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Lyle Bickley explains the PDP-1 (and we play the original Spacewar!)

CuriousMarc · 431.7K views · 2017-05-03 · 22:24

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Overview

Lyle Bickley of the PDP-1 restoration team tours the 1959 DEC machine at the Computer History Museum and plays the original Spacewar! He covers its graphics display and the MIT student programs written for it.

On Hacker News

Linked in Spacewar and vintage computing threads as a charming demo on real hardware.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2018–2020

Topics

History of computingGame history & retro gaming
Search by tags
pdp-1spacewarcomputer history museumdecrestoration

What people said

chaos_a · 2020-12 · Recommendation

Here's the same one on youtube with an interview with one of the people who restored it, it's quite an impressive machine. [VIDEO]

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BuildTheRobots · 2020-01 · Recommendation

CuriousMark has a PDP11 video that has some of these demos running on the original hardware: [VIDEO] His videos are surprisingly addictive; they've restored an Apollo guidance computer, Altos and tonnes of other ancient kit.

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nezgar · 2020-10 · Reference

Check out this demonstration of "Space War" on a PDP-1 using a radar long-persistance CRT: [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by CuriousMarc, played through YouTube.

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