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Futureproofing Artifacts: Spacewar! 1962 In HTML5
trebonian writes "In 1997 we posted a playable version of the Spacewar!, the first graphical computer game. Spacewar! was written by Russell et al at MIT in the early '60s. We did not re-implement the game. Rather, we found the original source code, rebuilt it to get an authentic binary and ran it on a PDP-1 emulator that we wrote in Java. We chose Java to implement the PDP-1 because we believed at the time — correctly as it turned out — that a Java version would survive the browser wars. Also, it would not require any effort to keep it running on all platforms well past the turn of the millennium, and through the traffic peaks of Spacewar's 40th and 45th birthday. It's now getting close to 15 years later. We would not want to bet that in another 15 years a Java program will still run on the latest popular platforms. As a hedge to the future, and in an effort to continue the preservation of this significant digital artifact, we've now ported the PDP-1 emulator to Javascript/HTML5. This should see the game through Spacewar!'s 50th (and hopefully 60th) birthday. Expect another update around 2025."
Open source software :)
Netcraft confirms it! Flash is dead!
Despite that 90% of the earliest net memes are still perfectly playable today due to their SWF composition, it's interesting that they're (indirectly) making the statement that html5 will beat flash. I can see why, flash is a bloated, update happy, buggy, insecure beast of a program, sort of like java through the years.
Get a 10 on the Cool Meter!
I hope this caused some synapses to fire.
Bah - now they've let those little spaceships out on the web. At least you can use them to kill adds - http://erkie.github.com/
HTML 5 may not be approved by 2025 so they won't have to re-write it!
There is a growing concern among some knowledge managers that society will lose a lot of its heritage as information formats change. .... ???? is a very costly and time consuming exercise - assuming you can even get the spare parts as technology advances and factories no longer produce them.
The expense and expertise required to move things from paper to micro fische to CD to
So is HTML 5 our saviour in this matter?
Time will tell I guess.
Great win for the community.
Now, if only we could force the current generation to play this for a few hours before complaining that I need to buy a PS3 because their xbox 360 isn't good enough...
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
To say that JVMs won't exist for current platforms 15 years hence is a bit of a stretch, I think. On the other hand, HTML5/JavaScript (implementations, not the standard) is such a moving target that I wouldn't count on code written for it being able to run in a few years, much less a decade-and-a-half later. Still a cool hack, but the reason given is kinda lame.
If an emulator, however cool, gets a 10, then Steve "Slug" Russell playing it last month on the original hardware at the Computer History Museum, definitely goes to eleven.
I see a striking resemblance between this and Atari's original 1979 Asteroids. I am curious how it took eighteen years to make that progress, though. Surely academia wasn't that far ahead of mainstream entertainment... or was it?
First link is goatse. Do not click! Second link is O.K.
I played this at MIT - the setting was as cool as the game. Go down an alley, into a freight elevator, up to the top floor, where the elevator opens into a computer room, and play at the console. It felt like the game was embedded in a James Bond movie.
How does the speed of this Javascript emulator (on a typical PC) compare to the original hardware PDP-1?
If you port the emulator to plain vanilla ANSI C, then it should still run in 100 years unchanged.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Many parts of HTML5 are moving targets, but some are relatively stable - "standardized" or not. JS as a language is extremely stable, and I do not expect any current JS code to be syntactically or functionally invalid in 15 years.
As a preteen in the late 70s I played a game that I remember as SPACWR on a friend's DEC PDP-11. My friend and I played for hours and thought it was great fun. It was really an ASCII Star Trek game originally written by Mike Mayfield in 1971 in BASIC and then translated into DEC BASIC by David Ahl who gave it the confusing name so similar to the game discussed here.
Here's another link for the curious.
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/startrek/
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I agree, I rather take my chances with a modern JVM and probably apply some fixes than have it completely broken for an unknown version of javascript and whatever the browsers of the future will think what HTML5 should look.
When I was in college (starting fall 1969), we took the original math and programmed an IBM 360 to print out a gravity map that could be pasted on posterboard/cardboard.
Then we played off of that.
The program got rewritten for a PDP-10, in interactive mode for use on graph paper (and one test version on a Techtronics 4010 graphics terminal).
It was the first programe to be banned by the computer center.
So they wrote a PDP-1 emulator for java. Maybe they should keep building emulators to run the last emulator on a newer system. Repeat ad infinitum and you never have to know more than 2 languages at a time in order to preserve it.
You chose a browser script/protocol rather than a programming language?
Sorry but I think you've chosen the thing that will die first. Java is standard across platforms. Javascript and HTML5 are not (and will never be) standard across browsers.
C++ has been around for a long long time, and it is a horrible unclean mess (compared to any modern language like Java) that should have died 20 years ago.
Java will be around in *50* years time. HTML5 will be being replaced in 5 years time.
Why do you think NetHack is so terrible?
You can forget about new digital artifacts that are encrypted and 'protected' with DRM. Even if/when copyright expires, sometime in the 2200's, there's no indication that circumventing DRM will suddenly be legal. So any future geek thinking they can create a holodeck experience with an emulated PS3 to play games like they did in 2011: sorry.
Bravo!
http://insomnia.ac/reviews/pdp-1/spacewar/
They modified the binary to change the sizes of the ships.
Who cares if this is running in 50 years?
It's boring and repetitive.
PDP-1 SpaceWar was a milestone but the arcade version from Cinematronics was a lot more fun I thought....
I thought they ported Java onto Javascript/HTML5. You know, so there'd be an emulator of a java that runs emulator of PDP that runs a game.
And the whole thing is inside of a Virtual box, that is installed on top of an instance running inside of a cloud :)
Hyperom.com
I would say it's more a vote of confidence in the ability of Oracle to mismanage Java into obscurity rather than any real confidence in JavaScript's longevity.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
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Table-ized A.I.
It's boring if it doesn't mesh with your imagination, and it's repetitive only in the sense that no two games are ever alike.
On the other hand after you've ascended a few times, the easier class/race combos do tend to become routine, and I guess you can start to see the game as a series of easy steps:
Survive to level 7. Do the mines. Do Soko. Do medusa. Do the castle. Do the quest. Get the bell. Get the candlestick from Vlad. Get the book. Find the square. Get the amulet. Do the planes. Ascend.
But no matter how many times you've done this, it's still a challenge and always has some unpredictable elements. And you can *always* die on the next turn if you aren't careful.
If you don't enjoy this game or this kind of game, maybe don't play it. It is interesting that you'd go out of your way just to criticize it on a forum where maybe one person in ten has ever played the game...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
You know, after working on my own long term project (25 years between updates), which Spacewar over-shadows by a factor of two, I've realized that code I write now, no matter how trivial, may be read back a long time afterward. And since I'm a very sloppy programmer, this is is embarrassing on a large scale.
Oh well. http://sites.google.com/site/dannychouinard/Home/rdos3-2-coco2-enhanced-dos if you're curious.
They didn't say they wouldn't exist anymore, they stated that they might not be integrated in the browser anymore, and that's a fair statement given how fast browsers have evolved lately. And java doesn't come installed by default.
maybe it will in 15 years ;)
If you port the emulator to plain vanilla ANSI C, then it should still run in 100 years unchanged.
My thoughts exactly.
What makes C so great is that it was born the way it is and does not change. I have been programming in C for about 25 years now and the first programs I wrote still compile and run unchanged today.
Compare this with other languages: Fortran, PHP, Perl, Python, all have gone through major redesigns from version to version. Moving a program from version n to version (n+1) means redesign, retesting, endless debugging.
I have been programming a lot in Python recently, but if I have to port a program from Python 2 to Python 3 I'd rather port it to C instead. Just think of checking every single division in every formula I ever used to see if I have to change '/' to '//' or not.
I don't want to do all that work again when Python 4 comes.
URL shortening is unnecessary, this is not Twitter, fool.
Before my time, but i can imagine why they are so pined over: Emotions and ideas attached to those games.
Being the first of a kind, the possibilities those games presented were infinite, and captured imaginations.
*That* is why those games are so revered.
The Windows version now uninstalls old versions before updating. The real problem with installing Java is the security issues if you're running a browser that allows all scripts.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Here's a better idea for future-proofing software: end insane copyright laws.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Aahaha he nearly got me too. It's good to see the trolls trying new stuff, a little friendly competition is always fun.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I get it that nothing will be around forever, includig Java but javascript and html never stop changing! I bet the java version still works longer than the new one does.
And I thought "Adventure" was the first graphical game. Or was that the first home PC/Mac game?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
And, because it's in Java in a browser, it's running choppy on my 4 core i7 with 12gb of ram. Kudos, you've made a pdp game bloated and unplayable.
It is necessary if you want to try to hide a goatse redirect.
I don't see how it is ever successful though. I just assume any URL shortened link goes to goatse.
I would say it's more a vote of confidence in the ability of Oracle to mismanage Java into obscurity rather than any real confidence in JavaScript's longevity.
As bad as Oracle is going to screw the official Java pooch, the other branches will continue for years - there's simply too much invested in the platform to wholesale (or even halfsale) switch
antipaucity
You shouldn't compare it against Asteroids, you should compare it against Star Raiders for the 8-bit series Atari home computers. It was much, much more advanced. In fact, it's still kind of awesome.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
For science sake, it's starting to get ridiculous, all these very simple HTML5 games that get so much attention on Slashdot. In case you Slashdot editors didn't notice, there are already plenty of HTML5 games out there that can easily compete with the best Flash games.
http://www.playtankworld.com/
http://websnooker.com/
http://www.redshootinghood.info/
http://www.pirateslovedaisies.com/
http://wordsquared.com/
http://www.effectgames.com/effect/games/crystalgalaxy/
http://agent8ball.com/
Please, STOP pretending like it's a big deal to port something to Javascript/HTML5.
It's not.
Plenty more games:
http://www.html5-games.org/
http://html5games.com/
Ok, so they can do space invaders in my browser in plain html. What can I do to block browser spam? One thing nice with flash is that it's easy to block. What about html5?
At least they tried, and you gotta admit that playing in a browser is way cooler than a VT-52 or VT-100 terminal (kind of miss the turbine like fan noise though, kind of like you were in a ship. I remember a couple of monitors without fans that we had in college, had to remove the cover slightly and have a fan blowing on them to keep cool (tektronix I think).
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
I'm just waiting for someone to port the DEC Lunar Lander for the (PDP-11 based) GT-40 graphics system...the one where when you land at the target site, the astronaut jumps out of the lander and runs over to the McDonald's, then runs back to the lander and takes off.
I know there are PDP-11 emulators out there, but I don't know of GT-40 emulator.