[game_preservation] National Game Registry Blog

[Martin Goldberg]

Devin -

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Devin Monnens <dmonnens at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm intending to head to the university and pick up that book today on the

> TIX-0.


Here's another source as well -

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/tx-0/TX-0_history_1984.txt



> I also located a paper trail through the old DECUS Catalogs for PDP

> software, which contain descriptions of what the software is as well as who

> made it. If you can find the original program documents, they also list the

> date of publication, which is quite useful (although I am feeling a little

> gipped that most of the information is already on Wikipedia...).


I can ask over on the vintage computing mailing list.  May actually
find someone willing to scan full copies.



> Otherwise, what you've just stated is that history chooses to remember what

> it wants to remember, and this 'wanting to remember' is usually because

> somebody has a vested interest in getting people to remember it (fame,

> money, lawsuits). I think that's as much an interesting part of the story as

> what was actually there.


Well, history chooses what it wants to remember but also what is
accessible to remember.  How much material was actually done behind
closed doors (grad school and research projects in the 50's and 60's)
and simply lost to time?  It's really up to the people involved with
it originally to come out with it - like what's happened with PLATO as
of late.  I'm very interested in some of the games that were written
by kids in Alan Kay's and Adele Goldberg's early smalltalk days at
Xerox as well during the mid 70's.  AFAIK, those are the first
mouse/gui based games.




> The other things I'd add to your description is the greater ease of

> availability of computer hardware, making the PDP-8 affordable to high

> schools,


Most high schools in the late 60's through mid 70's that had the
foresight and funding to offer computer courses, usually did time
sharing.  I'm not aware of PDP's being bought by high schools until
the late 70's, and those were usually private schools or systems
bought for an entire city school system that once again would use
timesharing access.  MPS (Milwaukee Public School Systems) actually
had a PDP-11 with terminal access at all the MPS schools in the
county, from the late 70's in to the early 90's.



>as well as the presence of powerful, easy-to-learn programming

> languages such as FOCAL (which Lunar Lander was written in) and BASIC, which

> was ported to PDP-8 in 1971 by Richard Burgess (designer of the graphical

> Lunar Lander). BASIC had its mainstream moment in 1973 with David Ahl's 101

> BASIC Computer Games, many of which were ported from FOCAL.


Don't forget Logo, which was also at one time a dominant childrens
educational research language.  Anything in that environment has game
development related to it as well.  As with Alan's Smalltalk (which
has a direct link to Papert).

And with regards to mainstream moments, remember you have to put that
in context.  Dave's market at that time was other computer
professionals.  BASIC wasn't elevated to it's remembered status until
a) Home computing started leaving it's hobbyist roots becoming more of
a mainstream consumer object, and b) BASIC interpreters were tied in
to the operating systems of said consumer computers.  Both of those
started taking place in the late 70's.


> -Devin

> This combination of cheap with ease of use (relative) as well as exposure of

> the hardware to high school kids is what encouraged many to get into

> programming. Today, the equivalent of BASIC seems to be Flash, which has the

> advantage of being more visual.



I'm not sure if that's the case, I'm actually an active Flash
developer (in fact just did a contract with the current Atari Inc.
porting several game properties to a cross platform game environment).
 If you're talking about no brainer timeline movie style coding, I
could possibly see some correlation.  However, real flash coding is
done through pure Actionscript, which is not any more accessible
structure wise than C, C++, Javascript, etc.




>

> Regarding Steven Kent, most of my impressions came from the way the people

> told their story. It was pretty easy to tell when Nolan Bushnell was just

> talking, and being able to recognize that was important.


LOL, just about everything he says is "just talking".


> Bushnell, after

> all, had his training as a carny, getting people to play carnival games.


Yes, his skill in all of this was being able to see the commercial
potential in other people's ideas and work (whether his own employees
or not), and make the sale on it.  In a way a rougher proto Steve
Jobs.  Where he differed from Steve (and continues to) is he didn't
stop there and took credit for said work as well.

Likewise, his skill stopped at the sale.  Actually running the company
and keeping it going is not his strong suit - any company he's ever
touched has gone bankrupt.  Atari was even close to it several times
over during his tenure until he finally manged to sell it out to
Warner in '76.


> That's a fantastic skill that translates well into selling arcade machines

> and getting people to play them (Pong and Chuck E Cheez being the triumphs).


Pong was an accident, and nowhere near the personal triumph he tries
to make it as.  At the time they were hoping at best to sell it off as
part of an engineering contract they had with Bally/Midway (they were
doing pinball playfield design besides this "side project").  Where
his strength shined?  Convincing Midway they didn't want Pong when
just before he had been trying to sell them on how great it was.
That's pure carny.




> However, on the design side, I don't really see him making many original

> things - most of the games he's known for had already been built by somebody

> else and he just found a way of making money off of them.


Everything he's taken credit for was actually designed and built by
someone else, including other engineers at Atari.  The only game I'm
aware of that he had any hands on with in the design process was
Computer Space, and even then that was just finishing up the layout on
circuitry that Ted Dabney designed.  Otherwise, everything at Atari
was done by Al Alcorn, Steve Bristow, the guys at Cyan, etc.


Marty