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#### DEC PDP-1

Currently emulates one image - SPACEWAR!

History and Trivia :
Note : I borrowed most details from an article by J. M. Graetz called "The origin of Spacewar".
This article can be found at <http://www.enteract.com/~enf/lore/spacewar/spacewar.html>,
and was originally printed in the August 1981 issue of Creative Computing magazine.
Early computers, particularly mainframes, were Complex Devices to be operated by Competent People
helped by dozens of Servants who typed the Data and fed it to the Computer. Outsiders who visited to
see computers were often disappointed : there was nothing to SEE, these machine were just crunching
numbers on paper tape, and printing further numbers on another tape.
In the fall of 1961, Digital started production of its PDP-1. This machine was quite friendly
for its time : it was compact enough to be located in the corner of a room, and you did not need to
know hundreds of pages of procedures to switch it on and off. Additionally, it supported
an optional CRT screen, which was a rare device at this time.
PDP-1 may be regarded as one of the first minicomputers, although it did not include and integrated
circuit (which hardly existed at this time). It may be regarded as one of the first personal
computers, too, since one person was quite enough to run and operate it (although, needless to say,
its price was not the kind of price you would expect from a personal computer today).
One of the first PDP-1 was installed at the MIT. Needless to say, the various hackers of the MIT
immediately felt attracted to this machine. And this is how the adventure of Spacewar! began.
Let it be clear that there were already computers games : a game of Tic-Tac-Toe and simple games
of cards existed as early as in 1955. Attempts at implementing a game of chess can be traced back
to the early 1950s.
Yet, the use of CRT enabled the development of a new breed of real-time, action games. Several
real-time, funny demonstration programs had already written for earlier machines : the Bouncing
Ball, in which a ball fell from the top of the screen and bounced ; the Mouse in the Maze which
enabled the user to draw a maze and place a piece of cheese with a lightpen : a mouse would enter
the maze, search the cheese and eat it. However, these were no "real" video games as far as there
was no real-time action.
There were three fellows who came with the initial idea of Spacewar! : Wayne Witanen,
J. Martin Graetz, and Stephen R. (Slug) Russell. They were about 25-year-old. They wanted to devise
an attractive demonstration program, which used as much the computer resources as possible,
so they came out with the idea of a video game. The basic idea was to have two players fly
a spaceship and fight each other with torpedoes. It was somewhat inspired by Science-Fiction
novels and films these fellow had read and watched. Soon, most hackers at the MIT knew about
this project.
Since there was no development tool, they had to wait for a text editor, assembler and debugger
to be ported to PDP-1.
Eventually, in January 1962, the development started, and by February, a crude version of the game
was already running. The development continued, as they added a star background, a big central star
with the associated gravitic effects, and an hyperspace jump device. The game was essentially
complete by the end of April 1962, so that it was shown MIT's annual Science Open House in May.
Needless to say, it was a hit. Soon, program tapes with Spacewar! were circulating in the
universities around the USA.

What else can we say ? These people thought that computer games would make computers more popular :
the least we can say is they were right. Spacewar! is the first video game, and as such it is
the ancestor of thousands of arcade, console or computer games with hairy aliens, missiles,
and action. Although it took about 10 additional years for video games to go commercial,
we can say that it all started with Spacewar!.

created on Tue Jan 01 12:56:01 2002