NYTimes: A Long Time Ago, in a Lab Far Away...

From: Curt Vendel <curt_at_atarimuseum.com>
Date: Thu Feb 28 11:58:13 2002

>From New York Times
A Long Time Ago, in a Lab Far Away . . .
 . .
By JOHN MARKOFF
STEVE RUSSELL sat in a darkened movie theater recently watching the army
of credits roll by after a computer-animated Hollywood blockbuster.
There was a time, he recalls thinking, when a cutting-edge
computer-generated fantasy could be conceived, written, tested and
packaged for distribution in a few months, just through the part-time
efforts of a small group of friends.
To be precise, that time was 40 years ago this month, with the result
played out on a computer screen at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Two tiny spaceships were locked in mortal combat as they
swung around a simulated sun. The duel was called Spacewar.
Designed by a small group of pioneering computer programmers led by Mr.
Russell, it was the world's first video game. It was an early hint that a
powerful new entertainment medium was on the horizon, one that would
ultimately bond Silicon Valley to Hollywood. Perhaps most significantly,
Spacewar demonstrated that sheer fun would become a driving force
underlying progress in computing technology.
Over the years it played a crucial role in inspiring the creators of
companies like Apple and Atari, said Henry Lowood, the curator of
Stanford University's collections on the history of science and
technology. "It set off a chain of events that created companies and led
to a whole idea of what Silicon Valley would be," he said.
It certainly established at least one stereotype of the high-tech age: a
few frenzied geeks in their 20's obsessively laboring after-hours in a
computer lab on a creation that combined play and programming.
But the premise of Spacewar seemed to reflect the specific preoccupations
of that time in the early 1960's. It was completed the same month that
John Glenn made the nation's first manned orbital flight. And the cold
war was at its most perilous stage: the Berlin Wall had just gone up, and
the Cuban missile crisis would soon follow.
Now those 20-something geeks are near or past retirement age. Unlike more
recent generations of computing and Internet pioneers, Spacewar's six
programmers did not find fortune from their invention. Their achievement
has made them legends only within the fraternity of the world's original
computer hackers.
"The only money I made from Spacewar was as a consultant for lawsuits in
the video game industry in the 1970's," said one of the game's creators,
Alan Kotok. "I have all this fame, but it's in a very narrow circle."
Mr. Kotok and the other members of the original team all remained part of
that circle, pursuing careers in computers. Several became hardware
designers, several went on to write software, one became a professor and
one joined the secretive National Security Agency.
Their early creation is now a museum piece - literally - reflecting the
software principles and programming culture of its era.
Designed to take advantage of the Digital Equipment Corporation's
brand-new PDP-1 minicomputer and the advent of a cathode- ray display
screen, Spacewar was written before software was patented, and the
original programmers' instructions were shared and freely modified by a
small group of software designers.
Introduced some months later at Decus, which was then a Digital Equipment
Corporation users' group, Spacewar immediately attracted a cult
following. It became so addictive that at the M.I.T. laboratory where it
was designed, play was soon banned except during lunchtime and after
working hours.
Spacewar was the original "twitch" game, requiring lightning reflexes.
Each player used keyboard controls or a joystick to maneuver a tiny ship
capable of firing a stream of torpedoes as it slid across the screen.
Before long a "hyperspace" option was added so that a player could make
his ship vanish and reappear at a random place on the screen, avoiding
certain death.
Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, saw the game played by
young hackers at Stanford's computer center in the early 1960's. "They
were absolutely out of their bodies, like they were in another world," he
recalled. "Once you experienced this, nothing else would do. This was
beyond psychedelics. It impressed the heck out of me."
In fact, though they came to be known for their hours in front of a
computer screen, the game's creators initially met through M.I.T.'s
hiking club. The group was led by Mr. Russell, known as Slug, and Martin
Graetz, known as Shag, both devoted science fiction fans who wondered why
better science fiction movies weren't being made.
Another contributor, Peter Samson, then a 21-year old undergraduate
studying engineering at M.I.T., added a crucial component called
"expensive planetarium," an accurate scrolling star field that portrayed
the night sky over Cambridge.
Spacewar began in January 1962 as a simple object-in-motion program, Mr.
Graetz said, and by February had become a rudimentary game, including two
ships, a supply of fuel and a store of torpedoes.
Both Mr. Russell and Mr. Kotok said it was never their intent to create a
new digital entertainment medium. After the new Digital Equipment
computer with its display was installed in late 1961, the group simply
began thinking about what might be the best way to demonstrate the power
of the new machine and hit on the idea of a graphical simulation of a
battle between two spaceships.
Spacewar was an obvious choice, but no one in the group sensed what
impact the program would have over a decade and a half of popularity.
"One of the things that drew me to the project was that here you could do
interaction and painless education and demonstration, and it was
engaging," said Mr. Russell, who was 24 at the time.
After agreeing to be the project's lead programmer, Mr. Russell said he
procrastinated until Mr. Kotok drove to Digital Equipment and returned
with a paper tape containing necessary math subroutines. Mr. Russell set
to work by entering code on a Flexowriter, a typewriter device that
translated commands into holes punched in paper tape.
Perhaps the most impressive feat was that Spacewar worked at all. The
processor for the PDP-1 minicomputer ran at about 100,000 instructions
per second, snail-like in comparison with the speed of today's fastest
microprocessors, which exceed two billion instructions per second.
Moreover, the computer, which was built from discrete transistors, had to
make the most of about nine kilobytes of random access memory,
unfathomably little compared with the RAM of today's desktop machines,
which can boast as much as one gigabyte - a million kilobytes.
"Each new game tends to push the state of the art," said Richard F.
Rashid, who heads research at Microsoft. "They stretch the machine as far
as you can stretch it."
Moreover, the Spacewar program became an integral part of a spreading
hackers' culture as it was carried on punched paper tape to the dozen or
so research centers and universities that had the early PDP minicomputer.
"What I was most pleased with was that a number of people saw Spacewar
and went off and said, `I can do that' and then implemented their version
on another system without looking at the source code," Mr. Russell said.
One of those inspired by the game was Nolan Bushnell, who went on to
found the Atari Corporation. He was first seized by the idea of
commercializing video game technology when he came across a version of
Spacewar while a graduate student in engineering at the University of
Utah.
In 1971 he introduced an arcade version of Spacewar called Computer
Space, which was a commercial flop. Mr. Bushnell kept at it, though, and
soon introduced the more successful Pong.
The game also made an impression on two other entrepreneurs-to-be, Steve
Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer, who as teenagers
would ride their bicycles to Stanford's artificial intelligence lab,
where the game was frequently played.
But credit for the first commercial video game actually goes to Bill
Pitts, a Stanford graduate who with a high school friend, Hugh Tuck,
installed Galaxy Game, a coin- operated version of Spacewar, in
Stanford's student union several months before Mr. Bushnell introduced
Computer Space.
It became a huge hit and was played by students for more than six years,
allowing Mr. Pitts to pay back the $60,000 he had invested in the
project. Today his version of Spacewar is in the collection of the
Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View, Calif.
For his part, Mr. Russell, now 64, is only an occasional gamer. He visits
arcades to keep up with video game technology and spends a couple of
hours a month playing at his own PC. But his tastes, like the times, have
changed. Now it is solitaire, not spaceships, that keeps him coming back.
Received on Thu Feb 28 2002 - 11:58:13 GMT