Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums [1972]

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47 points·michael_dorfman··5 comments

I poked around to find the long-haired guy brandishing that controller, which led me to a page of some interesting snapshots of people from the early 70s SAIL: http://www.saildart.org/saildart_pix_1974/index.html

If your imagination of what the game looks like is lacking: http://www.saildart.org/saildart_pix_1974/d/d7.jpg

Whitfield Diffie in an undignified pose: http://www.saildart.org/saildart_pix_1974/c/c10.jpg

That 'long-haired guy brandishing that controller' today:

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/bruce-baumgart

Far out!

I recently finished "What the Doormouse Said" by John Markoff and it went into depth about this era in Silicon Valley. This is something you will want to read if you are into the history of computing.

http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Pers...

It was painful to assemble stuff, so they never listed out the programs. The programs and stuff just lived in there, just raw seething octal code. And one of the guys wrote a program called 'The Unknown Glitch,' which at random intervals would wake up, print out I AM THE UNKNOWN GLITCH. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, and then it would relocate itself somewhere else in core memory, set a clock interrupt, and go back to sleep. There was no way to find it."

This is awesome.

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