3
The Priesthood at Play

In the 1940s, the electronic digital computer was a new, largely unproven machine developed in response to specific needs like the code-breaking requirements of Bletchley Park or the ballistics calculations required by the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Once these early computers proved their worth, projects like the Manchester Mark 1 and the EDVAC implemented a stored-program capability allowing digital computers to become useful for a variety of scientific and business tasks. In the early 1950s, several for-profit corporations built on this work by offering mass-produced computers to businesses, universities, and government organizations around the world.

ENIAC creators Eckert and Mauchly established the first commercial computer company in 1946 and sold it to office equipment giant Remington Rand in 1950 after several years of financial difficulty. Early the next year, the company released its first computer, the UNIVAC I.¹ This computer delivered one of the more effective demonstrations of the coming revolution in 1952 when it successfully predicted Dwight Eisenhower’s landslide victory over Adlai Stevenson in the U.S. presidential election despite traditional polling that called for a close race. These results were aired on national television by CBS and turned UNIVAC into a household name.²

For the general public, a computer was a device straight out of science fiction, and to some, it was terrifying. Science fiction stories from Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952) to Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1967) depicted dystopian futures in which self-aware computers made human endeavor obsolete, or worse, wiped out humanity in a fiery apocalypse. Therefore, companies like Remington Rand faced a daunting task in preparing society to accept these contraptions that would soon catapult humanity into the Information Age. One way to help the public feel more comfortable around computers was to allow people to see, touch, or interact with the new machines. To provide these opportunities, computer companies began giving demonstrations of their products at trade shows, exhibitions, and fairs.

¹ Campbell-Kelly et al., 2014, 109-110. The UNIVAC I was the first commercially available computer in the United States but was predated by the Ferranti Mark 1 in Britain by about a month. Technically, Eckert and Mauchly built the first commercially sold computer, BINAC, in 1949, but it was a one-off design.

² Ceruzzi, 2003, Chap. 1.

A 1950s-era computer was not an exciting machine to watch in action, for it carried out tasks through batch processing, in which a stack of punched cards or a reel of tape would load a program and/or some data into memory, execute the requested operations, and spit out a result via a printer or teletype. Aside from a few blinking lights or whirring reels of tape, there were no indications that the computer was actually doing anything. Consequently, when a computer was demonstrated to the general public, it was usually either custom-built or specially programmed to perform some feat of logic, display something visually interesting, or play a game against a human opponent.

***

The first known public exhibition of a game-playing electronic computer occurred in 1950. The instigator was Josef Kates, an Austrian Jew who fled the annexation of Austria into Germany in 1938 and spent the latter part of World War II earning mathematics and physics degrees at the University of Toronto while working on radar for the Rogers Vacuum Tube Company. Kates had recently invented a new type of vacuum tube called the additron that was smaller and less power hungry than the tubes currently in use. Rogers was eager to sell the device, but the company had trouble patenting it in the United States and was unable to bring it to market until 1955, by which time it was already obsolete. In the meantime, Rogers wanted to show off the invention and asked Kates to build a custom machine incorporating additron tubes for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. Kates and his colleagues had already programmed a prototype computer at the University of Toronto called UTEC to play a few games, so he decided that to hold the interest of the general public, he should build a computer that could play a game of tic-tac-toe.³

³ Matt Blitz, “Bertie the Brain Still Lives: The Story of the World’s First Arcade Game,” Popular Mechanics, November 2, 2016, https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a23660/bertie-the-brain.

Dubbed “Bertie the Brain: The Electronic Wonder” by Rogers, Kates’s four-meter-tall creation was exhibited from August 25 to September 9, 1950, alongside the latest Rogers radio and television sets. A player entered his move at a large panel in front of the computer with buttons in the configuration of a tic-tac-toe board, and the moves were displayed on a lighted panel on the computer itself. Kates programmed the machine to be unbeatable, but he also included variable difficulty levels and would adjust them for children, so they had a chance to win. While merely intended as a curiosity, the computer game proved more popular than anyone at Rogers had anticipated, and a constant throng of people flocked around Bertie throughout the show. Nevertheless, Bertie largely avoided attracting wider coverage save for one unpublished Life Magazine photo spread chronicling comedian Danny Kaye’s quest to defeat the computer – finally accomplished only after Kates had greatly adjusted the difficulty downward.⁴ The next year, a second demo computer garnered international attention.

As the 1950s began, Great Britain was in sorry shape. The empire that once covered 25% of the globe was being dismantled, the great city of London was largely in ruins, and food was still being rationed as it had been throughout World War II. In this atmosphere of hardship and uncertainty, the British government decided to encourage its people to look not at the state of their lives at present, but at how their lives could only improve in the future. A Festival of Britain was organized for 1951, both to commemorate the centenary of the famous Great Exhibition and to demonstrate how British contributions to the arts, science, and technology were helping to build a better world out of the ashes of the recent war. Individual displays were organized all over the country, but the centerpiece of the festival was the South Bank Exhibition in the Waterloo District of London, where British contributions to science, technology, and industrial design were displayed.

For Ferranti, just putting the finishing touches on its Mark 1 computer, the festival represented an important advertising and public relations event, so the firm signed on to display at South Bank. Soon after pledging its support, the company realized it could not build a computer in time for display at the exhibition. Enter John Bennett, an Australian electrical engineer who helped build the EDSAC computer at Cambridge University. Bennett proposed constructing a custom machine that would play the mathematical game of Nim against a human player and incorporate a special display to illustrate how the computer operated as a means of introducing basic algorithms and programming principles.⁵

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ John M. Bennett, “Early Computer Days in Britain and Australia: Some Autobiographical Snippets,” Annals of the History of Computing 12, no. 4 (1990): 281–285.

Built by engineer Raymond Stuart-Williams between December 1950 and April 1951, Bennett’s computer, designated Nimrod, premiered at the festival on May 4, 1951.⁶ It remained on display until the exhibition closed in October, after which it was displayed for three more weeks at the Berlin Industrial Show before being dismantled. Like Bertie, Nimrod consisted of a computer with a light bulb display with a panel of buttons situated in front of it on which the player would enter his moves. The lights not only displayed the state of the game but also blinked in patterns that corresponded to the operations being performed by the computer to demonstrate how the program worked.⁷

Nimrod was not intended for entertainment: the goal was to introduce the public to basic programming principles. Indeed, the official guidebook for the machine – available to festival goers for one shilling and sixpence – betrayed Ferranti’s embarrassment at presenting a game in the first place, quick as it was to point out that creating a machine to play games is not just a waste of time, but rather illustrates how a computer can approach complex problems such as modeling world economies. The guidebook also described in detail how the computer approached playing a game of Nim and offered advice on how to defeat it in the hopes that members of the public would take the opportunity to educate themselves on the ins and outs of computer programming.⁸

Few people took any interest in how Nimrod worked, but throngs of people did stop to gawk at the computer, and the press covered it extensively in Britain and Germany.⁹ As the decade progressed, Nim variants emerged as standard demonstration programs for computer projects, appearing on the first Norwegian computer, NUSSE (1954),¹⁰ the early Swedish computer SMIL (1956),¹¹ the first Australian computer, SILLIAC (1956),¹² the Polish Odra 1003 computer (1962),¹³ the custom-built Dutch computer Nimbi (1963),¹⁴ and the French computer Antinéa (1963).¹⁵ This fascination with Nim as a demonstration program predated digital computers and was most likely inspired by an analog computer called the Nimatron developed by Westinghouse for the 1940 World’s Fair in New York City.¹⁶

⁶ R. Stuart-Williams, “Nimrod: A Small Automatic Computer,” Electronic Engineering 23, no. 283 (1951): 344.

⁷ Bennett, 1990, 281–285.

⁸ Faster Than Thought: The Ferranti Nimrod Digital Computer (Hollinwood: Ferranti, 1951).

⁹ Tirstan Donovan, Replay: The History of Video Games (Lewes: Yellow Ant, 2010), kindle, chap. 1.

¹⁰ Lars Konzack, “Scandinavia,” in Video Games around the World, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015), iTunes.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Thomas H. Apperley and Daniel Golding, “Australia,” in Video Games around the World, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015), iTunes.

¹³ Bartłomiej Kluska and Mariusz Rozwadowski, Bajty Polskie (Łόdź: Samizdat Orka, 2011), 6. While the Odra 1003 was commercially available, the Nim game, called Marienbad, was not publicly released.

¹⁴ Christelvan Grinsven and Joost Raessens, “The Netherlands,” in Video Games around the World, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015), iTunes.

¹⁵ Alexis Blanchet, “France,” in Video Games around the World, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015), iTunes.

¹⁶ Donovan, 2010, chap. 1.

***

By 1955, computers were well on their way in becoming fixtures at government agencies, defense contractors, academic institutions, and large corporations, but their function remained limited to a small number of activities revolving around data processing and scientific calculation through batch processing. For companies like IBM and Remington Rand that had produced electromechanical tabulating equipment for decades, this was a logical extension of their preexisting business, and there was little impetus for them to discover novel applications. The enduring image of this period, as codified in the seminal 1974 work Computer Lib by Ted Nelson, is of a “priesthood” (the operators) that interceded between a fickle god (the computer) and those wretched souls beseeching it to manifest its divine powers.¹⁷

In some circles, however, there was a belief that computers could move beyond data processing and be used to control complex systems. This would require a completely new paradigm in computer design based around interacting with the computer in real time – i.e., giving the computer a command and receiving feedback nearly instantaneously. The quest for real-time computing not only expanded the capabilities of the computer, but also led to important technological breakthroughs instrumental in lowering the cost of computing and opening computer access to a greater swath of the population. Therefore, the development of real-time computers served as the crucial final step in transforming the computer into a device capable of delivering credible interactive entertainment.

The path to the first real-time computer began with a project that was never supposed to incorporate digital computing in the first place. In 1943, the U.S. Bureau of Aeronautics began to explore creating a universal flight simulator for military training. While flight simulators had been in widespread use since Edwin Link introduced a system based around pneumatic bellows and valves called the Link Trainer in 1929, these trainers could only simulate a single airplane model and could not be tailored to specific flight conditions. The Bureau envisioned using an analog computer to simulate the handling characteristics of any extant aircraft to provide a significant cost savings over existing training systems and turned to MIT to transform this vision into reality.¹⁸

¹⁷ Theodore H. Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Chicago, IL: Hugo’s Book Service, 1974), 46.

¹⁸ Campbell-Kelly et al., 2014, 143–144.

At the time, MIT was already the foremost center in the United States for developing control systems thanks to the establishment of the Servomechanisms Laboratory in 1941, which worked closely with the military to develop electromechanical equipment for fire control, bomb sights, aircraft stabilizers, and similar projects. The Bureau of Aeronautics established Project Whirlwind within the Servomechanisms Laboratory in 1944 to create its flight trainer.¹⁹ Leadership of the Whirlwind project fell to an assistant director of the Servomechanisms Laboratory named Jay Forrester, an engineering genius who had been building electrical systems since constructing a 12-volt electrical system out of old car parts as a teenager to provide his family’s ranch with electricity After graduating from the University of Nebraska, Forrester came to MIT as a graduate student in 1939 and joined the Servomechanisms Laboratory at its inception.²⁰ By 1944, Forrester was getting restless and considering establishing his own company, so he was given his choice of projects to oversee to prevent his defection. Forrester chose Whirlwind.²¹

In early 1945, Forrester drew up the specifications for a trainer consisting of a mock cockpit connected to an analog computer that would control a hydraulic transmission system to provide feedback to the cockpit. As work on Whirlwind began, the mechanical elements of the design came together quickly, but the computing element remained out of reach. To create an accurate simulator, Forrester required a computer that updated dozens of variables constantly and reacted to user input instantaneously. Bush’s Differential Analyzer, perhaps the most powerful analog computer of the time, was far too slow to handle these tasks, and Forrester’s team could not figure out how to produce a more powerful machine solely through analog components.²²

¹⁹ Ibid, 144.

²⁰ Peter Dizikes, “The Many Careers of Jay Forrester,” MIT Technology Review, June 23, 2015, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538561/the-many-careers-of-jay-forrester.

²¹ Jay Forrester, interview by Renee Garrelick, December 6, 1994, Concord Free Public Library, https://concordlibrary.org/special-collections/oral-history/Forrester.

²² Campbell-Kelly et al., 2014, 144–145.

In summer 1945, the flight simulator project gained a new lease on life when a fellow MIT graduate student named Perry Crawford who had written a master’s thesis in 1942 on using a digital device as a control system alerted Forrester to the breakthroughs being made in digital computing at the University of Pennsylvania. In October, Forrester and Crawford attended a Conference on Advanced Computational Techniques hosted by MIT and learned about the ENIAC and EDVAC. By early 1946, Forrester was convinced that the only way forward for Project Whirlwind was the construction of a digital computer that could operate in real time.²³

The shift from an analog computer to a digital computer for the Whirlwind project created an incredible technical challenge. In a period when the most advanced computers under development were struggling to achieve 10,000 operations a second, Whirlwind would require the capability of performing closer to 100,000 operations per second for seamless real-time operation. Furthermore, the first stored-program computers were still 3 years away, so Forrester’s team also faced the prospect of integrating cutting-edge memory technologies that were still under development. By 1946, the size of the Whirlwind team had grown to over a 100 staff members spread across ten groups each concentrating on an aspect of the system to meet these challenges. All other aspects of the flight simulator were placed on hold as the group focused its attention on creating a working real-time computer.²⁴

By 1949, Forrester’s team had succeeded in designing an architecture fast enough to support real-time operation, but the computer could not operate reliably for extended periods. With costs escalating and no end to development in sight, continued funding for the project was placed in jeopardy. It was saved on August 29, 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. With the threat of a nuclear attack on the United States suddenly a very real prospect, the military required a new early warning system to blanket the country, and such a system required a real-time computer at its heart that could decipher radar signals, track moving objects, and continuously update a display so that operators could identify threats and scramble aircraft to intercept long-range Soviet bombers. In 1951, Whirlwind moved to a new home at the Lincoln Laboratory – a joint MIT–U.S. Air Force facility – and formed the heart of Project SAGE, an ambitious attempt to create such a command and control computer system.²⁵

²³ Ibid, 145–146.

²⁴ Ibid, 146.

²⁵ Ibid, 148–150.

By April 1951, the Whirlwind I computer was operational, but rarely worked properly due to faulty memory technology. The only memory theoretically fast enough to support real-time operation was CRT memory, but tube technology failed at regular intervals and was therefore unsuitable for incorporation into a real-time computer. Forrester and his team developed a new form of memory based around magnetic cores made of ferrite, a material that can be magnetized or demagnetized by passing a large enough electric current through it.²⁶ The Whirlwind’s core memory array came online in August 1953, finally providing a fast and reliable enough memory for a viable real-time computer. Within 5 years, core memory would replace all other forms of memory in mainframe computers.²⁷

With Whirlwind I finally operating effectively, the Lincoln Laboratory turned its attention to transforming the computer into a command-and-control system suitable for installation in the U.S. Air Force’s air defense system. This undertaking was beyond the scope of the lab because it would require fabrication of multiple components on a large scale. Lincoln Labs evaluated three companies for this task, defense contractor Raytheon, Remington Rand, and IBM. At the time, Remington Rand was still the powerhouse in the new commercial computer business, while IBM was only just preparing to bring its first products to market. Nonetheless, Forrester and his team were impressed with IBM’s manufacturing facilities, service force, integration, and experience deploying electronic products in the field and chose the new kid on the block over its more established competitor to build a command and control system that would become known as the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE.²⁸

As the first deployed real-time computer system, SAGE inaugurated a number of firsts in commercial computing such as the ability to generate text and vector graphics on a display screen, the ability to directly enter commands via a typewriter-style keyboard, and the ability to select or draw items directly on the display using a light pen, a technology developed specifically for Whirlwind in 1955. To remain in constant contact with other segments of the air defense system, the computer was also the first outfitted with a new technology called a modem developed by Bell Labs in 1956 that allowed data to be transmitted over a telephone line. The expertise IBM developed through building and deploying the SAGE computers proved definitive in vaulting the company past early market leader Remington Rand and its UNIVAC machines to establish a total dominance of the computer industry unchallenged for 30 years.

²⁶ In a core memory array, two wires are threaded through the center of each core, and only when currents are run through both wires in the same direction will the magnetization change, allowing it to serve as a switching unit. A third wire is threaded through all the cores to allow any portion of the memory to be read at any time.

²⁷ Ibid, 150.

²⁸ Ceruzzi, 2003, chap. 2.

***

The emergence of real-time computing represented a significant milestone in computer design, and institutions working on such machines turned to demonstration programs to illustrate all the new features a real-time environment offered. Oliver Aberth created the first real-time demo on the Whirlwind I in February 1951, a simple bouncing ball represented by a single dot that would appear at the top of the computer’s CRT screen, fall to the bottom of the display, and then bounce accompanied by a sound from the computer’s speaker.²⁹ While exceedingly simple, the effect proved stunning in a time when no other computer could update a CRT display in real time. Later that year, Adams and Gilmore modified the program so that a user could turn a knob to adjust the frequency of the bounces and added a hole at the bottom through which the ball could disappear. Afterwards, the members of the lab treated this interactive demo as a game by challenging themselves to set the frequency perfectly to hit the small hole in the floor.³⁰ It did not take a great leap to transform a ball and some rudimentary physics calculations into a more complex interactive demonstration, which is exactly what a group of programmers did at the University of Michigan’s Willow Run research facility.

Established by the Ford Motor Company in 1941, Willow Run initially built aircraft components before producing roughly half of the B-24 Liberator bombers that flew in World War II. After the war, an airfield within the complex passed to civilian control, and the University of Michigan established a research facility there. This lab undertook defense projects ranging from air traffic control systems to the BOMARC (Boeing-Michigan Air Research Center) guided missile. Between 1951 and 1953, a team of engineers led by John DeTurk built two computers at Willow Run to aid in this research, the Michigan Digital Automatic Computer (MIDAC) and the Michigan Digital Special Automatic Computer (MIDSAC). Both were based on the design of the SEAC computer, an EDVAC derivative built by the National Bureau of Standards in 1950.³¹ While MIDAC was unremarkable compared to its contemporaries, MIDSAC was intended as a control system and therefore processed information in real time.³²

²⁹ “Bi-Weekly Report, Project 6673, February 2, 1951,” Memorandum M-2084, prepared by the Electronic Computer Division of the Servomechanisms Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 2, 1951, 5.

³⁰ Hurst, Jan, Michael Mahoney, Norman Taylor, Douglas Ross, and Robert Fano, “Retrospectives: The Early Years in Computer Graphics at MIT, Lincoln Lab and Harvard,” in ACM SIGGRAPH 89 Panel Proceedings Boston, July 31–August 4 1989 (New York: ACM, 1989), 21. Note that Taylor gives the year as 1949 in this talk, but other sources show that his dates are off.

In early 1954, the Willow Run staff decided to stage a public demonstration of its computers that June for members of the Association of Computing Machinery, who would be meeting in nearby Detroit. In order to hold the interest of their audience, the engineers programmed both computers to play games. MIDAC was programmed to play tic-tac-toe and craps against a human opponent entering commands via a teletype, while MIDSAC hosted a pool game incorporating a CRT monitor that updated the state of the table in real time.³³

MIDSAC pool was initially programmed by Ted Lewis and later refined by William Brown, two avid pool players who felt the game was perfect for highlighting the intended purpose of MIDSAC since it would require updating the positions of 16 objects rapidly enough to give the illusion of seamless movement. Unlike Whirlwind, MIDSAC did not incorporate a display, but it did possess a digital-to-analog converter, so attaching a CRT to the computer proved a relatively simple exercise. A 13-inch point-plotting display was duly sourced, and an engineer working on mapping projects in another department cobbled together a sine-wave generator that could draw circles on the display to represent the balls. Brown and Lewis then wrote a program that accurately modeled the physics of the game so that the balls realistically bounced off each other and the sides of the table. The entire process took about 6 months.³⁴

The resulting program displayed 16 balls, represented by circles, and a cue stick, represented by a line, on the CRT. While the positions of the pockets were calculated by the game, the table itself could not be displayed electronically and was drawn on the CRT with a grease pencil. Controls consisted of one joystick to move the cue stick around the screen, one joystick to rotate the angle of the stick, and a button to shoot. Two additional buttons were required to rack the balls to begin the game and make the cue ball reappear in the event of a scratch. At the start of the game, one player would perform the break, which happened in slow motion due to the number of objects moving on the screen at once, and then play proceeded at regular speed until all the balls were knocked into the holes, which would cause them to disappear from the screen. There was no way to identify individual balls due to the primitive graphics save for the cue ball, which was rendered brighter than the rest.³⁵

³¹ Norman R. Scott, Computing at the University of Michigan: The Early Years Through the 1960s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2008), 4–7.

³² Although MIDSAC was slower than Whirlwind, it incorporated a hybrid serial-parallel design that made it much faster than many of its contemporaries. The computer never worked well because it incorporated unreliable tube memory rather than the core memory that helped make Whirlwind a success, and it was ultimately dismantled.

³³ Gibbons, Roy, “Meet Midac and Midsac: Dice, Pool Shooting Fools,” Chicago Tribune, June 27, 1954.

³⁴ William G. Brown, Deposition, Magnavox Co. v. Bally Manufacturing Corp., No. 74-1030 (N.D. Ill), June 25, 1976, 40–100.

³⁵ Ibid.

The MIDSAC pool game was demonstrated to a group of roughly 25-50 people, who were given a rundown of the basic operation of the computer and the controls for the game and then invited to play it themselves. The response to the program was enthusiastic, but the system was dismantled soon after. The only point of the game was to demonstrate how the computer could track multiple objects at the same time, and once it had served that purpose, it was no longer needed. Nevertheless, MIDSAC pool is the first known publicly demonstrated computer game to incorporate graphics that updated in real time.

***

Like the AI research programs and military simulations, the demonstration programs of the 1950s were not intended primarily to entertain: they were developed to introduce the general public to the capabilities of modern computing technology through an interactive experience designed to hold their interest. The first known computer game to break with that convention and be presented largely with pure entertainment in mind was a demonstration program that historians have retroactively labeled as Tennis for Two developed by Willy Higinbotham.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, William Alfred Higinbotham was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1910 and grew up in western New York. His interest in electronics blossomed at the age of 14 after he began building and modifying his own radios to pick up early commercial stations. Higinbotham studied physics at Williams College in Massachusetts and entered the graduate program at Cornell University. Although forced to abandon doctoral studies during the Great Depression for financial reasons, in 1940 he nevertheless parlayed his experience working with electronics and CRT displays into a posting at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where scientists were engaged in groundbreaking work on the new technology of radar.³⁶ From there, it was off to Los Alamos in 1943 to head the electronics division and develop the timing circuits necessary to properly detonate an atomic bomb.³⁷ Like so many involved with the Manhattan Project, the specter of nuclear annihilation haunted Higinbotham to the end of his days. A founding member of the Federation of American Scientists, an organization committed to the peaceful spread of nuclear energy and the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, Higinbotham dedicated the rest of his life to the eradication of the powerful bombs and warheads he helped make possible.³⁸

But Willy Higinbotham also understood there is more to life than work. He called square dances, played the accordion, and entertained the public at the head of a Dixieland band called the Isotope Stompers. In the kitchen, he exhibited creative flair as he mixed and matched ingredients with wild abandon so his family never knew what he might serve them next. He also understood how to make technology fun: when cutting grass astride his power mower, he would often pull two wagons behind him so his three children could ride along.³⁹ As a man who knew how to effortlessly blend serious work and fun in his own life, who recognized that any practical technology could provide entertainment under the right circumstances, and who was fond of surprising people in creative ways, Higinbotham possessed the perfect temperament to create the world’s first true computer entertainment product.

After World War II, Higinbotham spent nearly two years in Washington, DC, promoting nuclear non-proliferation on behalf of the American Federation of Scientists before taking employment at the newly established Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1947, which was dedicated to discovering peaceful uses for atomic energy. Every fall, Brookhaven held a series of three open houses – one each for high school students, college students, and the general public – to showcase the work being done at the facility. Visitors were bused around the buildings of the Brookhaven campus to view such fascinating sites as the high-energy proton-accelerator and the nuclear research reactor before winding up in the gymnasium to view a series of static displays discussing the work of each department at the lab. After several years of this routine, Higinbotham sensed that these displays were not captivating their audience and thought perhaps he could liven up the experience and demonstrate the practical relevance of Brookhaven’s technology in everyday life by allowing visitors to play some sort of game.⁴⁰

³⁶ William Higinbotham, testimony, Magnavox Co. v. Activision, Inc., No. 82-5270 (N.D. Cal), August 12, 1985, 89–90.

³⁷ Robert P. Goldman, “Wonderful Willie from Brookhaven,” Parade, May 18, 1958, 15–18.

³⁸ Higinbotham, 1985, 89–90.

³⁹ Goldman, 1958, 15–18.

⁴⁰ William A. Higinbotham, “The Brookhaven TV-Tennis Game” (unpublished notes, c. 1983), 1–2.

Brookhaven possessed an electronic analog computer called the Donner Model 30. The manual for the computer described how it could be hooked up to an oscilloscope and employ resistors, capacitors, and relays to display curves useful for modeling a missile trajectory or a bouncing ball, complete with an accurate simulation of gravity and wind resistance. The bouncing ball reminded Higinbotham of tennis, so he sketched out a system to interface an oscilloscope with the computer and then gave the diagram to technician Robert Dvorak to implement. Laying out the initial design only took Higinbotham a couple of hours, after which he spent a couple of days putting together a final specification based on the components available in the lab. Dvorak then built the system over three weeks and spent a day or two debugging it with Higinbotham. The game was largely driven by the vacuum tubes and relays that had defined electronics for decades, but to render graphics on the oscilloscope, which required rapidly switching between several different elements, Higinbotham and Dvorak incorporated transistors, which were just beginning to transform the electronics industry.⁴¹

The graphics of Tennis for Two consisted of a side-view image of a tennis court – rendered as a long horizontal line to represent the court itself and a small vertical line to represent the net – and a ball represented by a trajectory arc displayed on the oscilloscope. Each player used a controller consisting of a knob and a button. To start a volley, one player would use the knob to select an angle to hit the ball and then press the button. At that point, the ball could hit the net, hit the other side of the court, or sail out of bounds. Once the ball made it over the net, the other player could either hit the ball on the fly or the bounce by selecting his own angle and pressing the button to return it.⁴² Like MIDSAC pool, the entire game played out in real time.⁴³

Introduced during Brookhaven’s visitor days in October 1958, Tennis for Two proved a great success, with long lines of eager players forming to play the game. Based on this positive reception, Higinbotham brought the game back in 1959 on a larger monitor and developed variants that simulated the low gravity of the Moon and the high-gravity environment of Jupiter. After the second round of visitor days, the game was dismantled so its components could be put to other uses. Higinbotham never patented the device because he felt that he was just adapting the bouncing ball program already discussed in the manual and had created no real breakthrough. While he appears to have been proud of creating the game, he stated in his own notes that he considered it a “minor achievement” at best and wanted to be remembered as a scientist who fought the spread of nuclear weapons rather than as the inventor of a computer game.⁴⁴

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Originally, the velocity of the ball could be chosen by the player as well, but Higinbotham decided that three controls would make the game too complicated and therefore left the velocity fixed.

⁴³ Ibid.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

Higinbotham’s attitude toward his own invention was typical of the scientists, engineers, and programmers who built and operated the first generation of computers, few of whom could discern any long-term value in a computer dedicated solely to entertainment. This attitude was perfectly understandable under the circumstances, for in the 1950s a computer represented a multi-million-dollar investment, and there was simply no way to justify wasting computer time on frivolous pursuits or to create a viable entertainment platform for use by the general public. While serious academics saw no benefit to creating games, their students and research assistants often did. When a group of these budding young computer enthusiasts at MIT were finally able to secure direct access to the computers at their university in the late 1950s, they created the first widespread and highly influential computer game: Spacewar!