Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 35)

Trigger Happy
37
in fact, because the owner of any patent on oscilloscope
tennis would have been the United States government.
And so—as if, eons ago in the primordial soup, one
helix of a DNA molecule had winked into existence
without the other, and therefore didn’t catch on—the
videogame spark fizzled and went out. If that
oscilloscope could have spoken, it might have said:
“There is one who comes after me.”
And so there was. Three years later a big package
arrived at MIT. Until this point, computers had mostly
been tedious, mute hulks that usually had to be
programmed with ticker-tape or punchcards, and were
strictly for esoteric mathematical applications. But the
new-fangled circular, dedicated VDU screen and
keyboard of the PDP-1 tempted programmer Steve
Russell and his friends
5
to indulge in a little creative
slacking. They began to fiddle around with the
interface, writing little bits of code that caused the
display to respond in real time to physical input. A
virtual typewriter and calculator. A model of the night
sky. And then . . . Spacewar.
_________________
5 I refer only to Russell by name for reasons of ease and fluency. These are
the full credits. Conception: Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell and Wayne
Wiitanen. Programming: Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards and
Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner and Robert A.
Saunders.