At MIT in the late 1950s, the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the Tech Model Railroad Club crawls out from under the train layout, finds a computer students are allowed to touch, and gives the industry its ethic and half its slang. Peter Samson makes the machine play Bach. Then three science-fiction readers and their friends write Spacewar on a donated PDP-1 and post it around the continent on paper tape, free, because nobody thought to charge.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Peter Samson, Stewart Nelson, Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Dan Edwards
- The idea it builds
- How a game redraws two ships thirty times a second, and how software spread on mailed paper tape before anyone sold it.