The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 55

After some preliminary foofaraw to get everyone’s name right, a bunch of overdeveloped Hardy Boys go trekking off through the universe to punch out the latest gang of galactic goons, blow up a few planets, kill all sorts of nasty life forms, and just have a heck of a good time. In a pinch, which is where they usually were, our heroes could be counted on to come up with a complete scientific theory, invent the technology to implement it, and produce the weapons to blow away the baddies, all while being chased in their spaceship hither and thither through the trackless wastes of the galaxy.^I

Afflicted by their passion for such space operas, it’s not surprising that Russell, Graetz, and their friends decided to concoct a space-war game for the PDP-1. “I had just finished reading Doc Smith’s Lensman series,” Russell recalled. “His heroes had a strong tendency to get pursued by the villain across the galaxy and have to invent their way out of their problem while they were being pursued. That sort of action was the thing that suggested Spacewar.”⁴ Proudly nerdy, they reconstituted themselves into the Hingham Institute Study Group on Space Warfare, and Slug Russell proceeded to code.⁵

Except that, true to his nickname, he didn’t. He knew what the starting point of his game program would be. Professor Minsky had stumbled upon an algorithm that drew a circle on the PDP-1 and was able to modify it so that it would display three dots on the screen that interacted with each other, weaving beautiful little patterns. Minsky called his hack the Tri-Pos, but his students dubbed it “the Minskytron.” That was a good foundation for creating a game featuring interacting spaceships and missiles. Russell spent weeks mesmerized by the Minskytron and grokking its ability to make patterns. But he bogged down when it came time to write the sine-cosine routines that would determine the motion of his spaceships.

When Russell explained this obstacle, a fellow club member named Alan Kotok knew how to solve it. He drove out to the suburban Boston headquarters of DEC, which made the PDP-1, and found a sympathetic engineer who had the routines necessary to make the calculations. “Alright, here are the sine-cosine routines,” Kotok told Russell. “Now what’s your excuse?” Russell later admitted, “I looked around and I didn’t find an excuse, so I had to settle down and do some figuring.”⁶

Throughout the Christmas vacation of 1961 Russell hacked away, and within weeks he had produced a method to maneuver dots on the screen by using the toggle switches of the control panel to make them speed up, slow down, and turn. Then he converted the dots into two cartoonish spaceships, one of them fat and bulging like a cigar and the other thin and straight like a pencil. Another subroutine allowed each spaceship to shoot a dot out of its nose, mimicking a missile. When the position of the missile dot coincided with that of a spaceship, the latter would “explode” into randomly moving dots. By February 1962 the basics had been completed.

At that point Spacewar became an open-source project. Russell put his program tape in the box that held other PDP-1 programs, and his friends began to make improvements. One of them, Dan Edwards, decided it would be cool to introduce a gravitational force, so he programmed in a big sun that exerted a tug on the ships. If you didn’t pay attention, it could suck you in and destroy you, but good players learned to whip close to the sun and use its gravitational pull to gain momentum and swing around at higher speeds.

Another friend, Peter Samson, “thought my stars were random and unrealistic,” Russell recalled.⁷ Samson decided the game needed “the real thing,” meaning astronomically correct constellations rather than miscellaneous dots. So he created a programming addition he called “Expensive Planetarium.” Using information from the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, he encoded a routine that showed all the stars in the night sky down to the fifth magnitude. By specifying how many times a display point on the screen fired, he was even able to replicate each star’s relative brightness. As the spaceships sped along, the constellations slowly scrolled past.

This open-source collaboration produced many more clever contributions. Martin Graetz came up with what he called “the ultimate panic button,” which was the ability to get out of a jam by toggling a switch and disappearing temporarily into another dimension of hyperspace. “The idea was that when everything else failed you could jump into the fourth dimension and disappear,” he explained. He had read about something similar, called a “hyper-spatial tube,” in one of Doc Smith’s novels. There were, however, some limits: you could toggle into hyperspace only three times in a game; your disappearance gave your opponent a breather; and you never knew where your spaceship would reappear. It might end up in the sun or right in the sights of your opponent. “It was something you could use, but not something you wanted to use,” Russell explained. Graetz added an homage to Professor Minsky: a ship disappearing into hyperspace left behind one of the signature patterns of the Minskytron.⁸

One lasting contribution came from two active members of the Tech Model Railroad Club, Alan Kotok and Bob Sanders. They realized that players crammed in front of a PDP-1 console jostling elbows and frantically grabbing at the computer’s switches was both awkward and dangerous. So they rummaged around under the train set in the clubroom and commandeered some of the toggles and relays. These they pieced together inside two plastic boxes to make remote controls, complete with all the necessary function switches and the hyperspace panic button.

The game quickly spread to other computer centers and became a staple of hacker culture. DEC began shipping the game preloaded into its computers, and programmers created new versions for other systems. Hackers around the world added more features, such as cloaking powers, exploding space mines, and ways to shift into a first-person perspective from the view of one of the pilots. As Alan Kay, one of the pioneers of the personal computer, said, “The game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer.”⁹

Spacewar highlighted three aspects of the hacker culture that became themes of the digital age. First, it was created collaboratively. “We were able to build it together, working as a team, which is how we liked to do things,” Russell said. Second, it was free and open-source software. “People asked for copies of the source code, and of course we gave them out.” Of course—that was in a time and place when software yearned to be free. Third, it was based on the belief that computers should be personal and interactive. “It allowed us to get our hands on a computer and make it respond to us in real time,” said Russell.¹⁰

NOLAN BUSHNELL AND ATARI

Like many computer science students in the 1960s, Nolan Bushnell was a Spacewar fanatic. “The game was seminal to anyone who loved computers, and for me it was transforming,” he recalled. “Steve Russell was like a god to me.” What set Bushnell apart from other computer bums who got their kicks by maneuvering blips on a screen was that he was also enthralled by amusement parks. He worked in one to help pay for college. In addition, he had the boisterous temperament of an entrepreneur, relishing the mix of thrill-seeking and risk-taking. Thus it was that Nolan Bushnell became one of those innovators who turned an invention into an industry.¹¹

When Bushnell was fifteen, his father died. He had been a construction contractor in a growing exurb of Salt Lake City, and he left behind several unfinished jobs for which he hadn’t been paid. Young Bushnell, already big and boisterous, finished them off, adding to his natural bravado. “When you do something like that as a 15-year-old, you begin to believe you can do anything,” he said.¹² Not surprisingly, he became a poker player, and as good luck would have it he lost, fortuitously forcing him to take a job on the midway at the Lagoon Amusement Park while studying at the University of Utah. “I learned all the various tricks for getting people to put up their quarters, and that sure served me well.”¹³ He was soon promoted to the pinball and game arcade, where animated driving games such as Speedway, made by Chicago Coin Machine Manufacturing Company, were the new rage.