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Lyle Bickley explains the PDP-1 (and we play the original Spacewar!)

CuriousMarc2 HN recommenders · 2018–2020
431K views · demo · evergreen · Uploaded 2017-05-03

Lyle Bickley of the PDP-1 restoration team tours the 1959 DEC machine at the Computer History Museum and plays the original Spacewar! He covers its graphics display and the MIT student programs written for it.

Linked in Spacewar and vintage computing threads as a charming demo on real hardware.

History of computingGame history & retro gaming

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4 comments from Hacker News

@masswerk2018 · in “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums (1972)”

See also this video shot at the CHM (by Marc Verdiell), "Lyle Bickley explains the PDP-1 (and we play the original Spacewar!)": [VIDEO]

CitesView on HN
@BuildTheRobots2020 · in “Snowflake: Graphical SFTP client and terminal emulator with helpful utilities”

CuriousMark has a PDP11 video that has some of these demos running on the original hardware: [VIDEO] His videos are surprisingly addictive; they've restored an Apollo guidance computer, Altos and tonnes of other ancient kit.

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@nezgar2020 · in “A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)”

Check out this demonstration of "Space War" on a PDP-1 using a radar long-persistance CRT: [VIDEO]

CitesView on HN
@chaos_a2020 · in “The original "Spacewar!" running on a virtual DEC PDP-1”

Here's the same one on youtube with an interview with one of the people who restored it, it's quite an impressive machine. [VIDEO]

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