June 3rd, 2006
If you've ever played a video game- a moment of silence, please
I know this is a stretch for this blog’s mission, but hey, what could be more "converged" and "broadband" then playing a video game over your high-speed Internet connection?
Or even your xBox or PlayStation, for that matter?
If you’ve ever played any sort of video game, then you may know that Spacewar (shown above, and linked to just now) is widely credited with being the prototype for all that has followed.
Designed by several M.I.T.students back in 1962, "Spacewar was the original ‘twitch’ game, requiring lightning reflexes," John Markoff of The New York Times writes today. ‘Each player used keyboard controls or a joystick to maneuver a tiny ship able to fire a stream of torpedoes as it slid across the screen."
Today, we learn from John that Alan Kotok, who enthusiastically supplied the sine and cosine math subroutines necessary for Spacewar’s design, died on May 26 at the comparatively young age of 64.
Kotok wasn’t a weird boy genius who flamed out. He had a successful 34 year-career at Digital Equipment Corp., and helped build the AltaVista search engine. Kotok also was associate chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium.
"The only money I made from Spacewar was as a consultant for lawsuits in the video game industry in the 1970’s," Kotok said in a 1990 interview. "I have all this fame, but it’s in a very narrow circle."
So today, let’s broaden the circle, shall we?
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
