Trigger Happy
in fact, because the owner of any patent on oscilloscope tennis would have been the United States government. And so—as if, eons ago in the primordial soup, one helix of a DNA molecule had winked into existence without the other, and therefore didn’t catch on—the videogame spark fizzled and went out. If that oscilloscope could have spoken, it might have said: “There is one who comes after me.”
And so there was. Three years later a big package arrived at MIT. Until this point, computers had mostly been tedious, mute hulks that usually had to be programmed with ticker-tape or punchcards, and were strictly for esoteric mathematical applications. But the new-fangled circular, dedicated VDU screen and keyboard of the PDP-1 tempted programmer Steve Russell and his friends5 to indulge in a little creative slacking. They began to fiddle around with the interface, writing little bits of code that caused the display to respond in real time to physical input. A virtual typewriter and calculator. A model of the night sky. And then . . . Spacewar.
_________________
5 I refer only to Russell by name for reasons of ease and fluency. These are the full credits. Conception: Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell and Wayne Wiitanen. Programming: Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards and Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner and Robert A. Saunders.
37
