Spacewar!

Lyle Bickley lbickley at bickleywest.com
Thu Jan 29 17:08:54 CST 2015


For those of you who are Spacewar! buffs and you haven't seen Norbert
Landsteiner's work, you are missing something big.

Norbert has what I believe to be the best simulation of original PDP-1
Spacewar! code running on a Model 30 display. And he doesn't just have
one version Spacewar! - but several original versions.

In addition, Norbert analyzed the original Spacewar! code line-by-line
and created an incredible set of writeups on Spacewar! internals.

As Norbert created his writeups, he sent them to me. I read them over,
and forwarded them to the entire PDP-1 Team at the Computer History
Museum. That Team includes Steve Russell (principal author of
Spacewar!) and Peter Samson (Spacewar! star field, etc.).

Additionally, I met with both Steve and Peter and we reviewed
several of Norbert's writeups together in some detail - and found only a
few minor corrections/comments to pass back to Norbert.

Here are links to Norbert's work:

Simulation
----------
http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/

Writeups (Inside Spacewar!)
---------------------------
http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/inside/

Cheers,
Lyle
-- 
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
http://bickleywest.com

"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"


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