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It's interesting how a cultural artifact belonging to a museum is better preserved in software. It is unlikely anyone will put the hardware in a museum, let alo
by hosh 14y ago
It's interesting how a cultural artifact belonging to a museum is better preserved in software. It is unlikely anyone will put the hardware in a museum, let alone getting it operational and allowing someone to play with the exhibit.
Many of the better museum exhibits tend to tie in things to people's daily life in the present. I searched an anachronistic term, "game of thrones."
- WalterGR 14y agoThe Computer History Museum in Mountain View spent 2 years fully restoring a DEC PDP-1. You can go see it - I don't even think you need to pay for admission to the museum. During the presentation, they load Spacewar! from paper tape, and two members of the audience can battle it out. It's pretty amazing to play one of the first graphical computer games ever, on a computer first released 50 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!#Spacewar.21_today http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!#Spacewar.21_today
- brunooo 14y agoThere's actually an PDP-1 easter egg in this one, just search for space and it takes you to a HTML5 version of the original screen / vector graphics.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ampersandy 14y agoFor everyone else reading this, if you live in the bay area, you should seriously visit the Computer History Museum. It's absolutely fascinating to see how far we've come in such a short time. I had assumed I wouldn't get much value from the trip, but I was blown away.
- MaysonL 14y agoGolly, that brings back memories [played Spacewar fairly often back in the '70s, albeit on PDP-15 clones].
- microtherion 14y agoI saw that presentation last week. What I found even more awesome than the presentation itself was that the presenters were Peter Samson and Steve Russell, the two MIT hackers who had written the software originally.
- jgw 14y agoSteve Russell, as in "I actually made Lisp a programming language rather than just a mathematical notation" Steve Russell? Also, I absolutely love this demo. It's really a work of art. It really puts to shame my humble plan to finish my Osborne 1 emulator and put it on the web.
- microtherion 14y agoYes, that would be the guy, although in the context of the PDP-1, he was only talking about Spacewar. Samson was demonstrating four part audio synthesis of Bach organ pieces. It turns out that during the restoration project, they came across some of his original data tapes encoding the music, but the software was long lost, so he recreated his hack 50 years later, with the additional constraint that he had to reconstruct his data format and remain compatible with it!
- gruseom 14y agoWow! Is that online?
- masswerk 14y agoSpeaking of Steve Russell: Meanwhile I've received a quite flattering mail from S.R. on the authenticity of the feel of the version of "Spacewar!" associated to the page. http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar
- kerneis 14y agoIf you live in the UK, the Nation Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park (of Alan Turing fame) is also totally amazing. http://www.tnmoc.org/ http://www.tnmoc.org/