[Gamasutra is proud to be partnering with the IGDA's Preservation SIG to present detailed official histories of each of the first ten games voted into the Digital Game Canon. The Canon "provides a starting-point for the difficult task of preserving this history inspired by the role of that the U.S. National Film Registry has played for film culture and history", and Matteo Bittanti, Christopher Grant, Henry Lowood, Steve Meretzky, and Warren Spector revealed the inaugural honorees at GDC 2007. The first history to appear is J. Fleming's history of arguably the first ever video game, 1961 mainframe-based shooter Spacewar.]
Harvard mathematician Howard Aiken
expressed the opinion in 1948 that no commercial market for computers
would ever develop and that only a handful of the complex and
delicate machines would be needed by the United States.
However, even
as he spoke, researchers were dreaming up new ways to refine the
hardware, making it faster, smaller, and more reliable. Across the
nation’s universities students were ignoring the pronouncements of
prophets on high, eager to get their hands on the devices, to take
them apart and reassemble them in new and more interesting ways, to
make them personal playgrounds for the imagination.
The
Hingham Institute Study Group on Space Warfare
In 1961 a small
group of friends gathered regularly at a small apartment on Hingham
Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Steve “Slug” Russell, J.M.
“Shag” Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen shared a common interest in the
nascent field of computing, having worked together at Harvard’s
Litauer Statistical Laboratory where they ran computations on the IBM
704.
“Wayne and I were roommates and we’d constantly get
together at our place. We’d go to see these awful Japanese science
fiction movies, the Godzilla movies and American grade-z science
fiction,” Graetz remembered.
Along with trashy movies, the group
had a special fondness for the pulp fiction of E.E. “Doc” Smith.
“We wondered why don’t they pick up on Smith’s novels? They’re
terribly written but naturals for the movies,” Graetz said. “You
have to let your mind relax a good deal in order to get with it, but
he sometimes had some really compelling visual images.”
Russell
and Graetz soon left Litauer for the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology where they would get a chance to work with the TX-0
computer installed at the university. “I wound up working for an
old friend of mine, Jack Dennis,” Graetz said. “He was the
faculty advisor for the Science Fiction Club and also the faculty
advisor for the Model Railroad Club. And he was in charge of the
Research Lab for Electronics.”
Digital
Throughout the
fifties MIT was a breeding ground for computer innovation. In 1951,
after eight years of development, the university unveiled Whirlwind,
a breakthrough machine that was fast enough to execute tasks in real
time rather than in batches. Based on Whirlwind’s design, MIT
proceeded to create a smaller, faster version called the TX-0 in
1956, which used more reliable transistors rather than vacuum
tubes.
Engineers Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson left MIT’s
Lincoln Laboratory in 1957 to start their own computer manufacturing
business called the Digital Equipment Corporation. “Its original
stated purpose was to build computer modules,” Graetz said. “The
idea was to build calculating devices and research equipment. It was
not formed explicitly to build a computer. That, it was felt, would
frighten off investors.”

Digital’s first commercial
computer was the Programmed Data Processor-1 (PDP-1). Introduced in
1960, the machine was a solid-state, general-purpose computer with
the ability to make 100,000 calculations per second. It came with a
number of peripheral options including a paper tape punch and reader,
typewriter, and a cathode ray tube that could accept input from a
light pen.
“The PDP-1 grew out of the same research that
produced the TX-0 and its architecture was very similar. When Ken
Olsen and Harlan Anderson and the others decided to go into business
for themselves, that whole approach informed the PDP-1.” Graetz
said. Priced at $120,000, only fifty of the computers were produced
and in the fall of 1961 the company donated a PDP-1 system to
MIT.
“One application being planned for PDP is dynamic
simulation of a weapons system…” - from a DEC ad in
Datamation magazine, November/December 1959.
As advanced as
the TX-0 was, the new PDP-1 pointed the way forward to one-on-one
interaction with computers. It was in its own way, one of the first
“personal” computers. As Graetz explained, “The TX-0
filled a room with banks of power supplies.