Computers/Information Technology

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.

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.

The idea for the electronic spreadsheet came to me while I was a student at the Harvard Business School, working on my MBA degree, in the spring of 1978. Sitting in Aldrich Hall, room 108, I would daydream. "Imagine if my calculator had a ball in its back, like a mouse..." (I had seen a mouse previously, I think in a demonstration at a conference by Doug Engelbart, and maybe the Alto). And "..imagine if I had a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations, and answer '10% will be fine!'" (10% was always the answer in those days when we couldn't do very complicated calculations...)

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!

The PDP Unix Preservation Society (PUPS), part of The Unix Heritage Society, is devoted to the preservation of all information related to the versions of Unix that ran on Digital PDPs. If you have something that you think should be preserved, or if you have any experience with PDP Unix, please let us know! Much of the information we are trying to preserve is protected by copyright or by licensing. We strive to abide by these conditions.

The video game history started in a strange and complicated way and it is important to avoid confusions with what happened in the 1950s and 1960s. The real video game history started with Ralph Baer as early as 1951. One very important thing to remember is how the video game has been defined in the 1960s before modern tehnologies allowed video games to be played on computers.
A video game is defined as an appartus that displays games using RASTER VIDEO equipment: a television set, a monitor, etc. In the 1950s and 1960s, computers were not only exceedingly expensive, but used a technology that could not allow integrating them into a video game system. Only mainframes could allow playing a few games. These games qualified as COMPUTER games, not VIDEO games.

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

America was introduced to the first home video game system on a Sunday night television broadcast hosted by Frank Sinatra. Released by Magnavox and named "Odyssey" this system was little more than a few logic switches, and not considered a microcomputer by the industry. The Odyssey was the result of years of negotiations between Ralph Baer and various players in the television manufacturing industry. 1, 2

The first edition of the Unix Programmer's Manual, dated November 3, 1971, is available here in image, Postscript, and PDF format. Return with us to the golden days of yesteryear!
The image links refer to PDF files produced by the scanner. They are fairly large, ranging up to a couple of MB, and are named .pdf. You may need a plugin or other software in order to view them; Adobe Acrobat is readily available.