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Claude Shannon isn't well known to the public at large, but he is one of a handful of scientists and thinkers who made our world of instant communications possible. Born in Gaylord, Michigan in 1916, into a fairly well-educated and intellectually stimulating environment, his younger days were spent working with radio kits and morse code, an early start to a promising career. (Later, he would remember Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Gold Bug", with its simple cryptogram, as another early influence.)

Erdös numbers have been a part of the folklore of mathematicians throughout the world for many years. For an introduction to our project, a description of what Erdös numbers are, what they can be used for, who cares, and so on, choose the “What’s It All About?” link below. To find out who Paul Erdös is, look at this biography at the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, or choose the “Information about Paul Erdös” link below.

The Tech is a cosmopolitan museum singularly focused on technology—how it works and the way that it is changing every aspect of the way we work, live, play and learn. Its people-and-technology focus and the integration of advanced technologies into visitor experiences and infrastructure, distinguishes it from other science centers.

Several years ago, Paul Vixie and Keith Bostic found a DECtape drive, attached it to a VAX, and offered to read old DECtapes. Even at the time, this was an antiquarian pursuit, and it presented an opportunity to mine beneath the raised floor of the computer room and unearth some of the DECtapes we'd stored since the early 1970s. Gradually, I've been curating some of this, and here offer some of the artifacts. Unfortunately existing tapes lack interesting things like earliest Unix OS source, but some indicative fossils have been prepared for exhibition.

While the point of this site is to cover the varied and interesting 40 year history of all those eater of dots, whether they be the pixels on the screen or the quarters in our pockets, from the invention of the very first game displayed on an oscilloscope in a nuclear laboratory to the latest megabit home console sensation, I don't expect to have EVERY base covered (at least, not yet). I've only just started to scratch the surface of videogame history, but you can follow the progress of the site in the What's New list, and I'm trying to add new elements as often as I can. The site is split up into different categories (players), each with their own sections (stages). While I think reading each section in each category in order, by using the rosetta stones, is the best way to understand videogame history as it progressed, you can of course jump to any stage you like with the handy drop down menus at the bottom of each page. I'd also like to say that I designed this site at an 1024x768 resolution in 32-bit High Colour. So if there are weird gaps in lines or graphics aren't lined up right ...well, I guess you can go ahead and blame me. Hope you enjoy the course, and HEY! You in the back! Put away that math book! We're studying videogames here!

According to the Net.Legends FAQ, Usenet's collective memory lasts about a fortnight. Thus most people know little or nothing about where Usenet came from or how it got where it currently is. Given the seemingly never ending stream of new users, and the drop out or burn out of older readers, the earlier years of Usenet are starting to take on mythological qualities. Yet Usenet can only understand where it is going unless it knows where its been. This history deals with events immediately before the Great Renaming and ends with the death of the Backbone Cabal, and hopes to tell what really happen during Usenet's more traumatic experiences.

The Virtual Altair Museum
MITS / Pertec / icom Microperipherals
Altair 8800 /Altair 8800a / Altair 8800b
Altair 8800b Turnkey / icom Attache
Altair 680b / Altair 680b Turnkey / icom CP6800
Altair 8800b-sm / Altair 8800b-dm
MITS 300 Business System

In 1949, a young engineer named Ralph Baer was given an assignment to build a television set. He wasn't supposed to build just any television set, but one that would be the absolute best of all televisions. This was not a problem for Baer, but he wanted to go beyond his original assignment and incorporate some kind of game into the set. He didn't know exactly what kind of game he had in mind, but it didn't really matter because his managers nixed the idea. It would take another 18 years for his idea to become a reality, and by that time there would be other people to share in the glory, like Willy Higinbotham, who designed an interactive tennis game played on an oscilloscope, and Steve Russell, who programmed a rudimentary space game on a DEC PDP-1 mainframe computer. And then there was also Nolan Bushnell, who played that space game and dreamed of a time when fairground midways would be filled with games powered by computers.

Ken Thompson used this QED at Berkeley before he came to Bell Labs, and among the first things he did on arriving was to write a new version for the MIT CTSS system. Written in IBM 7090 assembly language, it differed from the Berkeley version most notably in introducing regular expressions for specifying strings to seek within the document being edited, and to specify a substring for which a substitution should be made. Until that time, text editors could search for a literal string, and substitute for one, but not specify more general strings.

In 1948 the government's chief scientist initiated a government contract with Ferranti Ltd. to make a production version of the Manchester Mark 1 "to Professor Williams' specification". This was important because it established a link between the university and industry, and ensured that the power of the electronic computer would be available as quickly as possible around the U.K (and abroad).
The architecture was closely based on the Manchester Mark 1, which was effectively treated as the prototype for the commercial version. The main improvements (apart from improved engineering) were increased B-line, CRT, and magnetic drum stores, a much faster multiplier, and an increased range of instructions, for example many more B-line operations. The magnetic drum store and the multiplier were substantially redesigned.