In December 1972 Stewart Brant, one of the luminaries of the San Francisco hippie scene, watched as a bunch of computer geeks (or "bums" as he calls them, as in ski bums, or surf bums) enjoyed late night forays into computing centers to play a hack they'd created called SpaceWar. By that time this underground computer bum phenomenon had been played for nearly nine years by rebel computer programmers.
Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-Death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers' valuable computer time. Something basic is going on...
October, 1972, 8 PM, at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, moonlit and remote in the foothills above Palo Alto, California. Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console room just off the main hall containing AI's PDP-10 computer. AI's Head System Programmer and most avid Spacewar nut, Ralph Gorin, faces a display screen which says only:
THIS CONSOLE AVAILABLE.
He logs in on the keyboard with his initials: Click clickclickclick click.
L1,REG
CSD FALL PICNIC. SATURDAY 11 AM IN FLOOD PARK . . .
He interrupts further announcements, including one about the "First Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics" at 8 PM, with: CLick ("run") clickclickclick ("Space War Ralph") click ("do it")
R SWR.
WELCOME TO SPACEWAR.
HOW MANY SHIPS? MAXIMUM IS 5.
