The History of Computer Gaming Part 2 - Swirling
So everyone fasten your seat belt while Sherman sets the Wayback Machine for 1959 when members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT first discovered the TX-0 computer and began an odyssey that would change computers and gaming forever.
The Tech Model Railroad Club had been founded in 1946 as a club for model railroad hobbyests to meet and discuss the hobby. By the time they were assigned a large room in building 20, the club began work on a huge model railroad setup. This was no ordinary setup, as the high tech inginuity that MIT students are known for was applied to it's design and continual growth.
That 58-59 school year, a young freshman by the name of Peter Samson entered the TMRC and by 1959 he and some friends started exploring around the campus. Eventually, they happened upon Building 21 where, hidden in a dank basement was an "programmable" punch card reader. Because it was a punch card reader, it wasn't "guarded" like the few computers MIT had on campus. In those days, the massive room sized computers took an entire staff of technicians in labcoats that had to be on duty at any time to scramble and fix and problems. Isolated in large, heavily cooled rooms, these technicians were refered to as the "Priesthood". With the computer being the "God", these men were the only link between the computer and the user.
However, what the kids stumbled on to was this small "computer" in a basement - with people rarely around. A computer they could get their hands on. Initially using it to keep track of the logic of the "Rat's Nest" and soon began messing with the wires and "circuits" of the card reader to do new things, as if they were working on the Rat's Nest itself. This "do it your self" tinkering view to computers and electronic would come to define "hacking" for generations to come.
Enter the TX-0 and a mouse
With no bureaucracy, save a sign up sheet to reserve an hours worth of personal time on the TX-0, the young TMRC hackers began taking over the late night shifts that were never signed up for (anywhere from 11pm though 7am). Other's outside of the TMRC began joining the small conclave of devoted students, and the small group became an entity of it's own known as the TX-0 Hackers. With the young hackers writing programs to help write programs, the TX-0 was able to be wielded with even more power. Peter Samson, for example, wrote a special compiler that took advantage of the rudimentary sound capabilities to make the TX-0 play music. Soon the songs of Bach were drifting down the hallway. Another hacker hooked up the TX-0 to the phone system and used the speaker to create tones allowing him to control phone switching equipment.
Soon, they began hacking the capabilities of the CRT display as well. A bouncing ball demo was among the first demonstrations on the TX-0, with the small "ball" bouncing around from one edge of the screen to the other. Other more sophisticated uses of the display were developed. Two grad students, Doug Ross and John Ward wrote a "Mouse in Maze" program. Based on the research by Claude Shannon (who did research in 1952 with a mechanical mouse that could find it's way through a maze), the program used the TX-0's light pen (a deviced that allows you to draw directly on the CRT screen and the computer in turn can be made to track and interact with what you draw) and allows the user to draw a maze on the CRT screen. A small "blip" would search through the maze, looking for other "blips" that represented cheeze wedges. Uniquely, the mouse would "remember" where the cheeze wedges were and would easily find them the second time the maze was run. In the hacker spirit, some of the other TX-0 hackers altered the program so that the wedges were replaced by martini glasses. After the mouse got a few of the martini glasses, it would start staggering about the maze, and eventually become to "drunk" to move. The Mouse in Maze program, along with a simple Tic Tac Toe game, became the 2nd known computer games, the first since Higginbothams Tennis for Two. The third was soon to follow.
The DEC PDP-1 expands possibilities
The PDP-1 was installed in the "kludge" room, which was the room next door to where the TX-0 was housed. The hackers wasted no time in converting over much of the TX-0 software to the PDP-1, and in fact they wasted no time in writing new programs.
One of the most interesting and innovative was actually done as a prank. Hacking a connection between the PDP-1 and the TX-0, they created a "chat" program of sorts. They then called in Professor John McCarthy (legendary artificial intelligence pioneer and creator of the Lisp programming language) and told him they had created a new chess playing game on the PDP-1. They then called in another professor, told him the same thing and sat him in front of the TX-0. The two proceeded to send chess moves back and forth to one another, each thinking the other was a chess program. That is, until McCarthy noticed the movements were coming in one letter at a time, and sometimes lagging in between each move. Noticing the wire, he followed it to the next room and the prank was up. However, this prank was to be the first networked computer game.