SPACEWAR
<games> A space-combat simulation game for the PDP-1 written in 1960-61 by Steve Russell, an employee at
MIT.
SPACEWAR was inspired by E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" books, in which two spaceships duel around a central sun, shooting torpedoes at each other and jumping through hyperspace.
MIT were wondering what to do with a new vector video display so Steve wrote the world's first video game.
Steve now lives in California and still writes software for HC12 {emulators}.
SPACEWAR aficionados formed the core of the early hacker culture at
MIT.
Nine years later, a descendant of the game motivated Ken Thompson to build, in his spare time on a scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that became Unix. Less than nine years after that, SPACEWAR was commercialised as one of the first video games; descendants are still
feeping in video arcades everywhere.
["SPACEWAR" or "Space Travel"?]
[
Jargon File]
