COMPUTER TRAINING
Then in the fall of 1961, the Digital Equipment Corporation donated a state-of-the-art computer called the Programmable Data Processor (PDP-1) to MIT. The PDP-1 was smaller than the TX-O, much faster, and a lot easier to use.
Even before it arrived at MIT, the PDP-1 had captured the imagination of the university’s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC). Club members had already spent several years “requisitioning” computer equipment from around campus and using it to automate their huge model railroad. They’d also spent a lot of time learning how to program the TX-O, so when the PDP-1 finally arrived on campus, they were already the best computer programmers around. And they were ready to hack.
South-pollywog: According to Sesame Street, Kermit the Frog is left-handed.
The PDP-1 came with no software at all; almost everything had to be programmed from scratch. MIT students were doing much of the programming for little or no pay, so the professors who controlled access to the computer agreed to give them plenty of hack time in return. And what did they do with the hack time? They invented games.
LOST IN SPACE
Many TMRC members were science-fiction buffs; so it didn’t take them long to decide what kind of game they wanted to create for the PDP-1: a space game—one that would push the computer’s processing power to its limits. “The basic rules developed quickly,” MIT alumnus J. M. Graetz remembers. “There would be at least two spaceships, each controlled by a set of console switches.… The ships would have a supply of rocket fuel and some sort of a weapon—a ray or a beam, or possibly a missile.”
SPACEWAR!
TMRC member Steve “Slug” Russell wrote the first version of the game, taking about six months and 200 hours of computer time to do it. The game he came up with consisted of two spaceships, one wedge shaped, the other long and thin, which flew around the screen and battled one another by shooting “torpedoes”—dots of light—at each other. Each ship was controlled by a different set of four toggle switches on the PDP-1 console. One toggle switch made the ship rotate clockwise; a second made it rotate counterclockwise; a third switch provided thrust; and a fourth fired the torpedoes. (Ever play Asteroids? The controls were pretty much the same.)
Both ships were controlled by human players. There was no way to play the computer as your opponent, because once everything else had been programmed into it, “there wasn’t enough computing power available to do a decent opponent,” Russell remembered. He named his game Spacewar!
The “average” American CEO’s pay has increased more than 600% since 1990.
A THOUSAND POINTS OF LIGHT
As soon as Russell got the game up and running, other TMRC members began making improvements:
• At first the game had no stars in the background, but the blank screen made it difficult to tell whether slow-moving ships were drifting closer to each other or farther apart. So Russell added a series of random dots… but they didn’t last long. Using an astronomical reference book, another club member, Pete Samson, programmed in an accurate map of the night sky, including the relative brightness of each star.
• Another TMRC member named Dan Edwards inserted a sun—complete with accurate gravitational field—into the center of the screen. Now instead of sitting still in empty space, the ships were constantly being pulled toward the sun, and if they crashed into it they were destroyed. That helped to make the game more interesting, because it inserted an element that was beyond the players’ control. It also made strategy more important, because skilled players could figure out ways to use gravity to their advantage.
• Graetz added a feature called “hyperspace.” If a player got into trouble and was about to get killed, flipping the hyperspace toggle caused the ship to disappear for a few seconds and then reappear somewhere else on the screen, hopefully someplace less dangerous and not close to the sun. Graetz also inserted an element of risk—if a player hit hyperspace one too many times, their ship would be destroyed.
TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING
The improvements made the game more interesting… which created a new set of problems. Spacewar! addicts played for hours on end, frantically flipping the toggle switches on the $120,000 computer until their elbows hurt. Needless to say, the computer wasn’t designed with that kind of use (or abuse) in mind.
Rather than risk breaking the $120,000 computer, a couple of TMRC members scrounged wire, switches, and other parts from the model railroad and made another innovation—individual game controllers that they connected to the PDP-1 with lengths of electrical wire. Now the players could stand back from the computer and play as furiously as they wanted to, without damaging the computer or getting sore elbows.
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BIRDS OF A FEATHER
So what do Steve Russell and the developers of Spacewar! have in common with Willy Higinbotham, creator of Tennis for Two? Two things—they never patented their invention; and they never made any money from it. Digital Equipment ended up giving Spacewar! away as a diagnostic program and it became popular with computer engineers and programmers all over the country… including a University of Utah student named Nolan Bushnell, who later founded Atari.
It turns out there was a way to make money off of Spacewar!.… it just involved waiting for the price of computer technology to come down. In the mid-1970s, well after the video arcade craze was underway, an MIT graduate student named Larry Rosenthal decided to build an arcade version of Spacewar! as his master’s thesis project. The game he created—sold as Space War and then as Space Wars—happened to hit the arcades in 1977, the same year that Star Wars hit the big screen.
Space War(s) had nothing to do with Star Wars, of course, but nobody cared. It quickly became the most popular arcade game ever…until a game called Space Invaders came along in 1978.
MEETING OF THE MINDS
As for Steve Russell, he not only never made a penny off the game he was largely responsible for creating, he never even graduated from MIT. He relocated to Seattle and got a job with a computer time-share company. One of his responsibilities was hiring local high school kids to come into the office and see if they could get the computers to crash. Lots of kids tried, but, according to Russell, only one kid had enough computer savvy to make the computers crash every time, no matter how hard Russell and his colleagues tried to thwart him.
The kid’s name was Bill Gates. He never graduated from college, either.
The next phase of the history of video games
will take us to the video arcade, so turn
to page 314 and let’s play Pong.
No matter how hard they try, scientists can’t train houseflies to do tricks.
LOST INVENTIONS
True or false: Ever since some caveman got the bright idea of making
tools, it’s been a steady advance of ideas and innovation, from the
wheel to the automobile and beyond. False. History is much
messier than that. Many inventions have been made, lost,
and reinvented later. Here are a few examples.
THE ELECTRIC BATTERY
The National Museum of Iraq has a collection of clay jars made by the Parthians, who once ruled the Middle East. One jar, however, dating from about 200 B.C., is not your ordinary container.
It’s just over five inches high by three inches across. The opening was once sealed with asphalt, with a narrow iron rod sticking through it. Inside the jar was a copper sheet rolled into a tube and closed at the bottom with a copper disc. The iron rod hung down in the center of the tube.
The odd jar didn’t attract much attention until around 1960, when researchers discovered that if the jar was filled with an acidic liquid (vinegar or fermented grape juice), it generated a small current, between 1.5 and 2 volts. Their conclusion: the jar was an electric battery. In the acidic liquid, electrons flowed from the copper tube to the iron rod—much like the batteries invented by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta
around 1800.
But what would anyone in ancient Baghdad use a battery for? The most likely explanation is that they linked a series of batteries that were used to electroplate gold onto silver. Electroplating is a way of covering the surface of one metal with another metal, creating the false appeareance of a solid gold object. It involves passing an electric current through a solution, forcing positively charged metal particles onto a negatively charged surface. Experiments have shown that electroplating can indeed be done with modern batteries just like that ancient jar.
THE COMPUTER
In 1900 sponge divers found the wreck of an ancient ship 140 feet under water, near the Greek island of Antikythera. Many of the items retrieved from it were taken to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, among them lumps of corroded bronze that looked like parts of a statue. But an archaeologist noticed some words inscribed on the metal and then found gears—and then realized it wasn’t a statue, it was a machine.
Odds that a battery was bought during the Christmas season: 40%.
Originally held together by a wooden box that fell apart when taken out of the water, the mechanism had dials on the outside and a complicated arrangement of wheels and differential gears inside. The inscription dated it between 100 B.C. and 30 A.D. and indicated that the contraption had something to do with astronomy.
A 1959 Scientific American article compared the object to “a well-made 18th-century clock.” The “Antikythera mechanism,” it said, was a model of the solar system which, like a modern computer, “used mechanical parts to save tedious calculation.” Turned by hand, or perhaps by water power, the machine would calculate and display the position of the sun, moon, planets, and stars.
The find meant that historians had to rethink their whole concept of the ancient Greek world—and their concept of when computing machines were first invented.
THE SEISMOGRAPH
Domemico Salsano, an Italian clockmaker, is usually credited with inventing the seismograph in 1783. His “geo-sismometro” used an inked brush attached to a pendulum. The brush recorded earth-shaking vibrations on an ivory slab. It was sensitive enough to register quakes from 200 miles away.
But 1,500 years before that, a Chinese philosopher named Chang Hêng had already invented a device for detecting distant earthquakes. It was shaped like a big wine jar, about six feet across. On the outside were eight dragon heads with an open-mouthed toad beneath each one. Each dragon held a ball in its mouth. When a distant earthquake occurred, the dragon pointing in the direction of the quake dropped the ball into the mouth of the toad.
Nobody is sure exactly what mechanism was inside the jar, but modern seismologists assume that a pendulum was connected to the dragons. And, according to ancient records, the dragon jar worked.
Water freezes before a cockroach’s blood will.
SPACE BATHROOM ALPHA
We’re always interested in how astronauts “take care of business” in
the weightlessness of space. Now that the International Space Station
is up and running, we figured that it’s time to revisit the subject.
BRAVE NEW WORLD
As we told you on page 25, millionaire American businessman Dennis Tito made history in April 2001 when he bought his way onto the International Space Station, also known as Space Station Alpha, by paying the Russian Space Agency a cool $20 million for the privilege of becoming the world’s first space tourist.
Since then, NASA has agreed to allow more such trips. So in case you’re planning to take a Space Station vacation, you might like to know what to expect if you get up there and have to… use the facilities.
The toilet on Space Station Alpha has a toilet seat and a bowl, but that’s where any similarity to Earth toilets ends. Since there’s no gravity in the space station, they can’t use water to flush the toilet—there’s no way to keep it in the bowl. The toilet flushes with “air currents.” What does that mean? That’s NASA’s polite way of saying that you’re pooping into a toilet bowl hooked up to a vacuum cleaner.
LOOKING OUT FOR NUMBER ONE
As for peeing, there’s a special vacuum hose in the bathroom designed for that purpose. Everyone has to use the same hose, but each astronaut is issued their own custom-fitted “personal urine funnel” (yes, the male funnels are shaped differently from the female funnels). These special attachments help to prevent leakage into the Space Station’s atmosphere and also helps to minimize the “yuck” factor associated with everyone having to pee into the same hose.
What happens next? Unlike the Space Shuttle, where the urine is collected into a storage tank and periodically vented into outer space, Space Station Alpha doesn’t have that luxury. The Space Shuttle makes short trips and returns to Earth on a regular basis, so its water tanks are refilled before each new mission. But Space Station Alpha (hopefully) is never coming back down, and the astronauts who live and work there will be in space for weeks or even months on end. Sending up fresh supplies of water every couple of months would cost a fortune, so NASA developed a different strategy: the station is designed to recycle every single drop of water possible, including sweat, including the moisture the astronauts exhale when they breathe, and their urine.
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WASTE NOT, WANT NOT
The Space Station toilet pumps the astro-urine into a machine called a Urine Processor, or UP (pronounced “you pee”) for short. It works kind of like the spin cycle on a washing machine: the urine enters a cylindrical drum that rotates more than 300 times a minute; this causes the liquid to spread out in a thin layer across the surface of the drum. Most of the air has already been sucked out of the drum, creating a low-pressure environment that allows the water in the urine to boil off into steam at close to room temperature. The steam is then condensed back into liquid form. Everything else in the pee—minerals and salts—is collected in a filter, and the filters are changed at least once a month.
RIGHT BACK AT YOU
After the UP is finished, the “water” is pumped into a “Potable Water Processor,” where it is mixed with all the other reclaimed water in the Space Station: shower water, water used when the astronauts wash their hands or brush their teeth, and moisture that’s removed from the air by dehumidifiers. This waste water is pumped through a filter that removes any particles or debris. Then it’s pumped through several other filters to remove any chemicals, and finally it’s oxidized, or treated with oxygen, to remove any remaining chemicals and kill off any living organisms.
End result: Purified, drinkable water that is actually much cleaner than the water that comes out of your faucet at home. Really. It has almost no taste, because the water doesn’t contain any dissolved minerals like tap water does on Earth. There’s no smell, either. “That’s easy to get rid of,” says Alan Mortimer, head of Space Life Sciences at the Canadian Space Agency. “The things that smell are easy to take out.”
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HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM
In all, the system is able to recycle about 95% of the space station’s water. But what about the “solids”? The poop that’s collected in Space Bathroom Alpha can’t be recycled. Instead, it will be stored in sealed “toilet canisters” until one of the unmanned Russian Progress supply ships docks at the Space Station. After the fresh supplies are unloaded, the Progress is filled with the poop cans (and other garbage) and then jettisoned away from the station. Gravity pulls it back into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it burns up on reentry.
These flaming fireballs of space poop are a huge improvement over the original Space Shuttle toilets. Those toilets had a 14-day holding capacity and could not be emptied during a mission. As soon as they filled up, the astronauts had to either return to Earth…or improvise. And even back on Earth, the toilets were not easily emptied. They had to be removed from the shuttle and flown to Houston to be cleaned by hig
hly trained technicians.
WASHING UP
The International Space Station also has a shower, something the shuttle astronauts had to do without. (They had to make do with sponge baths and shampoo, originally designed for hospital patients, that didn’t need to be rinsed out.)
Taking a shower in space is similar to taking one on Earth, except that in the absence of gravity, the water doesn’t fall to the floor. It just floats around inside the shower stall, which is sealed to prevent the water from escaping into the rest of the Space Station. One advantage: Since the water floats around instead of going down the drain, you don’t need as much to take your shower as you would on Earth. You only use about a gallon of water, and instead of moving in and out from under the shower-head, you just grab the floating globs of water and rub them on yourself. When you’re finished, there’s a vacuum hose attached to one wall that you use to suck up all the drops before leaving the shower.
Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader Page 21