[game_preservation] National Game Registry Blog

[Devin Monnens]

>

>

> Here's another source as well -

>

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

>

>

Thanks, I'll take a look through that one.



> I can ask over on the vintage computing mailing list.  May actually

> find someone willing to scan full copies.

>


Yeah, if someone had copies of those, those are the pages I really need!
Incidentally, because these were distributed through DECUS, it should be
possible to find all the software in the catalogue and get it running.



>

> 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.

>


Yeah, PLATO is really interesting because it is one of these threads that
wasn't directly connected to the others. From what I see, there is a lot of
influence across platforms (arcade to home console and later home console to
handheld; home console to PC and PC to console) but ultimately there's the
console/arcade branch and the PC branch (which includes mainframe
computers). Text adventures for example don't seem to have had a big impact
on console games (their successors, the graphics adventures, did however).
And even in the PC branch, there are different things going on that weren't
necessarily having a direct impact (PLATO was inside PARC). It's a pretty
tangled web...

So when I start talking about memes developing, it's very interesting
because Spacewar is this powerful meme, but it doesn't really start
expanding beyond Spacewar modifications until 1971 with Computer Space.
However, a lot of those guys who started working on computers in the 60s
eventually went on to develop interactive software and games; Spacewar got
them into programming and showed them what they could do with a computer (so
it's more of a long tail or indirect connection rather than a 'Spacewar
begat Combat' type of story. Brown Box on the other hand is stuck in a lab
and doesn't begin influencing other things until it is released as the
Odyssey (and promptly copied by Bushnell with great success).




> 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.

>


I'd say the PDP-8 was purchased by at least a few private high schools. The
DECUS software catalogs tell you where the software was made, too. Lunar
Lander comes out of Lexington High School (MA), Apollo II from Wayland High
School (MA), and then there's a game of NIM produced out of Highland Park
High School in IL (and these are just a few games distributed through
DECUS). These are all produced in FOCAL, which was another easy-to-use OS
(comparatively with assembly, of course).


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).

>


Yeah, I loved to read about Logo in Dealers of Lightning - we used that in
middle school. The goal was to get a cat animated and then walk off a wall -
I never got to see the program run though. PD, RT 90, FD 50!

A


> 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.

>


Hmm. Well, why are so many kids using Flash? There's a bunch of stuff on
Newgrounds. I figured Actionscript was about as complex as learning BASIC,
only it's a lot faster to get the visual output and jump into debugging.



>

>

>

> 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.

>


Now didn't Bushnell design Gotcha? Or was that another designer? Out of all
the games I saw at the time, that looked like the only one he'd made outside
of Computer Space. While it was a new type of game, I can't exactly say it
looked like it was any good...

RE: Dabney - Baer and Steve Kent both seem to talk about Bushnell building
Computer Space. So Baer was just going off of Bushnell's story in Kent's
book?

Also, regarding running a company, I think you'd have some doubts just from
hearing the stories about Bushnell hiring bums off the street to assemble
computer parts! This and the jacuzzi board meetings. The way Kent describes
it, he kind of glorifies the story, when in reality it's just complete and
total disaster (not to say it isn't possible to have successful jacuzzi
board meetings, but these are really just a bunch of kids who suddenly have
more money than they have ever seen before or know what to do with - and
don't know a lick about business or money management).

-- 
Devin Monnens
www.deserthat.com

The sleep of Reason produces monsters.
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