Video Game History
1679 - Gottfried Leibniz is a german mathematician that invented Binary.
1770 - The Turk was a chess machine that had a human inside to fake automation. Bought in 1804 by Johann Maelzel and toured around with it, til it was destroyed by fire in 1854.
1804 - Joseph Jacquard created a weaving loom that was automated by hole punched cardboard that "programmed" what pattern the loom was making.
1821 - Charles Babbage is a computer pioneer that created Difference Engines and Analytical Engines. Difference Engines(1821) are calculators, used addition, and Analytical were for general purpose computing. Neither were built.
1843 - Ada Lovelace is considered the first programmer. She was entranced by Babbage's engine in
1833. 1843 she translated an article from french on the analytical engine and added her own notes. She published the first computer algorithm.
1890 - Herman Hollerith adapted the punch cards to include electricity, for the census. This was the precursor of the IBM company.
1914-1920 - Leonardo Torres y Quevedo invented a chess playing machine(no human tricks this time). This machine would always get checkmate no matter how the human made moves.
1923 - Arthur Scherbius was a german engineer that created the enigma machine for encrypting and decrypting coded machines.
1940 - Edward Condon designed a computer for Westinghouse that played Nim and beat the humans
90% of the time. Nim = Dont pick up the last matchstick.
1947 - Thomas Goldsmith Jr and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent for a cathode ray tube amusement device. This early console prototype used an oscilloscope as a screen.
1948 - Man U engineers came up with a way to store memory using electric tape inspired by wartime radar. The Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine had the nickname Baby and used a whole room for a mere 128 bytes of memory. Thankfully computers are not that big anymore!
1950 - Claude Shannon published an article describing the basic guidelines for progrmaming a chess machine.
Alan Turing invented the idea of a Universal Machine that could perform any set of instructions.
1939 he and his fellow mathematicians created a machine that could crack the enigma machine's messages. 1946 he produced the design for the automatic computing engine. In 1950 he came up with the imitation game which was the major contributor to the AI community, and is now the Turing Test.
1951 - Baby became the prototype for the first computer the Ferranti Mark I, it was recorded playing the earliest form of digital music by the BBC.(Very loose definition of music here)
1952 - A.S Douglas created a naughts and crosses game at Cambridge University as part of his human-computer interaction research.
1954 - The first blackjack program is created in New mexico on an IBM 701. (Atomic bomb homeplace)
1955 - US Military created Hutspiel, a war game between NATO and USSR as a training exercise.
First appearance of Hack as a computer term. It was used in an MIT meeting in reference to people working/hacking on the electrical system needing to turn the power off. 1960s is when the term became used by generalists. 1975 was when The Jargon File was released, which included 8 definitions of the term Hacker. 1993 is when Hacker became associated with a "digital trespasser".
1956 - Arthur Samuel released his checkers program created on an IBM 701, which beat a master player 6yrs later.
1957 - Alex Bernstein wrote the first computer chess program on the IBM 704.
1958 - Willy Higinbotham created Tennis for Two for public demonstration in the Brookhaven National Library. This style most likely was the inspiration for Pong.
1959 - MIT students created Mouse in the Maze in which the player draws the maze and then the mouse navigates it to find the cheese.
1960 - First account of someone skipping work to play games. 1 month later, IBM workers Paul and John Burgeson run the first known baseball program on an IBM 1620.
1961 - Raytheon created a global cold war simulation for the US. This simulation was too complex for the non-nerds that didnt understand computers. They then created a user friendly version.
1961 - The creation of Space Wars! Considered to be the first proper video game and introduced real time action, and shooting.
1963 - US defence department creates their game version of how the US would beat the USSR in a nuclear war called STAGE(Simulation of Total Atomic Global Exchange)
1964 - John Kemeny declared that "everyone is a programmer", and created the BASIC programming language and computer time share. This enabled the students to easily create computer games, leading to a boom.
1965 - Dartmouth students produced the first football game the day after they won the ivy league champs.
1966 - Ralph Baer came to the US in 1938 to escape the nazis. Joined Saunders Associates and helped make airbourne radar components. Pushed for TVs to be interactive.
1967 - "The Brown Box" was a prototype that let ppl play several games. Baer patented it in 1968, and in 1972 Magnavox became the first console licensee selling "Odyssey"
1970 - Scientific American published the rules for LIFE, a simulation of cell growth, reproduction and death. Hackers all wanted it on their own computers due to the pretty patterns that were created.
1971 - Don Rawitsche, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger created the infamous Oregon Trail, a simulation of pioneers westward trek. This game is now a meme due to its high level of difficulty and random deaths for seemingly no reason.
- Alan Turing Horizon BBC Documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-sTs2o0VuY
- History of the word Hacker - https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/a-short-history-of-hack
