in the beginning, there was nothing. well, actually, there was
pinball, some shooting gallery games, a few nickel peep-show
machines and those mechanical genies that would guess your
weight and give a glimpse of your future. but it was probably
pretty hard trying to beat your buddies at who weighs less.
(there was bell, there was edison, there was fermi. and then there was higinbotham)
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'tennis for two' on an oscilloscope
working at brookhaven national laboratory, a us nuclear research
lab in upton, new york, william a. higinbotham, a chain-smoking,
fun-loving character and self-confessed pinball player, wants to
develop an open house exhibit at bnl that will entertain people as
they learn. his idea is to use a small analog computer in the lab to
graph and display the trajectory of a moving ball on an oscilloscope,
with which users can interact.
missile trajectory plotting is one of the specialties of computers at
this time, the other being cryptography.
along with technical specialist robert v. dvorak who actually
assembles the device, to create in three weeks the game system they
name tennis for two, and it debuts with other exhibits in the
brookhaven gymnasium at the next open house in october 1958.
in the rudimentary side-view tennis game, the ball bounces off a long
horizontal line at the bottom of the oscilloscope, and there is a small
vertical line in the centre to represent the net.
the game was simple, but fun to play, and its charm was infectious.
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