14
Back to Basics

In July and August 1962, the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) of Westchester County, New York, staged a joint workshop with IBM, the most important company headquartered in Westchester, to pursue computer automation initiatives in education. Established by state law in 1948, the BOCES system existed to help smaller school districts in New York State, particularly in rural areas, pool their resources to purchase or develop programs and services that were financially out of reach for the individual organizations. Westchester BOCES Superintendent Dr. Noble Gividen was a passionate advocate of improving outcomes at smaller schools and believed that providing a quality education in rural areas would only be possible through extensive reform. He believed that the computer had a role to play in this process.

The early twentieth century had been characterized by a rapid expansion of high schools in rural America that were patterned on existing institutions located in larger cities. As education standards and curricular demand became more complex, these small school districts were unable to keep up with city districts and their larger staffs. A wave of consolidation and the formation of intermediate school districts like BOCES for resource pooling followed, but many districts were still hampered by ineffective leadership and poorly trained staff.¹ Aware of the computer business simulations like the Carnegie Tech Management Game being incorporated into college curricula, Dr. Gividen believed introducing similar programs into secondary education could help compensate for the weaknesses of rural teachers.² Residing in the same county in which IBM was headquartered provided Dr. Gividen an outlet to explore his theories.

¹ Noble J. Gividen, “High School Education for Rural Youth,” a report delivered to the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Office of Education, September 1963, 2–21.

² Gividen, 1963, 21, and “BOCES Gets $103,824 to Study Simulation,” North Westchester Times New Castle Tribune, 1963.

In 1962, Gividen approached IBM about establishing an informal relationship to discuss the intersection of education and technology. This resulted in the BOCES hosting a summer workshop later that year led by Bruse Moncreiff and James Dinneen of IBM with support from Dr. Richard Wing, the curriculum research coordinator for BOCES. Ten teachers were invited to the workshop and explored the possibilities of simulated environments as a tool for classroom instruction.³ The workshop was so well received that in December 1962, BOCES applied for a $96,000 grant for an 18-month study on methods of incorporating simulation into elementary and secondary education;⁴ the cooperative research branch of the United States Office of Education gave them $103,824.⁵ Two further grants later extended the program into 1967.⁶

Cooperative Research Project 1948 commenced in February 1963 under the direction of Dr. Wing, who asked nine teachers to submit plans for bringing simulations into the classroom. One of these teachers, Mabel Addis, wanted to flesh out an idea proposed by Moncrieff at the workshop. Inspired by the board game Monopoly and his own research into the use of computer simulation, Moncrieff proposed developing an economic model for a civilization to teach basic economic theory. He chose Sumeria as a setting because schools at the time ignored pre-Greek civilizations even as new archaeological digs in the Near East were shedding increasing light on the importance of ancient cultures found therein.⁷ Addis had studied Mesopotamian civilization in college, shared Moncrieff's views, and desired to complete the game.

Addis’s proposal was approved, so she worked with IBM programmer William McKay to develop a program called The Sumerian Game that illustrates the factors aiding the development of Mesopotamian civilization through a land management game played by a single individual. The game takes place over the reign of three kings of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash: Luduga I, Luduga II, and Luduga III. In the first reign, the player develops farmland and grows and stores crops to balance population expansion and the stockpiling of sufficient resources to weather drought and natural disasters. In the second reign, the player changes his focus to investing his food supply into developing technology and culture. In the third reign, the player interacts with other city-states and expands through trade and military might.⁸

³ Richard L. Wing, “The Production and Evaluation of Three Computer-based Economics Games for the Sixth Grade, Final Report,” U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare report, June 1967, ii.

⁴ Joan Booth, “BOCES Asks $96,000 for ‘Simulation’ Study,” Patent Trader, December 30, 1962.

⁵ “$103,824 Grant for Special Research,” The Brewster Standard, March 14, 1963.

⁶ Wing, 1967, ii.

⁷ Ibid, 13.

⁸ Richard L. Wing, “Two-Computer-Based Economics Games for Sixth Graders,” American Behavioral Scientist 10, no. 3 (1966): 31.

By 1967, BOCES and IBM had created two additional games in the vein of The Sumerian Game called The Sierra Leone Game and The Free Enterprise Game that applied similar mechanics to alternate scenarios. At that point, work ceased when BOCES could not secure additional grants to continue the project. According to the agreement between BOCES and IBM, the programs themselves became the property of the computer giant, which never made any real effort to promote them more widely. Under normal circumstances, this would have been the end of the Sumerian Game story. Instead, it was one of the opening shots in a new wave of computer game creation that accompanied projects to introduce computer-based education into secondary schools. Unlike the BOCES project, which remained localized in a single consolidated school district, most of these projects would flourish over large regions – and even entire states – thanks to the spread of networked computing through time-sharing.

***

In the early 1960s, the computer game Spacewar! achieved notoriety at several universities and research facilities and demonstrated the potential of computer gaming as a new entertainment medium. The game directly influenced the birth of the commercial video game industry by guiding the work of Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney on Computer Space, but not until nine years after Steve Russell and friends had originally coded it. From a commercial perspective that additional decade was required for computer technology, most notably integrated circuits, to become cheap enough to incorporate into a product intended for mass consumption. Computer labs like the RLE at MIT in which Russell coded Spacewar! were not bound by the same cost concerns, yet it would still be over half a decade before another computer game appeared that achieved anywhere near the same impact.

The primary factor limiting the spread of computer gaming in the 1960s was a scarcity of computer resources. Even if a university, government think tank, or corporation was lucky enough to own an interactive, real-time computer similar to the PDP-1 that birthed Spacewar!, these institutions would still only operate a handful of computers that only a handful of people would know how to program on them. In such an environment, computing resources were simply too precious to waste on the development of entertainment software with no research purpose and little commercial prospect.

The situation changed when John McCarthy and others at MIT began exploring time-sharing in the late 1950s. With multiple users now able to access one computer simultaneously, computer time did not have to be regulated quite as strictly. Furthermore, as time-sharing opened up computer use to thousands of additional people, many academics came to believe computer programming would become an essential skill in everyday life and began looking at expanding computer instruction to a larger percentage of college, and even high school, students. Encouraging non-technical people to dabble in computer programming necessitated a new emphasis on making programming both easy and fun. The former would require new programming languages, while the latter was best accomplished through entertaining applications such as computer games.

***

The development of the first time-sharing system, the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) at MIT, evolved out of the unique computing resources available at the institution. In the early 1950s, computing was still a new and radical concept, but MIT had emerged as one of the important centers of computer research through the Whirlwind project that had pioneered real-time computing. Despite this central role in developing new computer technology, MIT faculty and staff made little use of computers to aid in their research projects.

MIT began exploring a wider introduction of computing at the university in 1950 through a committee formed by provost Julius Stratton and chaired by physicist and father of Operations Research Philip Morse. In 1954, this committee recommended that MIT establish a Computation Center on campus. At the same time, IBM began making a concerted effort to place mainframe computers in higher education facilities to develop a new generation of users of its equipment, so Morse allied with IBM to outfit the center with its latest equipment free of charge. The center opened in 1957 with the arrival of an IBM 704 computer and served not just MIT, but also a host of other schools under the banner of the New England Computation Center.⁹

⁹ “Guide to the Records of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computation Center,” MIT Libraries, accessed June 27, 2019, https://libraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-ac/ac62.html.

The Computation Center proved a boon to researchers, but was quickly overtaken by demand. As the problems being fed into the machine became more complex and, consequently, also more error-prone, the wait for a successful batch processing run became longer and more frustrating. A group of professors led by Fernando Corbató and Herbert Teager, all of whom had programmed on the Whirlwind in the early 1950s, advocated for an interactive computing environment like the one they were familiar with at Lincoln Labs.¹⁰ They were guided toward a time-sharing solution by John McCarthy, who began conducting some basic time-sharing experiments on the 704 in 1957 and wrote a key memo outlining the time-sharing concept in detail in 1959.¹¹ As he was primarily devoted to AI research, McCarthy turned the time-sharing experiments over to Teager.

Teager secured a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant and began putting together a plan for an elaborate time-sharing system in early 1960, but it proved overly ambitious. Corbató, meanwhile, began developing a simpler system to serve as a demonstration of what time-sharing could achieve.¹² First operational in November 1961, the CTSS allowed three users to access the Computation Center’s IBM 7090 simultaneously through use of typewriters, while a fourth user could also have a program loaded into the system that would be processed during any period when the other users were inactive.¹³ The success of CTSS would lead to larger and more ambitious time-sharing projects at MIT, while its main architects would spread the word of its benefits to other institutions.

One of the first people outside MIT to embrace time-sharing was Dartmouth professor Thomas Kurtz. A statistician with a PhD from Princeton, Kurtz was exposed to computing in 1951 and would have pursued a degree in computer science if one had existed at the time. In 1956, he was recruited for Dartmouth by fellow Princetonian John Kemeny, a brilliant Hungarian-Jewish émigré who worked on the Manhattan Project before he had even completed his bachelor’s degree in mathematics, served as Albert Einstein’s mathematical assistant while he was in graduate school, and completed his doctorate at the age of 23.¹⁴

¹⁰ David Walden and Tom Van Vleck, “Compatible Time-Sharing System (1961–1973): Fiftieth Anniversary Commemorative Overview,” IEEE Computer Society, 2011, 1–2.

¹¹ Ibid, 7. McCarthy’s memo was inspired in part by a similar paper written by AI pioneer Christopher Strachey earlier that year, but while Strachey articulated the concept of a terminal hooked up to a mainframe to serve as a debugging station, he did not envision a large network of terminals interacting with a single computer as McCarthy did.

¹² John McCarthy, “Reminiscences on the History of Time Sharing,” Stanford University, 1983, http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/time-sharing/time-sharing.html.

¹³ Walden and Van Vleck, 2011, 7.

¹⁴ Joy Rankin, A People’s History of Computing in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2018), kindle, chap. 1.

Like many New England colleges, Dartmouth relied on MIT for its computing needs. Kemeny helped facilitate Kurz’s appointment as the Dartmouth liaison to the New England Computation Center, but he also felt Dartmouth would be unable to continue attracting top mathematics students if it did not own a computer itself. He convinced the university to divert some of the funding for a new mathematics building to the purchase of a small computer, the LGP-30. A vacuum tube computer in an era when the transistor was rising to prominence, the LGP-30 nevertheless stood out for its small size and interactive programming environment and presaged the arrival of the minicomputer just a few years later.¹⁵

While working with the LGP-30, Kemeny and Kurz came to believe that human–computer interaction would become a central part of everyday life both at home and in the workplace. They also encouraged students to experiment with the machine and work on their own projects, creating something akin to the hacker culture that was flourishing simultaneously at MIT. The professors’ aim was not just to reach a small group of math and engineering students with a predilection for computer programming, however, but to teach the entire student body how to both use and program computers. This ambition was stymied by one major obstacle: the LGP-30 could only handle one user at a time.¹⁶

Around 1962, Kurz formally proposed to Kemeny that they should facilitate free access to computing for all Dartmouth students through time-sharing, which he learned about directly from John McCarthy at MIT. Kemeny supported this initiative and helped secure funding from the NSF to develop it. For a computer to sit at the heart of the network, they turned to an unlikely source, General Electric (GE), which had never managed to develop a significant computer division. The GE deal hinged on a computer called the Datanet-30 communications processor that proved particularly adept at routing inputs from multiple devices and could work in tandem with a GE-225 mainframe to deliver an efficient time-sharing system.¹⁷

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

Kemeny shared Kurz’s vision of free computing access for all students as a necessary educational tool for the modern world, but he felt there was another major obstacle in carrying out this vision: the lack of an easy to use programming language. The machine code and assembly languages unique to any given computer required dedicated study to master, and even early high-level languages like FORTRAN assumed advanced knowledge of engineering and/or mathematics principles. Without a more accessible programming language, only Dartmouth’s most technically minded students would actually be able to accomplish anything on the time-sharing network.¹⁸

Kurz felt a simplified version of FORTRAN would solve this problem, but Kemeny disagreed. During his experiments with the LGP-30, he had developed, in tandem with a student, a programming language called “Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment” or DOPE. While too limited to serve the needs of the time-sharing network, DOPE convinced Kemeny that, with a little effort, they could develop a language far simpler than any of the currently available options. In 1963, Kemeny and Kurz worked together to create the Beginners’ All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, better known as BASIC. By using natural language for many commands and building complexity in layers so the user could accomplish many programming feats by mastering simple commands before tackling more difficult instructions, BASIC revolutionized programming by allowing just about anyone to jump right into creating computer programs with little formal training.¹⁹

The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) went live in May 1964 and entered general use that fall. By October, the system could accommodate 21 simultaneous users, a number that would greatly expand over the coming years. BASIC instruction was incorporated into several first-year math courses as a series of lectures and problem-solving exercises culminating in the creation of a BASIC program by the student. This approach ensured that roughly three-quarters of all Dartmouth students would receive computer instruction in their first year at the school. Students who particularly enjoyed the experience would then be provided outlets to continue working with BASIC during their time at the institution.²⁰

DTSS and BASIC democratized computer use at Dartmouth by providing the computing resources for nearly anyone affiliated with the university to create and share their own computer programs regardless of their technical acumen, but Kemeny and Kurz had no intention of stopping there. As they truly believed programming would become a necessary task for people of all walks of life, they felt computer education should begin in secondary school. Therefore, as they began expanding DTSS outside the confines of the Kiewit Computer Center at Dartmouth, some of their first targets were area high schools.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Ibid.

During the 1964–1965 school year, Kemeny and Kurz introduced teletypes to Hanover High School, a public school located just a short walk from the Dartmouth campus. The students there enjoyed programming so much that a computer club at the school counted several hundred members before the end of the year. By 1967, eight more high schools in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont had joined the network. That same year, Kemeny established the Dartmouth Secondary School Project with another NSF grant to form the Kiewit Network, which connected 18 high schools across New England to DTSS at no cost.²¹

With thousands of high school and college students having access to a computer and being encouraged to flex their creativity by programming whatever they wanted in BASIC, it is no surprise that many games appeared on the network. Indeed, Kemeny felt encouraging game playing on DTSS was crucial to its success because engaging in a fun activity could serve as a pleasant introduction to the new technology and help alleviate fears related to using it. In the late 1960s, students wrote simulations of casino games like blackjack and poker; sports like basketball, baseball, and soccer; and adaptations of board games like checkers. Even Kemeny chipped in: on November 21, 1965, the avid football fan created a simple game called FTBALL to commemorate Dartmouth’s upset victory over his alma mater Princeton to win the Ivy League championship.²²

***

The DTSS project was a full partnership between Dartmouth and GE. At the 1964 Fall Joint Computer Conference, the two organizations publicized the time-sharing system and the BASIC language at a jointly operated booth. That same fall, MIT’s own ambitious extension of the CTSS, dubbed Project MAC, chose a GE computer to serve as the heart of its time-sharing system, no doubt spurred by the success of DTSS. Buoyed by these contracts, GE launched a commercial time-sharing service in 1965 through a two-pronged strategy of selling and leasing computers and opening time-sharing service centers to provide computing to individuals, small businesses, and educational organizations that could not afford to own a computer.²³

²¹ Ibid, chap. 3.

²² Ibid, chap. 2.

²³ Ibid, chap. 4.

By 1968, the highly profitable GE time-sharing operation had opened 25 locations and spurred imitation from over 20 companies. Some of these were existing firms active in other fields that rented out terminals like IBM and BBN, while others were specifically set up to offer time-sharing services like Tymshare in San Francisco, established by former GE employees in 1965, and Call-a-Computer in North Carolina. Together these corporations brought computer use to tens of thousands of individuals across the United States.

The success of DTSS, particularly with bringing computer use into secondary schools, also helped spur similar educational computer networks in other parts of the country. Many of these projects also adopted the BASIC programming language, for Kemeny and Kurz promoted it widely and made it freely available. As with DTSS, the combination of an easy-to-use programming language and a mandate for students to flex their creativity on computer terminals in a largely unstructured way ensured these systems would also sport a variety of games.

One of the first significant educational networks to emerge after DTSS was the Huntington Project, which Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn electrical engineering professor Ludwig Braun established in 1967 with the aid of an NSF grant.²⁴ Like Noble Gividen and John Kemeny, Braun believed that computers would play an important role in the future of education, so between 1967 and 1970 the Huntington Project placed computers and/or time-sharing terminals in over 80 high schools in 30 Long Island, New York, school districts to explore how best to incorporate computers into the high school curriculum.²⁵ During the creation of the project, Braun visited Kemeny and Kurz in Dartmouth and fell in love with the BASIC programming language, which ensured it would play a key role at Huntington.²⁶

Over 3,000 students gained computer access through the Huntington Project,²⁷ and they began creating simple games like those appearing on the DTSS. One that stands out, if only for being unusual in the context of the usual casino and board game fare, is High Noon. Programmed by Syosset High School student Christopher Gaylo in 1970, this turn-based game simulates a Wild West shootout against a computer-controlled bandit named Black Bart. During each of his turns, the player has the option to move, shoot, or run away. The player and Bart have four shots apiece, and the odds of a successful hit increases the closer they get to each other. Playing the game is therefore a balancing act of moving just close enough to bring down Bart before he can shoot the player. While a simple game, High Noon includes brief narrative snippets to frame the action, introducing a small degree of storytelling into a medium still largely based around fast action, puzzle solving, or simulation without any context.

²⁴ Ibid, chap. 3

²⁵ Marian Visich, Jr. and Ludwig Braun, “The Use of Computer Simulations in High School Curricula,” Huntington Computer Project, January 1974, 2.

²⁶ Rankin, 2018, chap. 3.

²⁷ Visich and Braun, 1974, 2.

At the close of the first Huntington Project in 1970, Braun and his colleagues concluded, like the Westchester BOCES computing project before them, that simulations showed the greatest promise for computer-enhanced learning. Therefore, Braun secured a second grant to extend the project with a new focus on crafting educational simulations for high school students. Over the next two years, Huntington developed 17 simulations covering subjects as diverse as combating a malaria epidemic, competing to sell a product, and evaluating the damage caused by water pollutants and the effectiveness of antipollution measures.²⁸ These simulations were widely disseminated over the next few years and helped generate further interest in bringing computers and time-sharing terminals into secondary – and even elementary – schools.

While the Huntington Project brought computing to many schools, perhaps the most remarkable time-sharing hub in the United States was in Minnesota. That Minnesota would become such an important time-sharing center stems from its place as arguably the most important computer industry hub in the Midwest in the 1960s. IBM located a division in the city of Rochester that focused largely on mid-range computer systems, while one of the more effective of the “Seven Dwarfs” competing with IBM in the mainframe space, Control Data Corporation, was headquartered in Minneapolis. Univac and Honeywell maintained a presence in the state as well. This thriving Minnesota computer industry inspired a math teacher named Dale LaFrenz to explore brining computers into the classroom.

A native of St. Charles, Minnesota, LaFrenz attended the University of Minnesota for a time, joined the military, and then completed a bachelor’s degree in math education at Mankato State. After teaching for two years, LaFrenz returned to the University of Minnesota to pursue a master’s degree in mathematics but discovered he was not suited to life as a pure mathematician. He changed course when he discovered UHigh, a high school established by the University of Minnesota College of Education in 1908 to serve as a testing ground for new teaching theories and curricular approaches. LaFrenz became a teacher at the school as he pursued his degree and remained there for five years.²⁹

²⁸ Ibid, 2–23.

²⁹ Dale LaFrenz, 1995, interview by Judy E. O’Neill, April 13, Charles Babbage Institute, https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107423/oh315dl.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

In 1963, LaFrenz was one of a group of UHigh math teachers who believed computers would be important to the future of education and began developing a computer curriculum for the school. A CDC employee named Bob Albrecht told them about DTSS, so they called Kemeny and were impressed to learn about a system that allowed a student one-on-one access to a computer via a teletype. Kemeny offered to bring UHigh into the Kiewit Network if the school could handle the long-distance charges. LaFrenz got a grant from GE, and UHigh connected to the Kiewit Network in 1965. The next year, Minneapolis-based Pillsbury Company purchased the new time-sharing-optimized GE-635, so UHigh left Kiewit for the cheaper local option.³⁰

LaFrenz and his colleagues began evangelizing time-sharing in state educational circles, and in 1966 another University of Minnesota College of Education entity, the Educational Research and Development Council (ERDC), began taking steps to form a larger computing consortium. Like the BOCES system in New York, Minnesota had a law on the books called the Joint Exercise of Power Act that allowed local government entities, including school systems, to form combined organizations to pool money and make decisions on behalf of the member entities. The ERDC proposed that Minneapolis-St. Paul school districts join forces to purchase a time-sharing mainframe and introduce terminals at schools throughout the Twin Cities. In 1967, this initiative led to the creation of the Minnesota School Districts Data Processing Joint Board, soon renamed Total Information for Educational Systems (TIES), encompassing 18 area school districts.³¹ Dale LaFrenz left UHigh to serve as head of instructional services for TIES.³²

One of the many Minneapolis schools with a TIES terminal in the early 1970s was Bryant Junior High School in south Minneapolis. In 1971, two Carleton College math majors named Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann were student teaching at Bryant while rooming with a third Carleton student named Don Rawitsch, a student teacher in American history at a school in north Minneapolis. One night, Dillenberger and Heinemann returned home to discover their roommate plotting an elaborate board game on the floor of their living room. Rawitsch was due to teach a unit on Western expansion in a little over a week, and he felt the students might find the subject more exciting if he created a board game depicting travel along the famed Oregon Trail.³³ Heinemann had taken the only computer course offered by Carleton before serving as a lab assistant for the instructor. For some time, he had been pondering creating a program allowing a user to interact with a computer through natural language, but he had been unable to brainstorm a concept. When he beheld Rawitsch trying to draw a map of the American West on a four-foot sheet of butcher paper, he suggested to his two roommates that they create the game on a computer instead.³⁴

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Rankin, 2018, chap. 5.

³² LaFrenz, 1995.

³³ Jessica Lussenhop, “Oregon Trail: How Three Minnesotans Forged Its Path,” City Pages, January 19, 2011, http://www.citypages.com/news/oregon-trail-how-three-minnesotans-forged-its-path-6745749.

³⁴ Kevin Wong, “The Forgotten History of ‘The Oregon Trail,’ as Told By Its Creators,” Motherboard, February 15, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qkx8vw/the-forgotten-history-of-the-oregon-trail-as-told-by-its-creators.

Rawitsch had already spent about a week designing the board game before his roommates became involved. He had planned to chart player movement across the map through dice rolls, while having the students draw random event cards to simulate the hardships encountered on the trail. For the computerized version, the trio translated movement into a fixed amount of progress each turn based on a speed chosen by the player, while adding the consumption of resources such as food and medicine to the mix. In place of random event cards, the programmers created a flow chart of misfortunes that could occur and tied them into the terrain that the player was traversing so that, for example, attacks by bandits would be more likely in the plains, while cold weather mishaps were most likely to occur in the mountains.³⁵

Heinemann handled main programming duties on the game, and Dillenberger assisted with subroutines and debugging.³⁶ They programmed the game after school hours in the Bryant computer room, a small converted janitor’s closet outfitted with a teletype and two chairs.³⁷ Most of the programming proved straightforward, but one difficulty was implementing hunting in the game, which could be used to replenish food resources. The solution came from Heinemann, who realized that BASIC could not only register inputs from the teletype, but could also register the length of time between inputs. He took advantage of this feature to make results dependent on how fast the player could accurately type the word “Bang.”³⁸

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Lussenhop, 2011.

³⁸ Wong, 2017.

Dubbed The Oregon Trail, Rawitsch, Heinemann, and Dillenberger’s game proved a hit with both Rawitsch’s class and the students at Bryant Junior High. When the week-long Western expansion unit ended, however, Rawitsch copied the program onto paper tape and deleted it from the system.³⁹ Oregon Trail may not have even become a footnote in computer game history save that after he graduated, Rawitsch was drafted to fight in Southeast Asia. While he avoided military service by filing for conscientious objector status, this required him to provide two years of alternate service considered beneficial to the country, and teaching did not qualify.⁴⁰

Meanwhile, the success of TIES in the Minneapolis area had attracted the attention of the Minnesota legislature, which mandated that the same computing services be provided to the entire state. This led to the creation of the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium (MECC) in 1973 to provide time-sharing to all 435 school districts in Minnesota. Dale LaFrenz, who had left TIES by that point and was self-employed, played a role in building the organization and became its assistant director. One of Rawitsch’s professors at Carleton College was friends with LaFrenz, so when Rawitsch needed a public service job, the professor called LaFrenz and secured him a position as a liaison between MECC and a group of community colleges. In 1974, Rawitsch thought of Oregon Trail and asked if MECC might be interested in distributing it on the time-sharing system. LaFrenz responded in the affirmative, and Oregon Trail was soon being played across the state of Minnesota.⁴¹

***

Once DTSS and GE proved the efficacy of time-sharing and helped spur its widespread adoption in the classroom, it did not take long for the concept to attract the attention of other major computer companies, most notably DEC. DEC realized that school consortiums were either purchasing or leasing time on expensive mainframe computers and that offering them minicomputer packages instead could drive down the cost of time-sharing for these consortiums and win a large portion of the educational computing market. The company repackaged its PDP-8 computer into a series of configurations it called EduSystems that included its own FOCAL programming language, which, like BASIC, was designed for ease of use.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Lussenhop, 2011.

⁴¹ Ibid.

DEC’s entry into the marketplace proved a boon for smaller consortiums that did not necessarily have the resources of an Ivy League school like Dartmouth or an entire state like Minnesota. One good example is Project Local, one of the earliest high school computing consortiums. Local grew out of a pilot project by two Massachusetts towns, Lexington and Westwood, that were awarded a grant under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to lease teletypes hooked up to Telecomp, the time-sharing service run by BBN. In 1967, a further grant allowed Lexington, Westwood, and the additional towns of Natick, Needham, and Wellesley to establish Project Local under the supervision of Robert Haven to explore the use of computers in math education and in developing problem-solving skills.⁴²

For the first year, Local continued to rely on Telecomp for computer access, which proved expensive. In 1968, the consortium secured another grant that allowed it to purchase five DEC EduSystems based around the PDP-8/I minicomputer so that each town could have its own system. As the project continued to grow in the early 1970s, its size and scope expanded as it encompassed more primary and secondary schools and began developing curricular materials and training programs focused on better integrating computers in the classroom.⁴³

As with all the early time-sharing networks, Project Local soon became a hub for games, several of which were novel for the time period. For example, in 1968 three students named Cram, Goodie, and Hibbard wrote a war game that recreates 14 U.S. Civil War battles using a basic rock-paper-scissors approach to determine results after the player and the computer opponent choose from one of four offensive or defensive strategies each turn. Local was also the home of one of the most significant computer games created in the 1960s, Lunar Lander. Its creator, Lexington High School student Jim Storer, had been captivated by the moon landing in July 1969, so when he returned to school in the fall, he resolved to program a simulation of the landing in FOCAL on the PDP-8. Lunar Lander tasks the player with deciding how much of his limited fuel supply to burn each turn to control the velocity of a lunar module and guide it to a safe, soft landing on the lunar surface. Although simple in concept, the game modeled the physics of lunar gravity and module velocity reasonably well through a set of complex equations that Storer believes were provided by his father.⁴⁴

⁴² Pamela Petrakos, “Project Local: A Classroom Project with a 13 Year History,” 80 Microcomputing, February 1981, 74.

⁴³ Ibid, 74–75.

⁴⁴ Benj Edwards, “Forty Years of Lunar Lander,” Technologizer, July 19, 2009, https://www.technologizer.com/2009/07/19/lunar-lander.

Storer also created his own variant of The Sumerian Game called King after discovering a scaled down version of the game called Hamurabi on the Project Local network. That a Sumerian Game variant existed on a time-sharing network when work had ceased on the game in Westchester before time-sharing became popular was due to a remarkable set of encounters. With DEC starting to focus on the education market in the late 1960s, its engineers began attending conferences to espouse the use of DEC computers in schools. At one such conference in Alberta in March 1968, Canadian DEC employee Doug Dymet gave a talk on computers in education, after which a woman described to him in detail an interesting educational game she had come across called The Sumerian Game. When Dymet returned from the conference, he decided to program the game as a demo for FOCAL.⁴⁵

To serve as an effective demo, Dymet required his game to run in the smallest possible FOCAL memory configuration of 4K, so he scaled down The Sumerian Game by focusing on just the first phase of harvesting and storing grain to manage population growth. Not being knowledgeable about Sumerian history, he decided to change the king in the game to the more famous Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, though he misspelled it as “Hamurabi” in the game text. Once he completed the game, he published it in both the 1968 DECUS catalog and a 1970 book of FOCAL programs aimed at colleges. The official name of the Dymet version was King of Sumeria, but due to character limitations in program titles, it went by a variety of names, of which the most widespread was that of the featured king: Hamurabi.⁴⁶

By 1970, dozens, if not hundreds, of games were being created and played on time-sharing networks and providing countless hours of entertainment to students across the United States. These were isolated pockets of game-playing, however, remaining largely disconnected from each other and unknown by the larger public. Only about 13% of American high schools were using computers for instruction, and these schools tended to be clustered in specific areas like Oregon, New England, and Minnesota.⁴⁷ Most of the country’s students remained computerless. Therefore, while Lexington students were piloting a Lunar Lander, Long Island kids were participating in shootouts in High Noon, and Minnesota school children were traversing the Oregon Trail, none of these games attained even the modest profile of Spacewar!. Within a decade, however, games like Hamurabi and Lunar Lander would become household names – at least among those who owned or worked with computers – after multiple channels for the national distribution and promotion of software emerged in the early 1970s.

⁴⁵ Devin Monnens, “‘I Beg to Report…’ The Sumerian Game 50 Years Later: The Strange and Untold Story of the World’s Most Influential Text Simulation Game,” unpublished draft 1.3.2, c. 2017, 8.

⁴⁶ Ibid, 8–9.

⁴⁷ Visich and Braun, 1974, 9. While not an important game creation center, the University of Oregon was another early pioneer of time-sharing networks.