SPACEWAR

<games>

A space-combat simulation game for the PDP-1 written in 1960-61 by Steve Russell, an employee at MIT. SPACEWAR was inspired by E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" books, in which spaceships duel around a star, shooting at each other and jumping through hyperspace. MIT were wondering what to do with a new vector video display so Steve wrote one of the world's first video games (OXO for the EDSAC came earlier).

SPACEWAR aficionados formed the core of the early hacker culture at MIT. Nine years later, a descendant of the game motivated Ken Thompson to build, in his spare time on a scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that became Unix. Less than nine years after that, SPACEWAR was commercialised.

[Was it called "SPACEWAR" or "Space Travel"?]

[Jargon File]

Last updated: 2025-02-11

Nearby terms:

space keyspace leakSPACEWARSPADEspaghetti codespaghetti inheritance

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