The article says this was for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition, and it appears that a high-schooler Donald Knuth got to see one such machine in Chicago (po

The article says this was for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition, and it appears that a high-schooler Donald Knuth got to see one such machine in Chicago (possibly on a school trip; he grew up in Milwaukee) long before his first encounter with a computer, as documented in TAOCP vol 4A: > This setup is based on an exhibit from the early 1950s at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, where the author was first introduced to the magic of switching circuits. The machine in Chicago, designed by researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories, allowed me to go first; yet I soon discovered there was no way to defeat it. Therefore I decided to move as stupidly as possible, hoping that the designers had not anticipated such bizarre behavior. In fact I allowed the machine to reach a position where it had two winning moves; and it seized both of them! Moving twice is of course a flagrant violation of the rules, so I had won a moral victory even though the machine had announced that I had lost. Later, a program for playing tic-tac-toe was one of the first programs he wrote, after he entered college and discovered computers. (He also quotes Charles Babbage! https://research.swtch.com/tictactoe https://research.swtch.com/tictactoe)