
Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums (1972) - jihadjihad
http://wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html
======
vinceguidry
In case anyone here hasn't read it yet, this should be required reading for
any would-be computer geek:

[https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-
Le...](https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-
Levy/dp/1449388396)

I picked this up randomly off a university library shelf and before I knew it,
I was halfway through the book and my feet were hurting.

~~~
archagon
Reading the book now and it’s making me a little sad. Where can I find today’s
Tech Model Railroad Club, Homebrew Computer Club, Community Memory, People’s
Computer Company? Are there still places left where computing is small, local,
non-commercial and so alive?

I love programming, but I’ve never felt myself to be part of any tribe like
the people in Hackers clearly do. It all just feels so commoditized and un-
magical these days!

~~~
westoncb
_Hackers_ was very inspirational to me when I read it as a ~17 year old. I'd
been programming off and on for a while, but just really getting into it at
that point—and the attitudes of many of the folks in the book resonated
strongly with me (especially the early MIT hackers).

I naively thought I'd find a group of people like this in college, and of
course failed to. I moved around the country some looking for people, too
(mostly in Berkeley, CA and Cambridge, MA)—but never had much luck. Definitely
not saying they aren't out there, or that my searches in those places were
exhaustive, but I did look and failed to turn anything up.

My current view is that it's difficult for at least a couple of reason:

1) It requires the group to have some some kind of unifying aim (even if it's
very loose/general) and (ideally) a physical location members can return to
regularly which fosters both serious work and the ability to
relax/socialize/goof around. Seems like some makerspaces are pretty good with
this, but from what I can tell typically don't have sufficient focus on
software/CS to be of interest to me.

2) It's hard to search for these things because the results will
overwhelmingly be filled with folks who don't actually feel much compelled by
pure hacking but describe themselves as such for professional reasons. In my
experience this is mostly what programming Meetups are about: making contacts
to find jobs, or people trying to get themselves to learn some new tech, not
because they are particularly curious but because it would improve their
resume.

I think part of the problem may also be related to viewing the
discovery/creation of such a group as something easier than it really is. I'd
bet both the difficulty of finding it and the potential rewards of doing so
are higher than people typically expect. Doing a few google searches and
occasionally asking around town will not be sufficient.

That said—anyone else here in Tucson presently? :)

~~~
archagon
Hey, I'm currently in the bumming-around-Berkeley part of your journey!

One of the reasons I found the Community Memory chapter of Hackers so
inspiring (apart from the Berkeley connection) was because it described a
piece of technology that brought local people together _by design_. Today, we
can go online and find out what people are saying in any part of the world on
any conceivable topic. But barring a few notable exceptions like Nextdoor,
there seems to be relatively little focus on technology that connects us with
our neighbors and colleagues (except in a roundabout way).

When I was a student at Cal, our Livejournal group hosted a biannual event
called AnonCon, where hundreds of people would gather in a single thread and
anonymously moan about finals, gossip about campus life, and discuss who they
were crushing on. At the co-op where I was living at the time, this was a Big
Event: people would huddle in the living room under blankets and have a merry
old time reading threads and adding their own thoughts to the pile. You'd run
into AnonCon participants in the real world who you'd have never thought were
clued in to this sort of thing. It felt like the campus was suddenly
electrified through the comments section of this simple blog post! We weren't
_really_ online, but part a quirky campus community brought together by way of
technology.

It makes me wonder if maybe these kinds of communities could be kickstarted
with a modern take on Community Memory: a distributed database or forum
combined with some sort of physical beacon that would facilitate peer-to-peer
connections between local devices. There would be no pathway to the internet:
if you wanted to know what was going on in your community, you'd have to go to
a particular location (or find a friend) and grab the latest snapshot of the
database directly. Perhaps someone might hide a beacon in their favorite café,
seed it with some comp-sci talk, and then see who shows up to trade thoughts!
Idealistic communities with unified aims and physical haunts could almost
emerge out of the ether — in cafés, libraries, community centers and parks.

If globally-hosted communities incentivize people to spread out, perhaps peer-
to-peer communities could incentivize people to grow closer together. And
maybe, the kind of unity and camaraderie evident in those oddball Hackers
communities would subsequently follow.

~~~
westoncb
Hey archagon—that sounds like a great idea. I can just imagine how it must
have felt to get on AnonCon :)

I wonder about the two principles involved there (or the ones I've happened to
pick out anyway): locality + anonymity. Seems like the anonymity supports a
kind of radical latitude of expression, which is great for the initial phases
of starting something new; meanwhile, locality constrains who participates in
the discussion and influences the topic (to things more local) without
constraining it.

Thinking about this more concretely, while I had trouble finding a group of
like-minded thinkers/builders in Berkeley/Cambridge—I have no difficulty
imagining that if I posted a number of random ideas I've had about programming
languages or philosophy or whatever, that I would have received some
interesting replies, and that some of those replies could turn into
discussions, and some discussions would evolve into something no longer
anonymous.

As for implementation, I most readily see it as an AR application: message
boards tied to physical locations. Of course there are any number of factors
in how this would be carried out that would attract (or repel) different
subsets of people, or different types of discussions etc. For instance, I
could see it devolving into a world-wide cover of bathroom stall graffiti if
too loose, or generating little of interest if too constrained, etc.

Cool projects btw! I think we spoke briefly on here some years ago :) Also,
did you ever go 'the Med' in Berkeley? Do you know if anything similar has
taken its place since it shut down?

Edit: actually, I guess the 'AR' aspect of it is pretty superficial—it's just
the idea of associating virtual objects with geolocations that I had in mind
with it. But, at least with the current state of AR frameworks/hardware, it
would probably be better to just use a more traditional 2D UI for this. But
the key thing would be that depending on where you were standing in the
physical world, you'd get a different set of 'terminals' (or something), which
you could jump into and start discussing things.

~~~
westoncb
I drew up a wireframe of what I'm thinking:
[http://symbolflux.com/images/wireframe123.jpg](http://symbolflux.com/images/wireframe123.jpg)

Would be cool to keep it something super simple like that—though you'd need a
way to create new 'terminals' which get pinned to particular geolocations,
too. (Also 'terminal' isn't quite the right concept/term... but yeah.) Maybe
each user gets one terminal that they can place somewhere... Maybe if it gets
enough upvotes the user who placed it is allowed to place another.

Thoughts anyone?

~~~
mercer
Could be interesting to look at Patchwork/ScuttleButt for inspiration. It uses
a 'gossip' protocol that primarily operates over LAN connections, and has a
bunch of other cool stuff.

There's a rather large 'escape hatch' to the local nature of it all in the
form of 'pubs', which are basically regular users that are internet-
accessible.

But at least for the interface and some of the decisions they made, it might
be worth investigating.

~~~
westoncb
That's interesting—I'll definitely give Patchwork a try. I'm curious to see
which 'Pubs' have been created in my city. That said, the focus seems pretty
distinct from my own interest, which is basically to create a kind of forum
where the top-level 'topic' is some real life location/object. Patchwork's
interface does look really nice though—thanks for pointing it out.

~~~
mercer
Well, Patchwork is just one possible app on top of it. There's also a chess
game and a soundcloud-ish app. So perhaps it would be possible to make what
you have in mind on top of the protocol.

The main problem I have right now that keeps me from playing around with it is
that I'm not currently much in the mood for Node.js development, and so far
that's the only really solid/easy implementation of the whole thing.

------
RNeff
SpaceWar running on a restored PDP-1 is demoed on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays at
2:30 and 3:15 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

While you are there, you also see the demos of the restored IBM 1401 (punched
card computing from the early 1960's) at 11:00 on Saturdays, and Wednesdays at
3:00.

~~~
ajlburke
I cannot recommend this highly enough. It's a real slice of history. If you're
lucky they'll actually let you play the game - which is still a fun challenge.

When I went there a few years ago, the PDP-1 demos were actually done by the
original guys who programmed Spacewar! I don't know if they're still doing
that, but it's magical to be in the presence of these pioneers. This industry
is young enough that many of the original masters are still alive and eager to
share their stories and achievements.

~~~
alblue
Yes, they are still there and running the demos - I watched them there on
Saturday.

------
masswerk
Also not to be missed, "The Origin of Spacewar" by J. M. Graetz (Creative
Computing, Aug 1981), recounting from an inside perspective how the original
MIT Spacewar! was born.

[http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/SpacewarOrigin.html](http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/SpacewarOrigin.html)

Martin Graetz was also reading a short paper on Spacewar! at the first DECUS
(Digital Equipment Computer Users Society) conference in summer 1962,
"Spacewar! – Real-Time Capabilities of the PDP-1":
[http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/decus1962/](http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/decus1962/)

------
sehugg
_Though no one has done it yet, Alan Kay is convinced a modest Spacewar could
be built cheap: “You can do motion with a couple of integrators. Heathkit has
this l6-integrator analogue computer you can build as a kit for 700 bucks or
something like that. You have to have two layers of integrators to get an
inverse-square law, so you should be able to get gravity and orbits with that
one. To make spaceship outlines and explosion patterns you need a few bits of
digital memory. Two chips worth of register file should do it. I think
electronics stores may carry the chips._

Funny that Atari's first game _Computer Space_ was developed the year before
the article went to press, with an old black-and-white TV and some cascading
digital counter chips, similar to how _PONG_ would later simulate ball motion.
And the spaceship outlines were literally outlined on the circuit board with
diodes: [http://www.masswerk.at/rc2017/04/images/e02-computerspace-
di...](http://www.masswerk.at/rc2017/04/images/e02-computerspace-
diodelayout.jpg)

------
cornholio
This sounds like a 1963 worm on a PDP-1:

 _They used to program the thing either in direct machine code, direct octal,
or in DDT, In the early days it was a paper-tape machine. 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._

~~~
KON_Air
At first thought why didn't they dump the memory, print it out and find it,
after all they did write everything "raw". But then I realized by the time
they could dump-print-find, it would have moved on.

It is glorious.

------
vgf
When i visited the Computer History Museum in MV a while ago there happened to
be a live play session going on with the original hardware, with a bunch of
excited people in this little room (the door had to be closed to create enough
darkness to make that old screen visible).

I didn't get to play, but that was okay. Watching a bunch of (really polite)
strangers huddled together, all excited about playing/watching this first
graphical computer game was reward enough.

~~~
GeorgeTirebiter
When I wrote the original Restoration Proposal for the CHM's pdp-1 in 2003,
along with Ace engineers Joe Fredrick (h/w) and Eric Smith (s/w), we
envisioned Spacewar! running and being demonstrated to ever-new generations of
folks. Hearing your story is heartwarming, as we were hoping others would be
similarly rewarded. Come back again and play some.

Not well-publicized: Every 5th Saturday of the months that have 5th Saturdays
we hold a Spacewar! Tournament, and the prizes are Spacewar! T-shirts signed
by Steve Russell and Peter Sampson (Steve wrote the main game and had help
from Shag and a few others; Peter added a realistic star field, showing what
one would see outside in Cambridge MA).

We ran Spacewar! for the first time during the restore on Feb 29, 2005. So
we're coming up soon on 13 years...

------
sciurus
If you enjoy reading about computer gaming in this era, get a copy of The
Friendly Orange Glow. The author goes into (sometimes exhausting) detail of
the authors and players of games on the PLATO system as part of his larger
exploration of the groundbreaking culture of PLATO.

[http://friendlyorangeglow.com/](http://friendlyorangeglow.com/)

------
forapurpose
_As Andy Moorer puts it, “Basically all you have to do is read a book on
computer programming, and you 're an instant computer scientist.” Alan Kay
insists that most of computer science can be mastered in one year of close
attention. That's how young a science it is._

There's a great value in that simplicity; it empowers people and arguably is a
leading reason for all the innovation that has followed. As we make things
more complex - UEFI, systemd, HTML5, HTTP/2, Google's AMP-based email
proposal, email authentication technologies (DKIM, etc) and more come to mind
- we disempower more and more people.

I'm not saying that none of the technologies above should have been
implemented; sometimes complexity is worthwhile. But we should work hard to
maintain the simplicity (and transparency) that creates a 'freedom to tinker'
in the practical sense, not just in the legal sense.

 _Should the computer program the kid or should the kid program the computer?_

------
cyberferret
Wow, I remember playing Spacewar on an IBM-XT, way back in the 80's. It was
one of my favourite games back then, and if I recall correctly, the first
'multi player' game I ever played with my friends (with two people sharing the
same keyboard). Incredible fun, and I remember being amazed by the physics and
smooth animation.

I cannot recall though, if the game actually worked on the old IBM monochrome
monitors that did not have a Hercules graphics card. I seem to remember that
the developers hacked it to run graphically by manually manipulating the dots
at the hardware level?! I could be wrong though.

~~~
hnzix
I played it on an XT with CGA, no Hercules and 512kb RAM. It looked really
crispy and was in stark black and white.

~~~
cyberferret
I do recall playing it on a CGA equipped machine later, but I distinctly
remember my first experience of it being on the original green screen
monochrome, and I was blown away. Wish I could remember if that machine had a
Hercules graphics card in it, but I seem to remember someone saying that it
didn't, and that the game was revolutionary because it went down to the
display BIOS to manipulate the individual green pixels.

------
msh
Computer bum, anyone know what they mean by that? Have never heard that
expression before.

~~~
rambojazz
A person who does not own a computer, and spends hours in libraries or
anyplace else they can find one.

------
platz
[https://twitter.com/LIL_ICEBUNNY/status/950572304655966208](https://twitter.com/LIL_ICEBUNNY/status/950572304655966208)

