The Return of SpaceWar: Reviving the World’s First Gaming Computer | Computing

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On my desk, next to my ultra-modern gaming PC, sits a strange device that resembles a spaceship control panel from a 1970s sci-fi movie. There’s no keyboard or monitor, just a few rows of colorful switches beneath a string of blinking lights. If you thought the recent proliferation of retro video game consoles, such as the Mini SNES and the Mega Drive Mini, was an amazing development in technology nostalgia, look no further than the PiDP-10. It’s a 2/3-scale replica of the PDP-10 mainframe computer, first introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1966. It was designed and built by an international group of computer enthusiasts known as the PiDP-10.
Obsolescence is certain
It’s a beautiful thing.

The project’s genesis dates back to 2015, when Oscar Vermeulen, a Dutch economist and lifelong computer collector, wanted to build a single replica of the PDP-8 mainframe that had fascinated him since childhood. “I had a Commodore 64 and proudly showed it to a friend of my father’s,” Vermeulen says. “He scoffed and said the Commodore was a toy. The real computer was the PDP, specifically the PDP-8. So I started looking for discarded PDP-8 computers, but I couldn’t find a single one. Now they’re collector’s items, very expensive and most of the time broken. So I decided to build a replica for myself.”

Ever the perfectionist, Vermeulen decided he needed a professionally made front panel cover. “The company that could make them told me I’d have to pay for one four-square-metre sheet of Perspex to cover 50 of these panels,” Vermeulen says. “So I made 49 extra ones, thinking I’d find 49 idiots to do it for me. Little did I know it would end up costing me thousands of dollars on my dinner table.”

At the same time, Vermeulen began posting in various vintage computing Google Groups, where he worked on software emulators for pre-microprocessor computers. As word spread about his replica, it quickly became a group effort that now has over 100 members. While Vermeulen focuses on designing the hardware replica (a front panel with working switches and lights), others are working on different aspects of the open source software emulation, which has a complicated history. At its core is SIMH, created by the ex-SIMH.
December Developed by employee and megastar hacker Bob Supnick, the program emulates a variety of classic computers, and it was later improved by Richard Cornwell and Lars Brinkhoff to add driver support for the PDP-10.
the Many other people were involved in the operating system and other MIT projects, some of whom collected and preserved old backup tapes, some of whom added improvements and debugging, and some of whom provided documentation and schematics.

The attention to detail is incredible. The lights on the front aren’t just decorative. They show the instructions being executed, CPU signals, and memory contents, just like the original machine. Vermeulen calls it watching the heartbeat of the computer. This element was taken very seriously. “Two people spent months on one particular problem,” Vermeulen says. “You know, LEDs blink, but incandescent bulbs glow. So we studied exhaustively the LEDs to simulate the glow of the original bulbs. And we found that different bulbs from different years glow for different amounts of time. Measurements were made and calculations were applied, but the glow of the lamps was added. More CPU time was spent simulating that than simulating the original.”

Why? Why go to all this trouble? First, there’s the historical importance. The PDP machines, built between 1959 and the early 1970s, were revolutionary. Not only were they much cheaper than the giant mainframes used by the military and big corporations, but they were designed to be general-purpose, fully interactive machines. Instead of writing a program on punch cards, giving it to the IT department to run on the computer, print it out, and debug it maybe a day later, PDP let you type directly into the computer and test the results immediately.

These factors led to an explosion of experimentation. Most modern programming languages, including C, were developed on DEC machines. The PDP-10 was the heart of the MIT AI Lab, the room where the term artificial intelligence was born. “The PDP-10 computer dominated the Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet,” says Lars Brinkhoff. “Internet protocols were prototyped on the PDP-10, PDP-11, and other computers. The GNU Project was inspired by the free sharing of software and information on the PDP-10. Stephen Hawking’s artificial voice grew out of the DECtalk device, which grew out of Dennis Klatt’s speech synthesis research begun on the PDP-9.”

The PDP made its way into university labs around the world, where it was embraced by a new generation of engineers, scientists, and programmers — the original computer hackers. Steve Wozniak got his start programming on a PDP-8, a small, inexpensive machine that sold by the thousands to hobbyists. Its operating system, OS/8, was the precursor to MS-DOS. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were teenage students who would sneak into the University of Washington to program the PCP-10, and it was on a PDP computer that MIT student Steve Russell and a group of friends designed a shoot-’em-up game.
Space War!was one of the first video games to run on a computer.

This legendary game wasn’t the only one. There were many others at the time, because making games was a fun way to explore possibilities. “There were Dazzle Dart, a four-player laser tennis game, and Lunar Lander,” Vermeulen says. “Maze War was the first networked video game. People connected two IMLAC minicomputer/graphics terminals to the Arpanet via a PDP-10 mainframe, and used that million-dollar pile of hardware to chase each other through a maze or shoot each other.” And the original text adventures like Colossal Cave and Zork, as well as the first multiplayer online games like MUDs and Star Trek, were also written on PDP computers.

These machines are an essential part of our digital culture, the furnace of the modern gaming and tech industries. But to be understood,
Already used
“The problem with computer history is that putting old computers in a museum that aren’t being used communicates very little,” says Vermeulen. “You need to experience these machines and how they worked. And the problem with computers before about 1975 is that they were huge, heavy and nearly impossible to keep running. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen loved his PDP-10 deeply, and with the funds he had, he was able to hire a team of skilled technicians to repair and get it running. But it was very expensive, and sadly, his family decided to discontinue this after he passed away.”

The answer is emulation. The PDP replica has all the look of the original terminal, including the lights and switches, but the calculations are done by a Raspberry Pi microcomputer connected to the back via a serial port. To get it running at home, just plug in the Raspberry Pi, connect a keyboard and monitor, boot it up and download the software. Then flip the switch on the front of the PDP-10, reboot the Raspberry Pi, and you’ll be in PDP mode, with a window on your monitor emulating the old Knight TV terminal display. A command line interface (remember those?) gives you access to a range of the original programs, including games.

This is what I’ve been waiting for. We all know the important role SpaceWar played in the birth of the modern games industry, but actually playing it and controlling a spaceship battling amongst vector explosions against a flickering starry sky…it feels like you’re living history.

In the 15 years since Vermeulen began developing his personal PDP-8 emulator, the Obsolescence Guaranteed group has sold hundreds of replicas and continues to develop more, including a replica of MIT’s experimental Project Whirlwind computer from the 1950s (which ran a simple version of tic-tac-toe). Today, a company in Panama called Chiriqui Electronic Design Studio manufactures the hardware. What started as a personal project has become something much bigger. “We had an ‘official’ launch of our PiDP-10 replica at MIT in Boston, where the original machine was kept. The demo session was attended by about 50 hackers from the 1970s. It was fun to see people playing the multi-user Maze War game 50 years later.”

Another reason the PiDP-10 is worth it is because it’s fun. I never imagined seeing something like this up close, much less plugging it into a monitor at home and playing with it. It was an exciting, nostalgic, and weirdly emotional experience. Navigating the ITS disk system, the glowing green dot-matrix font, the appealing list of programs and games, the “happy hacking!” message above the terminal command line – it’s very evocative.

Meanwhile, programmers who bought PiDP machines are creating new programs and games. They range in age from 80-year-old PDP veterans to 20-year-olds who want to relive a bygone era of programming. Memory and processing power were scarce, so elegant and super-efficient code had to be written; there was no room for bloat. “Quite a few universities are using the PiDP-11 and -8 in their classes,” Vermeulen says. “Partly to show computer science students our origins, but also because the super-low-level programming still required for microcontrollers and hardware drivers is the type of coding you learn very well on these dinosaurs.”

Brinkhoff agrees that while these machines have a certain nostalgia, they also have something to teach us: They’re functional. “I enjoy writing new software for the 10, like a program to display fractals or generate QR codes,” he says.

“I hope it becomes more widely accepted, because if you don’t do anything with PiDP, it just sits on a shelf and the lights flash. It looks pretty, but I don’t think the computer can be truly happy unless you program it.”