Talk:Spacewar!/Archive 1

Basis for naming of "Expensive" programs
I reverted a change that asserted that the naming of "Expensive" programs was the cost of PDP-1 computer time. The naming was based on the cost of the computer, according to Steve Russell and Peter Samson. The idea was that people asked what the point was of making a $120,000 computer (think of about $1,000,000 today) to act as a typewriter or calculator. At the time there wasn't any direct accounting for PDP-1 computer time in terms of dollars, though that may have appeared later on the PDP-1 timesharing systems. The latter, however, are not related to Spacewar!. --Brouhaha 23:35, 1 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, I clarified it to time because isn't that the way use of computers was accounted as in that era? Also, I had bene given to understand that the PDP-1 was relatively inexpensive, and so the staggering waste wouldn't be the machine itself but the time. --maru  (talk)  contribs 03:34, 2 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Some were, the PDP-1 generally was not. It was "relatively" inexpensive, but still cost more than a fleet of twenty automobiles.  However, the systems running the "Expensive" programs were being used as single-user machines.  In the academic environment, users simply signed up for time to use the machine, but the time was not billed.  Anyhow, as I said, the origin of the naming of the "Expensive" programs has been explained by Steve Russell and Peter Samson, who were there at the time.  There's no need to guess at what "expensive" meant.  --Brouhaha 23:07, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Authors, Planetarium, Gravity, Hyperspace
Hi, new user here. I started a page for Peter Samson and his program TJ-2 which led to a page for Expensive Planetarium. Do you, the authors of this article on Spacewar!, think the planetarium bits belong here instead? If you do, I am happy to move them. There is not a whole lot more than you have already. If you do think it belongs here then maybe you would look also at the Spacewar! section in Alan Kotok. Dan Edwards and Martin Graetz also contributed major features to the game: Edwards added the central star, i.e., gravity, and Graetz added hyperspace. Kotok and Saunders built the game controllers. Also, in the Readme there are more people credited with conceiving the game. Thanks for any thoughts. I looked a little and didn't find a Wikipedia rule or guideline for this situation (there may very well be one). --Susanlesch 23:35, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Modern games don't need to be listed in the article
I'm inclined to seriously edit down the mention of Star Control; it's sufficiently different than Spacewar! that it doesn't merit much discussion here. At most, it should be part of a brief list of "other games inspired by Spacewar!". --Brouhaha 02:19, 2 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I concur. I edited it down.  On an unrelated note, we should probably italicize all of these game names.  Nandesuka 02:25, 2 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I also agree, and would quetion the tic-tac-toe entry.


 * Noughts and crosses is reasonably relevant in that it is one of only a handful of video games predating Spacewar. Since many people mistakenly believe that Spacewar (or Pong) was the first video game, I think it makes sense to mention a few earlier ones.
 * As you'll see below (later section contents moved up here), I've suggested that no modern games be specifically listed here. --Brouhaha 05:25, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Modern games based on Spacewar! are too numerous to count, and individual games don't merit listing here. If someone feels strongly about it, they can create a List of video games inspired by Spacewar!. I removed this recently added material on an AT&T Plan 9 version:

When AT&T released the Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs operating system to universities 1992 it included a modern version of spacewar. Spacewar was removed from the public 1995 release of Plan 9, however, most likely due to its political incorrectness. In the Plan 9 version the central star was replaced with an AT%26T Death Star. The two players were named Sprint and MCI. AT&T got a point any time either player was destroyed, and any time that either player "caused trouble", such as by slingshotting a missile through the AT&T gravity well.

--Brouhaha 23:41, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Hingham Institute
I believe the spelling was originally Hingham Institute with a second H. Hingham is a local placename: the town just before Nantasket (Hull) and the old Paragon Park amusement complex. The "H" was apparently lost in one scan of the old Creative Computing or other reprint of the memoir, and the typo has been cut-and-pasted since. In the long form of J.M."Shag" Graetz's 1981 memoir, he explained that Hingham Institute was their name for their off-campus summer apartment. A later version has it thusly:

"The augustly named Hingham Institute was, in reality, a dingy tenement on Hingham Street a few blocks from MIT." 

The street still exists, and is on the Harvard side of Cambridge.

Dislaimer -- I actually knew "Shag" Graetz when he and Prof. Jack Dennis were rehabbing the PDP-1 & Spacewar for the old Computer Museum (Boston) (long before the west-coast remove).

192.223.226.5 21:08, 31 July 2006 (UTC) Bill Ricker, Boston

More Versions of Spacewar and the Picture
After the PDP-1, spacewar was later implemented on the PDP-6. The graphics of picture shown in the article - although identified as from a the PDP-1 emulation - are from the PDP-6 version. This is based on my experience with both versions back in the early 70's.

I hope someone else with an interest in this article can find a picture of the PDP-1 graphics. Later I'll add a section on the PDP-6 version, unless someone with more detailed info does it first.

--brucekg 13:22, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

I just had a chance to try out the spacewar applet. It is great. It must be from one of the earliest versions, as it appears that torpedoes are not affected by gravity. I need more time to experiment.

In the 70's version I played on both the PDP-1 and PDP-6 the torpedoes were effected by gravity. One of my earliest experiences was being hit by my own torpedo coming round the sun.

The version on the PDP-1 also had torpedoes intercepte each othe and the fireballs from destroyed ships and torpedo collisions had mass.

Also the PDP-1 version in the 70's provided for 4 players - two per team.

--brucekg 23:53, 17 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Steve Russell says that in the PDP-1 version, gravity did not affect torpedos because there was not enough compute power available to do that without the display flickering. The retcon'd explanation was that they were photon torpedos (long before the Star Trek writers used that term).  Early versions of the Spacewar code ran without the automatic multiply/divide (or with it disabled), using the MUS/DIS instructions.  Later versions used the automatic multiply/divide.  This probably reclaimed some time, but I'm not sure how much.  If there ever was a PDP-1 version with gravity affecting torpedos, the Computer History Museum does not have it.  Such things should have been easy, almost trivial, on the PDP-6, which was a much faster machine with a better display controller.  --Brouhaha 04:42, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Expensive Planetarium
Hello. I tried tagging Expensive Planetarium for merging with Spacewar! but there was no support for it in the PDP talk page (if I recall correctly) (archive). If a merge seems beneficial to others here, apologies in advance for having removed the merge. OK in advance from my point of view to do this. (See also comment above from June 2006.) Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if there is anything I can do to help your project. Best wishes. -Susanlesch 06:51, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Awards and Recognition?
Hey there, I recently read that this game was nominated as one of the 10 most important video games of all time. The full article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/arts/design/12vide.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

ManosFate 03:08, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Spacewar! Additional Tidbits of Info for Discussion
Hello! Spacewar! also played on the PDP-4, and played well. A PDP-4 was actually at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1960's and early 1970's and Andrew Serdy taught me to program with it. PDP-4 also had a paper tape reader, and the Fortran compiler was on paper tape! These early PDPs were an excellent way to learn the nuts and bolts of computing. I still have the Fortran Compiler and also Spacewar! on a magnetic Dectape; likely it's demagnetized by now I suspect. Joseph F. Goodavage also wrote an extensive article on Spacewar! which appeared in the magazine "Saga" between 1972 and 1975, based on his visit and interviews with people at MIT. FGGraham (talk) 18:27, 7 March 2008 (UTC)FG Graham

Only one example of the PDP-1 left - not true
There is another working one at the London Science Museum Angryafghan 15:14, 20 October 2006 (UTC)


 * It's amazing that our society just throws these things away. There seems to be a conception that new computers are better in every way than older ones. But that isn't true in a number of crucial cases. There's one feature on the 1960s IBM 360 I'd love to have on my Alienware: real time, hardware graphic representation of what part of memory is accessed. Another example? Various published writers have told me that they swear by the mechanical means they use to write novels: that a word processor doesn't produce the same results at all as writing by hand (where forethought is more critical).


 * When we throw "previous generation" technology away, we are throwing away heritage. It isn't just a matter of sentiment.


 * Alpha Ralpha Boulevard (talk) 05:19, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Games inspired by Space War
It doesn't seem to actually list games inspired by Space War, such as Asteroids, Omega Race, etc... (in other words, games with triangle ships that shoot bullets). JettaMann (talk) 21:35, 8 July 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) Because it's talking about games that are literally inpsired clones of spacewar. 2) Having ships with triangular or other geometric shapes in a vector medium is pretty common, and does not necessarily have to do with being inspired by Spacewar.  You'd need to provide valid and notable references directly acknowledging a connection to be able to state that for those games. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 02:26, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

Is Spacewar really the first computer game invented?
I was looking at this website, [] which states that A.S. Douglas wrote "the first graphical computer game" in the year 1952, not even close to the year Spacewar was invented. Infact, this same article states that "William Higinbotham created the first video game ever in 1958. His game, called Tennis for Two," was created and played on a Brookhaven National Laboratory oscilloscope". --Puerto.rico 12:12 (GMT-04:00), July 14 2006


 * I don't know anything about A.S. Douglas's game, but Higinbotham's game was played on an analogue computer and wasn't endlessly extensible in the way that we think of modern-day day computer games played on digital computers. (The original Pong was a more-modern implementation of that analog approach.) We should certainly credit Higinbotham here, but he was playing in a different field. ;-)


 * Atlant 12:07, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Can we draw a distinction between computer games and video games? Here is a picture of women playing a computer game called Nim at the festival of Britain in 1951:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/uknews/8448698/The-1951-Festival-of-Britain-on-the-South-Bank-in-London-in-pictures.html?image=19

But it's definitely not a video game as there's no CRT. Propose that we change 'computer game' to 'video game' for Spacewar! Douglasi (talk) 08:38, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

Multiple versions of MIT-Spacewar! (PDP-1) accessible in emulation
The page http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar (linked under external links in the main article) now features several versions of Spacewar! (from version 2b, 2 April 1962, up to version 4.8, 24 July 1963), most of these loaded from binary images of the original paper-tapes. There are also annotations on the game, the various versions provided, and the emulated display hardware. --NoLandst (talk) 16:12, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

"Spacewar" vs. "Spacewar!"
The vast majority of sources I've seen drop the "!", including The Ultimate History of Video Games which interviewed Steve Russell and went through quite of bit of fact checking, so they would have easily picked up on such an obvious mistake. Unless proof can be shown of an example of Steve Russell himself adding the "!" (quotes aren't enough, interviewers can change the grammar to what they think is right) or the "!" being part of the original code or something, then the page should stay as it is. --SeizureDog 23:38, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Hi, SeizureDog. It was my understanding from a earlier editor's work on this article that the name of this game ends in an exclamation point (and though their site is slow the last couple times I checked I am almost sure that the Computer History Museum uses the '!'). I will ask for a move next time I think of it unless you object or there is a citation you can offer? Thanks. -Susanlesch 05:48, 2 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Ultimate History of Video Games did *not* go through quite bit of fact checking. In fact, its known as one of the worst books for errors. --Marty Goldberg 12:10, 2 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Hey, a discussion with Steve Russell in 2013 seems to point out that the game had an exclamation mark in its original form : http://www.crummy.com/2013/02/02/0 The discussion seems to have taken place at this event : http://www.movingimage.us/visit/calendar/2013/02/01/detail/spacewar-a-conversation-with-steve-russell-and-peter-samson But there's no record, just a testimony. Nr3c fr (talk) 22:37, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Subsequent developpements
Hi, in 3. subsequent developpement, you can read : "DEC apparently used it for factory testing and shipped PDP-1 computers to customers with the Spacewar program already loaded into the core memory"

Shouldn't this part need a reference? I haven't been able to find any information saying that DEC would ship the program with their computers... Nr3c fr (talk) 22:43, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Cost?
Any information how much Spacewar cost to purchase when it came out? DKPhilosophy (talk) 17:48, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Not sure if you were serious, because the question seems so ill-informed, but: $0 for the game, but access to one of the ~30 $120,000 PDP-1s with a monitor ever made required. -- Pres N  16:32, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Versions, control flags? Link to hardware re-creation?
Would there be interest for me to create a section covering different versions of the game that exist (2B, 3.1, 4.1 ...) and sense switches, spcifying how they were used as "options" menu altering the game parameters?

Is there a possibility to add a link to a FPGA hardware re-creation project which enables running the original Spacewar code for home users? (https://github.com/hrvach/fpg1)

Hcavrak (talk) 14:55, 8 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Discussion of different versions might be helpful if you have a reliable source that describes them, though I strongly suspect that it would be way too detailed for a general purpose encyclopedia and I don't think it would warrant its own section. As to the github link, we already have external links to Spacewar running on emulators in Java, javascript, and python so I think adding on a Verilog/FPGA implementation is fine as an external link. I'll add that one. -- Pres N  15:04, 8 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Maybe it is too detailed, I always forget that the amount of details that would interest me might not be what interests someone else. Hcavrak (talk) 13:31, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Removing that bit about Steam
I’ve removed the claim that Spacewar is available on Steam because I can find no record of it except in forums. It has no store page and no half-reliable sources that I can find, and if the claim can’t be verified without installing Steam on a Windows computer and then installing the game oneself, it probably shouldn’t be in WIkipedia. —Frungi (talk) 07:25, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I would also find it highly unlikely that Steam has a PDP emulator to run the game. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 14:11, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I assume it's an original port rather than an emulated version. I looked up video of the PDP game and alleged video of the Steam game, and their look is very different. —Frungi (talk) 10:51, 30 March 2013 (UTC)
 * If it was a port, that would at least involve a porting of the code to the new platform (using the original code to create a version specific to the platform - hence the descriptive "port"). From what it sounds like by you, this was more an original game that was "inspired by" the original. Certainly doesn't belong then. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 19:13, 30 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Spacewar on Steam is a Steamworks example application meant to be used as a learning tool for developers trying to itnegrate the steamworks framework onto their games, however because it is essentially a no store, no encounter point game many games that require some form of steam authentication yet can't utilize their original game's assigned Steam ID utilize Spacewar via Smart team Emu (a common tool used for tricking the game into using spacewar's steam ID), The Dark Souls Prepare to Die Editon: Ultiamte Edition link on the internet archive uses Spacewar's ID via Smart Steam Emu in order to function without boot issues. I hope this clarifies and reconstitutes the steam paragraph i the article, thank you for your time. (Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1556288286) -RVBM.

Spacewar is used as a pseudonym for many pirated games that use Steam's servers to facilitate matchmaking and online services, such as Assassin's Creed: Black Flag's trade feature. So, when you have a pirated game using Steam, it will say that you are playing "Spacewar". - Anonymous — Preceding unsigned comment added by 105.233.39.14 (talk) 08:42, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

World Video Game Hall of Fame
Inducted in 2018: --Mika1h (talk) 12:50, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

openFPGA


czar 18:36, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

Good source
I found a good source that should be used or at least linked in further reading: https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/spacewar @User:PresN Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 06:34, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Public domain source
I noticed an issue when trying to poach a source from this article. The game is definitely in the public domain. It has to be because of its release date and there are plenty of articles that mention this when discussing ports of the game. I don't see that in the cited page range though. I think it's something the article should clearly cite to a reliable source. Rjjiii (talk) 04:44, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Good point, I just checked those pages and you're right that it doesn't explicitly say it. I've added a citation for it. -- Pres N  16:16, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks, and congrats on getting your work onto the front page, Rjjiii  (talk) 04:28, 20 October 2023 (UTC)