![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
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)
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)
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)
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&T 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)
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 [1], 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." [2]
The street still exists [3], 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) [4].
192.223.226.5 21:08, 31 July 2006 (UTC) Bill Ricker, Boston
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)
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)
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)
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
There is another working one at the London Science Museum Angryafghan 15:14, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
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)
I was looking at this website, [ [5]] 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
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:
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)
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)
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, 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)
Any information how much Spacewar cost to purchase when it came out? DKPhilosophy ( talk) 17:48, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
GA toolbox |
---|
Reviewing |
Reviewer: Indrian ( talk · contribs) 04:57, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
I am somewhat tardy on another review for PresN, but I can't pass this one up. Comments to follow in the very near future. Indrian ( talk) 04:57, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
That's it for now. In addition, the article needs a few grammar tweaks, but I will go ahead and make those myself at some point. I'll go ahead and put this
On hold as we continue to work on it.
Indrian (
talk)
19:58, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
Finally finished my grammatical edits to the article, and I am now ready to promote to GA status. One down, two to go! Indrian ( talk) 15:19, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
Inducted in 2018: [6] -- Mika1h ( talk) 12:50, 6 May 2022 (UTC)
czar 18:36, 29 July 2022 (UTC)
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| reply here 06:34, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
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. [7] I don't see that in the cited page range though ( Smith 2019, pp. 55–59). I think it's something the article should clearly cite to a reliable source.
Rjjiii ( talk) 04:44, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
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)
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)
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)
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&T 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)
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 [1], 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." [2]
The street still exists [3], 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) [4].
192.223.226.5 21:08, 31 July 2006 (UTC) Bill Ricker, Boston
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)
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)
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)
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
There is another working one at the London Science Museum Angryafghan 15:14, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
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)
I was looking at this website, [ [5]] 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
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:
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)
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)
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, 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)
Any information how much Spacewar cost to purchase when it came out? DKPhilosophy ( talk) 17:48, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
GA toolbox |
---|
Reviewing |
Reviewer: Indrian ( talk · contribs) 04:57, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
I am somewhat tardy on another review for PresN, but I can't pass this one up. Comments to follow in the very near future. Indrian ( talk) 04:57, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
That's it for now. In addition, the article needs a few grammar tweaks, but I will go ahead and make those myself at some point. I'll go ahead and put this
On hold as we continue to work on it.
Indrian (
talk)
19:58, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
Finally finished my grammatical edits to the article, and I am now ready to promote to GA status. One down, two to go! Indrian ( talk) 15:19, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
Inducted in 2018: [6] -- Mika1h ( talk) 12:50, 6 May 2022 (UTC)
czar 18:36, 29 July 2022 (UTC)
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| reply here 06:34, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
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. [7] I don't see that in the cited page range though ( Smith 2019, pp. 55–59). I think it's something the article should clearly cite to a reliable source.
Rjjiii ( talk) 04:44, 19 October 2023 (UTC)