Spacewar!

[Paul Koning]

>>>>> "Mike" == Mike Loewen <mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us> writes:

 Mike> On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
 >> Pong Story has a new bit of information I've never seen before.
 >> Apparently, in 1952 a PhD candidate wrote his thesis on
 >> human-computer interaction and used the EDSAC's memory tubes to
 >> display a tic-tac-toe game:

 Mike> I don't see any mention on the Pong site about the video (oops,
 Mike> COMPUTER, he,he) games on the old SAGE (AN/FSQ-7) system.  We
 Mike> had a baseball game, which would display a baseball diamond on
 Mike> the large display scopes:

 Mike> http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/images5/PDRM0380.jpg

 Mike> The pitcher would "pitch" by pressing a button on the scope
 Mike> console, which would start a spot of light (the ball) moving
 Mike> towards the batter.  At the right time, the batter would press
 Mike> another button at the end of a cord to swing the bat.  If the
 Mike> batter connected, the ball would fly out and the men would run
 Mike> around the bases.

 Mike> I don't know when the baseball program was written, but the
 Mike> SAGE systems started going into place in 1958. 

Interesting.  So that could make it older than PDP-1 Spacewar,
perhaps. 

There's an implementation of a baseball game that sounds exactly like
what you describe, on the CDC 6600.  That one is dated 1967 (at least
the version I have).

    paul