Advent of Computing - Episode 4.5 - Space Travel!

Episode Date: May 27, 2019

In this mini-episode we talk about Space Travel, an obscure video game from 1969.

I'm starting to realize that 1969 was a bizarrely pivotal year for computers. You have a lot of things that are going on at once. Engelbart's mother-of-all demos took place in 1969. Apollo 11's guidance computer brought humans to the moon for the first time. The first paper on ARPANET was published, and Xerox even invented the laser printer in this year. And that's just to name a few. But today, I want to tell you a small story about one of the footnotes in an amazing year

of advances. I'm going to share with you the story of Space Travel, a video game that no one has played in nearly 50 years. in nearly 50 years. Welcome back to Advent of Computing. I'm your host, Sean Haas. Now, this episode is something a little different than I want to try out. Currently, the podcast releases a new episode every two weeks. Now, usually while I'm prepping the next episode, I'll end up with some content that doesn't quite fit into the full release, but just isn't enough to fill an entire new episode. So when that happens, I'm going to try and push out that story as this occasional bite-sized episode, so to speak. Today's episode is about space Travel, a video game that was originally programmed in 1969 but was never released to the public anywhere.

And, as near as I can tell, the game itself has been completely lost to history. But, despite its relative obscurity, Space Travel may have, indirectly, been responsible for one of the largest triumphs in computing history. So here's how I want to tell the story. I'm going to start off by explaining what space travel is as far as the game, and then I'm going to explain why it's important. So first off, what's the gameplay like? If you guessed you travel through space, then congratulations, you are spot on. The name's really the whole giveaway.

The game consists of piloting a spacecraft around in, well, space. You can explore a two-scale model of our solar system, complete with the planets and little moons and everything. Your ship experiences gravity dependent on what celestial body you're near, And as a pilot, you have to account for that gravity as you fly your ship around the stars. You can even attempt to land your craft on planets a la Lunar Lander by carefully adjusting your craft's speed to touch down softly. So, that gameplay isn't super impressive. So, that gameplay isn't super impressive, and the graphics aren't either from archival photos, well, the archival photo that exists of it, it's just vector-drawn green lines Well, first off, this is one of the very first video games, full stop. Keep in mind, we're still in 1969. Pong wasn't even developed for another three or so more years. Also, space travel wasn't a home video game. In fact, it wasn't even

available in arcades. No, this is a breed of games that has essentially died out. You see, space travel was a mainframe video game. It may come as a shock, but think of it. In the 60s, mainframes were really the only option for complex or any computing. Combine that with the fact that humans love to be distracted and programmers are some of the most bored, easily distractible humans possible, and things should start to make sense. All the first video games, in fact, were written for mainframes. And in the 60s and 70s, this

bizarrely covert and robust tradition of mainframe video games really started to spring up. So, if space travel is just one of many, then what makes it special? Well, it's not the gameplay or the graphics, we went over that. And it's not the setting. Believe it or not, a lot of mainframe games already existed that were set in space. What's important is the fact that space travel was in the right place and the right time to be on two of the most influential operating systems of the decade. You see, it was originally written on Multics, the first large-scale and really ambitious timesharing system.

After the Multics project started to come apart at the seams, space travel kept on, well, traveling. The original author of the game was an employee at Bell Labs, so when Bell eventually pulled out of the Multics project, the game came with them. That same programmer would use space travel as a thinly veiled excuse to get access to, and later get more familiar with, a new machine, the PDP-7. Over the next few years, as space travel was ported from the old Multics code to run on the new PDP, that programmer would need to write more and more supporting software to aid in its development.

Ultimately, the video game started to fade into the background, but the system that inspired would not. The name of that system, well, today, you'd call it Unix. Thanks for listening to Advent of Computing. Come back next week and I'll tell you the rest of the Unix story. Until then, you can rate and review on iTunes. Ideas for a new episode or feedback? Go ahead and hit me up on Twitter at Advent of Comp. And as always, have a great rest of your day.