doing something really revolutionary. I mean, car steering wheels had been around for a while -- is it really such a jump to think that you could control something with a stick?

Re:Shoulders of giants

[jd]

Most aircraft of the time used a wheel on a column. If you look at WW2 movies, the smaller fighters used a simple joystick, but anything larger used more sophisticated controls. So you are correct that he may well have been inspired - I can easily believe that - and that prior art certainly existed, I would argue that it was not universal and had largely gone out of fashion. As such, I would very much like to know why he went with such a retro design. They're not robust and if cheaply made (which most are) the wires and soldered connections are extremely fragile.

However, design them he did, and he must have had his reasons. I would love to know more about his thought process.

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.

Re:uh?

[Paradise Pete]

Well no shit, of course no one else knew what something was that hadn't been produce yet.

And in fact to this day there are still no lettuce-based game controllers. And we call ourselves advanced.

Re:uh?

[Ohreally_factor]

Exactly! Just last night I was looking at a website with pictures of women inserting vegetables manually! It's had to believe that we haven't automated this process yet.

Best known for the PDP-6, DEC-10

[isdnip]

I knew Alan personally; he was quite helpful to my own career. He was also a really Nice Guy, a pleasant person to talk to, and always willing to be helpful in explaining things to people who had trouble understanding it. His hobby was telephones, and he was a lead designer of Digital Equipment Corp's internal telephone network, even though it wasn't his real job. He just liked to do it and had the juice to tell the people in charge what to do. He also could help certain famous VPs handle their phones; it's funny how a guy who was a professor and who designed a successful computer family coudln't transfer a call. Alan told me how he was sometimes called upon to help him do that.

His obituaries note his early work with computer games, but that's like noting that George Washington was an important surveyor. Alan's biggest accomplishment was as lead hardware architect of DEC's 36-bit family. It began as the PDP-6, and went into volume production as the PDP-10, which became the DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20 families. These were incredible machines, too -- with BBN's TENEX operating system, which DEC adapted into TOPS-20, they were efficient, user-friendly timesharing machines. It's miles away from today's style of computing, but we got a lot done on those machines with our VT-52s!

Later, he worked on some big RISC machines that DEC didn't build, and he also designed one of the later large VAX machines. Nowadays, processor design is mostly done inside chip firms. There aren't many people like Alan, and we'll miss him.

Just out of curiosity

[Daysaway]

If he died on May 26, how is it that /. is finally getting the news?
The obit dates June 13, and the reflections article dates July 11. And a quick search through slashdot history shows no other articles on the gentleman.

Alan Kotok, RIP. Better late than never, of course. And thank you for everything!