15
These Are the Voyages
In spring 1951, the photography club of Malverne Junior-Senior High School in Malverne, New York, took a field trip to New York City to walk from Battery Park to 42nd Street while photographing everything in sight. One of the club’s students, David Hollerith Ahl, held no passion for photography and had merely joined the club due to a crush on its sponsor. He would discover a new life-changing hobby that day, however, as the group passed through an area called “Radio Row.”1
World War II had been won not just by legions of soldiers, but also by investment in new technologies that relied on electronic components for their operation. Amplifiers, transformers, diodes, resistors, vacuum tubes, and solenoids were produced in great quantities to feed the war effort and discarded in record numbers when it reached its conclusion. Junked electronic parts and devices filled military surplus stores and scrapyards and fueled a new wave of hobbyists interested in creating their own electronic devices. In Manhattan, much of this business clustered in “Radio Row” on the site later occupied by the World Trade Center. As Ahl perused the bins of discarded components lining the street, he became the latest convert to the world of electronics.2
In 1956, Ahl graduated high school and matriculated to Cornell University on a full scholarship provided by the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation. Cornell installed its first computer the next year, and Ahl took both available computer courses. He also spent his summers working in Grumman’s computer group. In 1961, Ahl matriculated to the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie-Mellon, where he wrote portions of the Carnegie-Tech Management Game and helped port it from machine language to FORTRAN.3
After two years in the military, Ahl became a computer programmer for a market research company. In 1969, he joined the Educational Systems Research Institute in Pittsburgh, where he wrote computer simulations aimed at predicting the success of vocational school students. He also began taking night courses at the University of Pittsburgh to earn a Ph.D. in educational psychology. He was only a few credits and a dissertation short when he took a job in 1970 with DEC to perform market research on educational computing.4
Ahl spearheaded DEC’s move into education by developing the EduSystem bundles largely responsible for bringing PDP-8s into the high school setting. He also became one of the company’s lone champions of BASIC and made sure the language would run on PDP systems alongside DEC’s preferred FOCAL. To further entice schools to adopt a DEC minicomputer for their time-sharing needs, he scoured the country for programs that might interest both students and teachers. Some would come bundled as part of an EduSystem, while others would be printed in a newsletter he started called Edu that reached a circulation of 20,000 within 18 months. In launching Edu, Ahl took his first step toward becoming one of the key individuals in the dissemination of many of the first iconic computer games.5
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The spread of time-sharing in the late 1960s created the first environments in which computer game creation was not merely tolerated, but openly encouraged. From FTBALL at Dartmouth to Lunar Lander at Lexington to Hamurabi at DEC, students, instructors, and professional programmers created and played games as part of a larger initiative to further technical education and computer-assisted instruction. These communities rarely intersected, however, and none of these games initially attained national recognition.
In the early 1970s, a new group of evangelists arose who operated outside of any particular time-sharing network, felt the entire United States was on the brink of computerizing, and wanted people from all walks of society to be prepared for this revolution. They established newsletters and magazines designed to keep the general public abreast of the latest developments in computing, and they embraced the BASIC programming language as the simplest method to empower average people to start programming on their own. Through these efforts, some of the more accomplished programs developed in BASIC – including many games – gained national exposure for the first time.
No single game illustrates the methods through which computer games began to disseminate nationwide in the early 1970s than the tactical combat game Star Trek. In 1971, a high school senior named Mike Mayfield began visiting the computer center at the University of California campus in his native Irvine. UC Irvine owned two computers at the time, a Sigma 7 mainframe and a DEC PDP-10 hooked up to a vector display, for which a port of the ubiquitous Spacewar! had been installed. Mayfield was teaching himself BASIC out of a book at the time and decided to create his own version of the game. Unfortunately for Mayfield, his access to the computer lab was not exactly authorized, and the time-sharing account he was “borrowing” only provided access to the Sigma 7, which lacked a display. Instead, he would have to output his program to an ASR-33 teletype terminal, by far the most common output device for time-sharing systems in the late 1960s and early 1970s when CRT terminals were a rare commodity.6
Mayfield was also a fan of the pioneering science fiction television show Star Trek, which had been cancelled in 1969 after three seasons but was just entering a second, more successful life in syndication. Mayfield and several friends began brainstorming how they might implement a combat game based on Star Trek on the Sigma 7. Their ideas were stymied by the limitations of the teletype, for virtually any real-time combat game they could think up would simply be impractical on a system that only outputted on rolls of paper. Finally, they decided they could at least have the teletype print out a map of a section of space to provide a static view of a tactical combat situation.7
Over the course of several weeks, Mayfield implemented Star Trek on the Sigma 7. As an unauthorized user, he did not have any personal disk space on the system, so he printed a paper tape copy at the end of each day and reloaded the program the next day so he could keep working.8 The final product is a tactical combat game in which the player controls the U.S.S. Enterprise and is tasked with ridding the galaxy of Klingon ships. The Enterprise has a limited amount of energy to accomplish this task, which is expended through movement, discharging weapons, and bolstering shields. This energy can be replenished at a starbase. The galaxy is divided into quadrants, each of which can be occupied by several Klingon ships or a starbase. Klingons do not move during encounters but do fight back. They can be destroyed with phasers, which always hit but decrease in power over distance, or photon torpedoes, which never lose potency but must be precisely aimed.
Once Mayfield completed his game and wiped it from the Sigma 7 for the last time, it should have been relegated to the dustbin of history like so many early programming experiments. It persisted because of Mayfield’s new HP-35 calculator. As he engaged with his new toy in 1972, he made trips to the local HP sales office and at some point mentioned his Star Trek game. In 1964, HP had entered the computer business through the purchase of a small company called Data Systems, Inc., and by 1972, it was a major player in the minicomputer market. Like DEC, HP aggressively marketed its HP 2100 series of time-sharing computers to schools. It also maintained a library of contributed programs that were available upon request. While most of these programs were educational, there were several games. The HP employees at the sales office offered to let Mayfield program on their HP 2000C computer on the condition that he convert his Star Trek game to HP BASIC. HP included the program in its software catalog with credit given to “Centerline Engineering,” a name Mayfield concocted for a non-existent company.9
In summer 1973, David Ahl discovered Mayfield’s Star Trek game.10 By that time, he was no longer working on educational systems at DEC after having been laid off earlier in the year, but he managed to remain with the company in its R&D division. While working on the RSTS time-sharing system for the PDP-11, Ahl compiled a book of the many games he encountered over the past two years, all of which he converted into DEC BASIC. In July 1973, DEC published this book as 101 BASIC Computer Games.11
In his book, Ahl brought together for the first time in a single package some of the most popular programs on various time-sharing systems. Many of these were simple number-guessing games with names like BAGLES, BULCOW, and STARS. Others were logic puzzles (TOWER); Nim variants (NIM, EVEN, 23MTCH); educational drills (CHIEF, MATHD1, TRAIN); and simple simulations of sports, board, dice, or casino games (BASBAL, BASKET, BLKJAC, CHECKR, FOOTBL, MNOPLY, POKER, ROULET, TICTAC, YAHTZE). Still others were not games at all, rendering character-based portraits of everything from Snoopy to the Playboy bunny or informing people on what day of the week they were born. Doug Dymet’s Hamurabi was included, as were many games from Project Local such as Civil War, King, and Lunar Lander.12 Finally, Ahl included the recently discovered Star Trek, which he dubbed SPACWR.
In early 1974, a Westinghouse employee named Bob Leedom discovered SPACWR in Ahl’s book and implemented it on his company’s Data General Nova 800 minicomputer. After converting it to Data General BASIC, Leedom and some of his friends improved the game. In the original, commands were entered by selecting a number, but Leedom replaced these with easy-to-remember three-letter combinations. He also improved navigation, maneuvering, and fire control and added movement to the Klingon ships. Finally, to add more flavor to the game he included status reports by crew members such as Spock and Uhura. Once this version was complete, Leedom sent a letter describing the game to one of the first nationwide personal computing newsletters, People’s Computing Company, circulated from Menlo Park, California.13
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People’s Computing Company was the brainchild of Bob Albrecht, the person who informed Dale LaFrenz about BASIC at UHigh and one of the first people to bridge the gap between computing professionals and ordinary people. Albrecht first worked with computers at the Aeronautical Division of Honeywell in Minneapolis in the 1950s. He was an avid skier, so when the Burroughs Corporation had an opening in its computer division in Colorado, he moved west. After spending time at a Denver-based company called Martin Aerospace, he moved on to Control Data Corporation (CDC), which had just opened a new Denver office.14
One of Albrecht’s jobs at CDC was teaching programming to new hires who had received insufficient instruction prior to joining the company. In spring 1962, he had a life-changing experience when asked to speak to the math club at George Washington High School. At the end of his presentation, he asked the students if they would be interested in learning programming and was shocked by their enthusiastic response. He began teaching students how to program on a CDC 160, one of the earliest minicomputers, and grew impressed at how easily students took to programming compared to his employee trainees. In the process, he discovered a new calling of empowering students to work with computers.15
In 1963, CDC purchased the computer division of California-based Bendix Corporation. Bendix had been marketing a smaller, low-cost computer called the G-15 that CDC felt could be introduced to schools and sent Albrecht to California to explore this possibility. While CDC ultimately decided to phase out the G-15 instead, the trip to San Francisco gave Albrecht the opportunity to meet Sid Fernbach at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. An early computing pioneer, Fernbach believed both that computers would come down drastically in price and that it was important to teach children how to use them. This encounter helped crystallized Albrecht’s desire to make computing available to the masses.16
Soon after his meeting with Fernbach, Albrecht transferred back to CDC headquarters in Minneapolis, but he spent most of his time on the road evangelizing computer use by teaching groups of students how to program and emphasizing how quickly they were picking it up. He also learned of BASIC and became one of its most enthusiastic adherents. Before the end of 1964, he left CDC and turned to freelance writing. Figuring he might as well pursue his new profession in a less frozen environment, he moved to San Francisco in 1966.17
In the late 1960s, San Francisco was in the throes of the counterculture movement. While this movement took many forms, some of which were decidedly anti-technology, there existed a small group of technophiles who took to the counterculture and its desire for equality, social justice, community activism, and human progress and saw the computer as a great equalizer that would give ordinary people the power to change the world. Albrecht fit right in with this ethos and became affiliated with the Midpeninsula Free University, a commune that offered free instruction in anything that an individual was interested in teaching. He also met a former economics consultant with the Stanford Research Institute named Dick Raymond, who was looking to establish a nonprofit foundation to explore alternative education. Albrecht helped Raymond establish the Portola Institute, which, among other endeavors, served as the publisher for noted counterculture figure Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog.18
Through the Portola Institute, Albrecht connected with a Woodside High School teacher named LeRoy Finkel who shared his passion for educating students in computer use. Together, they founded a computer book publishing company called Dymax as a for-profit spin-off from Portola and wrote a series of books about programming in BASIC.19 Initially headquartered in a warehouse in Redwood City, Dymax moved to a shopping mall in Menlo Park so it could establish a People’s Computer Center (PCC) in which anyone could access a terminal hooked up to a time-sharing service. Soon after, Albrecht acquired a PDP-8 from DEC in trade for some technical writing so Dymax could run its own service.20 By 1971, the PCC was a magnet for area youths interested in learning more about computing.21
Albrecht did not just want to inspire a few local students; he wanted to create a movement. He knew that time-sharing setups were becoming increasingly common in schools around the country, and he wanted to create a publication that would both document the rise of this new time-sharing revolution and bring together its disparate elements in order to further its growth. To that end, he launched a newsletter in October 1972 called the People’s Computer Company named in honor of the counterculture rock icon Big Brother and the Holding Company. The counterculture ethos of the publication was evident from the cover of the first issue, which stated the purpose of the newsletter was to free the computers that were being used against people by the military-industrial complex and empower people to use them instead for the good of humanity.22
People’s Computer Company embraced BASIC as the medium of this new computer revolution and from its inception featured listings for computer programs written in the language that subscribers could type into their own computers, many of which were games. As with 101 Basic Computer Games most were simple logic puzzles or guessing games, but some were more interesting. The most noteworthy game to come out of the newsletter was a hide-and-seek style game called Hunt the Wumpus programmed by Gregory Yob and published in November 1973.
Wumpus traces its origins to a series of hide-and-seek games using a Cartesian coordinate plain. The original version of the game, simply titled Hide and Seek, was created in 1972 by high school students taking part in a University of Pittsburgh computer education initiative called Project SOLO. This simple game presents a Cartesian coordinate grid upon which three points are occupied. The player must determine the x, y coordinates of each occupied spot. Each time the player types in a set of coordinates, he is given a clue as to how far away he is from one of the occupied spots on the grid. The goal is to find all three objects in as few moves as possible.
Bob Albrecht did his best to keep abreast of all the computer education projects across the United States and reported on them whenever he could. Indeed, the simulation programs created by the Huntington Project were featured in the inaugural issue of the People’s Computer Company. Albrecht learned of the activities of Project SOLO as well and enjoyed the Hide and Seek game so much that he created two Cartesian coordinate games of his own, Hurkle and Mugwump, that he published in the third issue of his newsletter in 1973.23 Yob was hanging around the PCC during this same time frame and observed people playing the game, but personally found it boring and decided to create something better.24
For his own stab at a hide-and-seek game, Yob moved from a flat, Cartesian plane to his favorite geometric solid, the dodecahedron. Each vertex of the shape represents a room in a series of interconnected caves, while each line denotes a path between two rooms. A creature called the “wumpus” inhabits this cave network and will devour the player if he is in the same room. The player wins through killing the wumpus by shooting an arrow into the room it inhabits. If the player shoots an arrow into an empty room, the wumpus moves to a new location. When the player enters a room, he is informed if the wumpus is in an adjacent room, so the goal of the player is to triangulate the position of the wumpus by mapping out the caves and only shooting when he is certain which room contains the beast. Other obstacles like bottomless pits and bats add additional challenge.25
Once Hunt the Wumpus hit the PCC time-sharing network, it quickly became the most popular program on the system. With games proving so successful, Albrecht published a book of computer games in December 1974 called What to Do After You Hit Return.26 The book largely retread the same ground as Ahl, complete with its own versions of Star Trek, Hamurabi, Civil War, and Lunar Lander, but it also included games particular to the PCC like Hunt the Wumpus. Albrecht continued promoting interesting game developments in his newsletter as well, which is why Bob Leedom, wrote a letter to the People’s Computer Company describing the improvements he made to the Mayfield Star Trek game.
Albrecht did not follow up with Leedom and continued to promulgate the original Mayfield Star Trek in later printings of What to Do After You Hit Return, but David Ahl did. Ahl subscribed to Albrecht’s newsletter and had even included Hurkle and Mugwump in 101 BASIC Computer Games. He read about Leedom’s version of Star Trek in People’s Computing Company and called the programmer to ask for a copy of the code to feature it in his newest publishing venture, Creative Computing.
In 1974, David Ahl finally left DEC for good. The impetus for his departure was a rejection by the Operations Committee of two prototypes he was working on that repackaged the PDP-8 and the PDP-11 in a manner that promoted their use as personal computers. The Operations Committee split right down the middle on the proposal, with the engineers feeling it was a wonderful idea and the marketers being completely against it. It fell to Ken Olsen to break the tie, and he turned it down because he did not see value in marketing a minicomputer for use by a single individual when the entire industry was embracing the idea of universal access to time-sharing terminals.27
Ahl moved to Morristown, NJ, and took a job with AT&T as its education marketing manager, but he had no intention of leaving his personal computing evangelism behind. At the National Computer Conference in June 1974, he announced his intention to publish a new magazine called Creative Computing. While several computer trade publications existed, hobbyist electronics magazines often covered developments in computing, and a handful of newsletters like the People’s Computer Company circulated, Creative Computing would be the first magazine dedicated solely to personal computer use by hobbyists and enthusiasts.28
Ahl promoted the magazine throughout the summer, and by 1974, he had netted 600 subscribers. Rather than print just 600 copies of the first issue, Ahl deliberately overprinted to the tune of 8,000 copies and sent the extra 7,400 to libraries and school systems at no charge.29 Officially dated December 1974, the inaugural issue featured articles describing how computers were being used around the country, suggestions for new ways to use computers, reviews of computer-related products, and a type-in listing for a game called Depth Charge that played like the old hide-and-seek games except on a cube rather than a flat plane. Subsequent issues continued to feature new games, and the Leedom version of Star Trek was featured in the fourth issue in May 1975 as Super Star Trek.
Circulation numbers remained low for Creative Computing over those first few issues and only reached 2,500 by August 1975. Soon after, subscriptions skyrocketed, so that by 1978 the magazine had over 60,000 subscribers and reached nearly $1 million in revenue, allowing Ahl to quit his day job at AT&T to devote his full attention to the magazine.30 The reason for this windfall was that by 1978 computing was no longer solely the purview of the student in the computer lab or the enthusiast who lived near a time-sharing center, for computers had finally entered the home.