The Origin of Spacewar! (1981)

The next best thing (but without Steve Russell himself, sorry) can be found here: http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar (a JS-emulation of a PDP-1 running various versions of Spacewar! – the version closest to the program described in the article is "Spacewar 2B", but the version seen in the photos is probably a bit later and more advanced.)

But of course we ought to visit the CHM, in case we would have a chance to do so.

It's really hard to say, but some of the high-res scans of DEC promotional material for the Type 30 CRT (1024 x 1024) at bitsavers.org are showing screenshots with a pretty good quality: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp1/JPEGs/

On the other hand the 1024 x 1024 of the standard display was rather a technical resolution, the visual resolution would have been – according to DEC – about the half (since the bleeding phosphor of the activated blips on the screen would overlap and merge). A closeup of the Type 30 CRT displaying an early version of Spacewar! can be seen here: http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/decus1962/spacewar-decus1962...

On the storage capacity: Please mind that these weren't bitmap driven displays, all the images had to be composed and refreshed algorithmically. On the up-side, this meant that even a small program could display effective graphics, like Snowflake (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ioLo2I_5Y) which would only use about 190 instructions or memory locations. Also, consider that these were 18-bit words holding op-codes (6-bit) and addresses (12-bit) in the same instruction word. This was quite more densely packed, like say, in a 8-bit microprocessor computer. For example, I would doubt that (the original) Spacewar! could have been ported to a C64, both for speed and storage, left aside the graphics. (But I could be proven wrong here ... :-))

I'm old enough that my first experience of 'big computer' graphics in the mid-Eighties was on one of these:

http://www.pdp8.net/tek4010/tek4010.shtml

Tektronix 4010 storage tube display.

It was actually pretty nice, as long as you just wanted to draw a picture.

I don't think they saved the photos verbatim -- rather, the idea was to use the CRT to slow-scan the photographs and analyze them by recording the light that transmitted through the film.

http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/PDP.1.dir/

It's not a raster display. The beam is driven by two voltages for X and Y, so really what those numbers are actually saying is that it had a pair of 12 bit DACs (hardly shabby technology in 1961, but not a 4k monitor either).