Spacewar – Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums (1972)

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46 points·anon808··5 comments

This has Alan Kay and Steve Russell, and uses 'hacker' right, and predicts that the ARPAnet will kill both newspapers and the music industry. Talk about a lost classic!

Not to mention a real, live, bona fide use of the word dis-Establishmentarianism(1) in the wild. Golden.

(1) Historical perspective: If you happened to be a theater major, hung out with such, or even did sound and lights for some rinky-dink drama club in the 90s like me, you heard this word ad nauseam spoken by people who had no earthly clue what it meant. For bonus points, they often stuck another "anti" to the front of it.

I'm not sure that this article is using the word (1) in the 'canonical' way either, so don't be too critical of your rinky-dink drama friends. They're just modifying the language to suit their ends, just like everyone else!

(1) the word describes a political position regarding the relationship of the UK government and the established church there. Therefore the antidisestablishmentarians were campaigners against those campaigning for disestablishing the Church of England

The author is Stewart Brand of WELL fame. Cool to see the exact moment video games came to be.

For those that are interested, you can play a javascript version of original PDP-1 spacewar! here:

http://spacewar.oversigma.com/html5/

According to the excellent wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar! ) there is only one PDP-1 which is currently operational, and yes it does play spacewar!

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