The
History of Computer Games
- Spacewar
Spacewar was conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen. The inventors of Spacewar have been influenced by a sci-fi author called E. E. Smith. Smith wrote the novel "Skylark of Space" which was a favourite book of the Spacewar programming team. It was first realized on the PDP-1 in 1962 by Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, and Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner, and Robert A Saunders. The Spacewar applet below is public domain. The applet simulates what would originally have happened on a PDP-1 monitor.
"This is the original version! Martin Graetz provided us with a printed version of the source. We typed in in again - it was about 40 pages long - and re-assembled it with a PDP-1 assembler written in PERL. The resulting binary runs on a PDP-1 emulator written as a Java applet. The code is extremely faithful to the original. There are only two changes. 1)The spaceships have been made bigger and 2) The overall timing has been special cased to deal with varying machine speeds."
(Barry Silverman, Brian Silverman, Vadim Gerasimov)
Use the "a", "s", "d", "f" keys to control one of the spaceships. The "k", "l", ";", "'" keys control the other. The controls are spin one way, spin the other, thrust, and fire.