16 Aug
1998
16 Aug
'98
8:19 p.m.
On Sun, 16 Aug 1998, Sam Ismail wrote:
But the Nicolet wasn't MPU-based, was it? There are plenty of games that
date back to the 60's (like the ever popular SpaceWar on the PDP-1), 50's
(Nim, tac-tac-toe, checkers), and I'd be astounded if there weren't
computer games in the 40's as well.
Perhaps the most surprising is that the first pong-like arcade game was
done in 1958:
<<
As far as I know, the first arcade game was created in 1958, by Willy
Higinbotham at the Dept. of Nuclear Energy in the US. He wanted to make
tours of the lab a bit more exciting, and so he made an analog computer
with two paddles and an oscilloscope display that let two players play a
sort of two-dimensional tennis (you got a side-view of the court).
To be more precise, the blueprints were made Oct. 1958, a date which has
been verified.
(source: _Creative_Computing_ October 1982, p. 190)
Somewhat
related point: the Nicolet monster I brought home a couple months
back came with tons of paper tape software, and had a considerable number
of games tapes. This for a computer that was intended strictly for
scientific use :)
And my point was to mention that the games are from the 1972-1976
timeframe. >
Hey, John H.: any relation to Willy?
-- Doug