Talk:Baseball (1971 video game)

Untitled
My apologies to the author of the PDP game for this sudden interjection. If I knew better how to interact with this system, I would have contacted you first.

In any event, I will make a change to the added text today citing a web reference for t he 1960 game. The final markup of this page is yours to do. (1-19-2009) I put the paper on Wilki Commons under the name "1620 baseball.pdf" but am so far unable to place a link to it here.Burgeson (talk) 19:58, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

John Burgeson —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.30.186.61 (talk) 20:58, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

1-16-2009 -- from John Burgeson

I added the following text to a spot early in the article.

"The game referenced above is not the earliest. That honor belongs to a game called "BBC," programmed on the IBM 1620 in late 1960. The earliest reference to it cites the date of first operation as Jan 3, 1961, and by the summer of 1961 a copy was available in the IBM 1620 "public domain" computer library. In the fall of 1961, Rege Cordic, a KDKA radio executive, heard of it and produced a short running radio show based on its output.

BBC was coded for a 20,000 position 1620 computer. A "position" was less than a byte, it could hold only numbers and a few special characters. The entire game, including room for stats on 90 players, fit within this memory. A copy of the game exists in the 1620 computer museum.

I shall shortly have a copy of the original paper and a sample game available on a web site."

I can be contacted at BURGYTWO@JUNO.COM if anyone wants to discuss it.

John Burgeson —Preceding unsigned comment added by Burgeson (talk • contribs) 15:41, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Move
PLEASE do not move articles without discussing it first on the talk page -- the movie from Baseball (computer game) to Baseball (1971 computer game) broke a ton of links, and the yet-unwritten article on Baseball (NES) should actually be referenced from the existing disambiguation page Baseball (video game).

To fix all this, we need to:
 * Add a reference to Baseball (NES) to Baseball (video game)
 * The author who did the undiscussed move should write the Baseball (NES) article he/she linked to
 * Move Baseball (1971 computer game) back to Baseball (computer game) so the wikilinks all realign (done)
 * I have already moved Baseball (computer game) to Baseball (game), so the undiscussed disambiguation page created by the editor does in fact have a spot. That new page could then refer to both Baseball (computer game) for home computer games and Baseball (video game) for console and coin-op games. Coll7 22:21, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Dubious
The evidence seems to be mounting against this game having been the first baseball computer game. First, the above comment by Burgeson, which is unfortunately unsourced so far. Secondly, there seems to be a game even on the PDP, including source code, from 1965: http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/decuslib10-01/01/43,50110/basbal.dem.html -- Nczempin (talk) 00:32, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Defining "Games"
The pdp-10 version is definitely not a game--if you read the code, you can see that the user does not input anything except a random number at the beginning, after which the description of the game is generated.

Burgeson's program might be a game, depending on your definition. Your only decision is to select players for your team; then the program generates the description as above.

But check this out, apparently from 1967: http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/decuslib10-01/01/43,50110/baseba.gam.html

Given this evidence, I'm going to change the wiki page slightly.

Here's a link to Burgeson's documentation:



-- Theyoder (talk) 05:55, 15 June 2011 (UTC)