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1961 1968 1977 1978 1979

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1961JULY -Outer Space!

The story of a $120,000 worth calculator used for implementing one of the first videogame in the computi

The DEC PDP-1
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Yup, it costed $120,000 but the second of them produced was given free to the MIT Labs (Thanks DEC)

It was simply revolutionary. It occupied the room of three big refrigerators, it had a CRT and the usual Flexowriter for input/outpu

most important it didn't need air conditioning and used conventional 110 Volt supply!

It used words of 18 bits and a basic setup had memory (core magnetic type) for up to 4096 words and expandable to 65536 The

Flexowriter could read and write paper tapes used for storing programs.

As the PDP-1 arrived at the MIT Labs those hackers saw it as a further step that might have taken their dream closer to reality.

The Hackers

Who were these guys? They were a bunch of students and professors at MIT (namely Peter Samson, Alan Kotok, John McCarthy,

Russell, and others)

They were interested in systems. It could be a model railway track or a phone system or whatever else. They studied and experim

with them endlessy, maybe not going to the classes and never got graduated but that was not the point. The point was to hack m

They had a sort of unwritten manifesto that can be resumed here: (from Hackers written by S.Levy)

Access to computers should be unlimited and total!

All information should be free.

Mistrust authority - Promote Decentralization.

Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degree, age, race or position.You can create art and beauty on a computer.

But above all

Computer can change your life for the better.

At the labs they fight for access on a computer, moved by the 'hands on' imperative. They coded hard with those first microcompu

(?!) and the will to improve their results every time was astounding.

No matter how many hours they worked they liked to give the system a new feature. So if you gave a project to a hacker it would


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always be a work in progress...

...and the Spacewar

Slug Russell thought about some cool demo to program on this beauty, the PDP-1.

The CRT was then a great feature of the PDP-1 as it was easily programmable. The PDP-1 had also been used to produce music a

Hackers had also written a new assembler in about a weekend of work replacing the standard factory version, which they though

wasn't efficient enough!

So Slug thought about a game, a game about duel in an outer space between two ships! A graphic algorithm developed by prof. M

called Three Position Display initially inspired him. Alan Kotok provided another piece with some routines for tracing the ships po

on screen.

Then after some coding Slug defined some elements of its game. He decided the shapes of the two ships and the controls for them

clockwise turn, counter-clockwise turn, accelerate and fire torpedo. He finished a first version and demoed it to the others.

What you would expect? The hackers started to improve it!

In a totally free environment every contribution was added to the game. Someone corrected the trajectory for the torpedoes, Pete

Samson defined a new map for the sky background (now it represented a map with all the real constellations, not just a random d

screen), and then a central sun was added and simulated a gravity effect as the ship could orbit around it or burn into it if too clo

Even a rudimental joystick was built then as using the PDP-1 front panel switches was rather painful...

The greatest feature was the hyperspace launch. Sometimes when you got in trouble you could fly into the nth space and your sh

would appear in another (random) point of the screen, maybe next to the central sun :)

This work was made available totally free on the usual paper tapes. Some one argued maybe some dollars could be made out of i

that wasn't the point then. Actually the game was well spread in the country already so it was impossible to control! Even at DEC

some time they used to demo and test the machine at the factory!

So if you play to one of those arcade shooting game remember where all come fromfrom a university lab!

Thanks to Marco Chrappanfor information and pictures.

1968

DECEMBER -The Mother of All Demos
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Back in 1968, one man had a vision. This vision regarded sharing informations. The computer revolution gave the user a

strength but very little was done to help people to work together.

Mouse, hyperlinks and email where shown that day by Doug Engelbartand his researchers at Stanford during a 90 min

presentation.

But most of all the desire for open exchange of informations fueled the demonstration. And that desire is still alive today

be fulfilled.

Internet and the Open Source movement embodies part of what he wanted to demonstrate.

Many GUI's concept were shown, as the mouse pointer, copy and paste functions, hierarchical organization of data. We

many Xerox PARC studies start probably from here...

Still that day he talked about the ARPAnet project in which a few computers

were linked on a network and that with a certain bandwidth he might present his demo from another town (yes net conf

1977

JULY -Software Records, a bad idea...


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In July 1977, Software Records launched the first issue of its BASIC software collection recorded on a 12" vinyl record. User coulddirectly transfer programs from its record player to its computer or tape a copy. Sadly, as soon as the vinyl record had a tiny scra

recorded programs were unreadable.

The first advert (left) was optimistic: "If everybody who read this ad would order one, we would be sold out!"

The second advert came out three months later, it was like a S.O.S.: "If we don't sell a bunch of our BASIC Software Volume 1 al

quick, we'll get fired!".

Were they fired? One thing for sure: Basic Software Volume 2 never came to life...

AUGUST -FORTRAN, Microsoft's second programming language


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FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) was first used in 1957. It was a popular programming language designed specifically to solve

scientific, mathematical and engineering problems. Its development started in 1954 with John Backusand some IBM designers.

first featured with IBM 704 computers.

For several years, FORTRAN was the only high level language available and the only alternative to machine-level or assembly lan

programming.

FORTRAN was the first programming language Bill Gates used in his high school years. His school wanted him to write a class sch

program on a Digital computer. Bill wrote it in FORTRAN, and designed a special version to put him in classes with no other boys

the girls he thought were cute!

After BASIC interpreter, FORTRAN was the second software sold by the new Microsoft Company. It was partly written by Bill Gates

ran under the CP/M operating system. The high quality of the software and its documentation placed Microsoft among the first se

suppliers in an emergent professional software industry.

DECEMBER -ADA birth

In December 1977, the revised language specification of ADAwas published in SIGPLAN, the Special Interest Group on

Languages. Actually, this is a small event within the long history of ADA birth.

In 1973, the US Department of Defense (DoD) was spending $3 billion annually on software. At this time, more than 45


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languages were used to implement different DoD projects, and none of them were standardized. For these reasons, the Army, Na

Air Force proposed to develop a common and standardized high-level language for use in the development of large military syste

In 1975, the Higher Order Language Working Group (HOLWG) was formed for evaluating existing language and think about an ide

language specification. 23 languages were tested, but none of them were accepted. The first ADA language specification appeared

early 1977 and four software companies began parallel production of a prototype language.

In may 1979 the French CIE CII Honeywell/Bull(the only foreign contractor) won the challenge and the language design was tby thousands of programmers in the world who reported bugs and wishes. Based on these informations, the final version of ADA w

born in early 1980. The language was then standardized in 1983, and revised in 1995.

The language was first named "DoD-1", but the name ADA was finally retained in 1979 by the Working Group in honour of

Countess Augusta Ada Lovelace, the daughter of poet Lord Byron and a mathematician who worked with Charles Babbage on h

engines and thus is considered the world's first computer programmer.

1978

JANUARY -BBS, the World Wide Web father

In January 1978, two guys from Chicago, Ward Christensenand Randy Suess, decided to devise a simple commun

between two computers, through a telephone line. They used the first generation of 110-baud Hayes modems that ap

April 1977. Christensen, who wrote the first binary file transfer protocol in August 1977 (MODEM.ASM, then XMODEM),

software, and Suess designed the hardware.


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One month later, their system was running. They called it the Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS). After several mont

tests and improvements, CBBS finally went online to the public in 1979. It was the first electronic message-posting network (exce

sharing systems) where participants could post messages to a public "board", read and respond to other ones and thus particip

virtual discussions. Few months later, virtual bulletin boards began popping up around the country, mainly intended to compu

hobbyists and scientists.

At the first time, BBSs were painfully slow as the transmission speed didn't exceed 300 bauds (30 to 40 chars. per sec.). Only A

codes and ANSI escape sequences were used. Later, when 1200 and 2400 baud modems were launched, the speed became acce

BBSs were very popular during the 80s and early 90s. They greatly declined in popularity when commercial Internet access bec

common. However, they were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web and many aspects of the In

M. Simon, who designed the S-100 I/O boardused in the world's first BBS, adds:

When I had a shop on Chicago on 2053 N. Sheffield they came over all the time to get advice on how to get the Master I/O Board

running. I used the 8251 serial chip and there was no way other than a hard reset to determine the state of the chip. I think they

cut and a jump on the board to the on board 8255 for a hardware reset.

They told me what they were planning and I wondered why any one would do something so crazy!

I made one or two visits to their basement to help out and see what was going on. We all belonged to the CACHEclub in tho

days.Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange. My wife silk screened bumper stickers for the club. We also sold T-shirts w

"Support the Revolution, Buy a Computer" for a slogan.

FEBRUARY -Space Invaders


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In February 1978, a programmer called Toshihiro Nishikadofinalized a primitive spaceship shoot'em up video g

Originally, the player had to shoot down soldiers who tried to cross the screen but, at the time, it was politically unto encourage killing humans, the soldiers were then replaced with an alien invasion.

Four month later, Taito, a company that sold video games since 1971, launched the first Space Invaderscoin op

cabinet. The game became immediately a national passion. It was so popular in Japan that it caused a severe shoof the 100-Yen coins needed to play the game, until the coins production was quadrupled. Beside arcades shops w

featured nothing but Space Invader machines, one found Space Invaders cabinets everywhere in Japan: restauran

cream and pizza shops, laundries...

In 1980, the game was licensed from Taito by Midwayfor production and use in the United States. The mania wa

quite as intense - no quarter shortage - but Space Invaders was still a phenomenal success.The same year, it was released on the Atari 2600, making it the first ever home conversion of an arcade game. S

dozen thousands 2600 consoles were then sold only for playing Space Invaders.

This game was probably the first game to manifest "repetitive motion injuries" and "near-epileptic seizures" in chilsomething that disturbed medical and childhood development professionals that wanted it banned.

500,000 machines were sold worldwide, 350,000 of which were sold in Japan alone. Literally billions of dollars and

in coins were pumped into the machine from 1978 to 1980. The original Space Invaders brought in over $500 millrevenue for Taito, making it, even today, one of the most profitable and successful games of all time. Of course, S

Invaders was followed by numerous imitators such as Space Invaders II, Invaders Revenge or Galaxian.

Later, Activision, Inc. acquired the rights to develop and produce interactive games based on Space Invaders for tPlayStation, Nintendo 64 and Nintendo Gameboy systems worldwide, excluding Japan, making Space Invader still

more than 20 years after it was launched.


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MARCH -Adventureland

Nowadays, everybody has heard of or has played adventure games, a style of game that puts the player in an environm

allows him to manipulate objects to accomplish an objective.

In 1978, noboby played adventure game, except some DEC owners who could enjoy the first adventure game written by

students and called Colossal Caves Adventure.

In 1978 Scott Adamshad the opportunity to play this game and he was fascinated by the concept. He wrote his first ad

game Adventurelandin the same year for the Radio Shack TRS-80 model 1 and was thus the first person to put an Ad

a personal computer and sell a computer game (for $14.95). He is credited with starting the computer game industry.


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Two years later, the Fourth Edition was totally rewritten in C language with multi-platform support in mind, allowing it to be used

wide range of computers. In 1975, the Sixth Version, widely known as 'Version 6' was the first UNIX version really available outsi

Bell Labs. The first BSD version was derived from this V6.

The second BSD version was launched a few months later with the full kernel source codes. This version became the backbone of

Internet and introduced the "open source" concept.

From this time, the various flavours of UNIX were divided in two different families, the BSD based types and those derived from thSYSTEM V.

The Berkeley version of UNIX became the standard in education and research and was notable for introducing using TCP/IP to UN

(later Bill Joy will be nicknamed the "Edison of the Internet"). BSD was widely distributed in source form so that others could lear

it and improve it.

After having been involved in the BSD project, Bill Joy co-founded Sun Microsystemsin 1982 and led technical strategy of the

company. He designed Sun's Network File System (NFS), parts of the SPARC microprocessor architecture as well as basic pipeline

in all of Sun's SPARC microprocessors.

Later, he was the co-author of the specification for the Javaprogramming language.

In 1998, Bill was appointed as Chief Scientist of the company.

APRIL -Microsoft COBOL-80 released

In April 1978, Microsoft Corp. shipped first version of COBOL-80 its third computer

product after BASIC-80and FORTRAN.

Although quite unknown by individual and small business computers users, COBOL

(forCommon Business Oriented Language) was, and is still used by huge business

(finance, assurance) in critical areas.

The story of COBOL started in 1959, in a small corner of the Pentagon where Grac

team of specialists coming from the computer industry, universities and Departme

started to work on initial specifications of a new language intended to be a busines

oriented, machine independent and capable of continuous change and developmen

The initial specifications for COBOL were presented in April of 1960.

Since, COBOL has undergone considerable updates and improvements. It has eme

leading data processing language in the business world. Several revisions and stan

the language appeared in 1968, 1974, 1985. The latest revision has been complete

Is COBOL still used? Let us give you this surprising information:

In 1997 there were about300 billionlines of computer business code in use in the world. Of that about 80% were in

were written in all the other computer languages, including C and C++.

In 2000,95%of finance / insurance data was processed with COBOL. The Y2K scare was a big reason that a hoard of

programmers came out of school in the mid to late 90's. COBOL was probably the largest codebase that needed fixing.


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Through 2004-2005 15% of all new applications (5 billion lines) will be developed in COBOL.

Why such a success? Because COBOL is simple, structured and strong. It can handle very large applications (more than 1,000,000

of code). Last version includes object technology, IDE and graphical interfaces as well as integration with the World Wide Web.

MAY -K&R first edition

Although the C programming language was developed in the early 70's, there was no description of it published for seve

the famous K&R. K&R was the summary for Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie the authors of "The C programming Lan

still considered as the basic reference book for any programmer wishing to learn basis of the C language.

First edition appeared in 1978. It was the first official definition of the language and marked the real expansion of the Un

System and its main language near professional and amateur users.

About this book, Dennis Ritchie wrote:

In 1978 Brian Kernighan and I published The C Programming Language [Kernighan 78]. Although it did not describe so

soon became common, this book served as the language reference until a formal standard was adopted more than ten y


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Although we worked closely together on this book, there was a clear division of labor: Kernighan wrote almost all the expository

material, while I was responsible for the appendix containing the reference manual and the chapter on interfacing with the Unix sy

A second edition appeared about ten years later. It was completely rewritten with additional examples and problem sets to clarify

implementation of difficult language constructs.

JULY -TCP/IP

In 1978, The Xerox Corporation created an Internet Protocol called IP. A few months later, IP, combined with the TCPpr

known as the TCP/IP, a standard system for information exchange in large networks and later the World Wide Web.

Back in the 60's, the U.S. governments Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), searched a way to keep

military computers talking with each other in the event of an international conflict. They founded ARPAnet, the first dec

network allowing a part of the network to keep working even if another one was unable to work. ARPAnet began operati


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based on a protocol called NCP.

As the ARPAnet grew larger, it became clear that NCP was not robust enough to handle the huge amount of data transferred betw

computers. In 1974, a team of computer scientists supervised by Vint Cerfimplements a new protocol called Transmission Contr

Protocol (TCP). TCP was faster, easier to use, more flexible and reliable. It was introduced in 1977 for cross-network connections

slowly began to replace NCP within the original ARPAnet.

IP was thus added to TCP in 1978. TCP handled the correct transmission of data packets and error checking, IP took care of connthe server and client computers to the various networks necessary to send data across the Internet. On January 1st 1983, every

machine connected to ARPAnet switched from NCP to TCP/IP which became the core Internet protocol. The Internet Activities Boa

(IAB) was created. The University of Wisconsin created Domain Name System (DNS). Internet gradually became more 'user frien

You know the following of the Internet story!

SEPTEMBER -MicroPro's first word processor software

SuperSortand WordMasterwere the first products sold by MicroPro International in September 1978. The company w


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1979

JANUARY -Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston form Software Arts Corporation.


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In 1978, Daniel Bricklin, who was then a masters student in business administration, came up with the idea of an interactive visib

calculator and programmed the first working prototype of his concept on an Apple II in Basic.

As the program wasn't really powerful, he asked his friend Bob Frankston who had been working with computers for 15 years, to

improve and expand the program. They founded Software Arts Corp. in January 2, 1979 and Frankston turned the Bricklin idea in

powerful and compact spreadsheet program they named VisiCalc, for Visible Calculator.

In October 1979, the first Apple II versions appeared in the computer stores at $100 and VisiCalc became an instant success. Abo

million copies were sold within four years, Software Arts grew from 2 employees to 125, and many businessmen bought an Apple

to run VisiCalc on. Although Atari, Tandy Commodore and later IBM versions were also launched, Visicalc widely contributed to th

commercial success of the Apple II and further Apple systems.

It was said that VisiCalc was the first computer spreadsheet program. However the 'Spreadsheet' term was fist used in 1952, and

first computerized version of an accounting matrix appeared in mid 1960's, programmed in Fortran language. However, at the tim

only way to use such a program was to rent calculation time on a shared system or run it on a mainframe. Both options were cos

prohibitive.

Visicalc was in fact the first 'democratic' productivity software which turned first generation of personal computers from toys or ga

consoles into real business assistants.

VisiCalc was sold to Lotus Development Corporation in 1983 and became the Lotus 1-2-3spreadsheet for the IBM-PC. Other ma

sequels of Visicalc were SuperCalcfor CP/M systems and Quattro Profrom Borland. The first Excelversion appeared in 1985 fo

Apple Macintosh.

For a complete information about VisiCalc history, don't miss theDan Bricklin Web site.
http://www.bricklin.com/visicalc.htmhttp://www.bricklin.com/visicalc.htmhttp://www.bricklin.com/visicalc.htmhttp://www.bricklin.com/visicalc.htm


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FEBRUARY -The first version of Flight Simulator is launched

The story of Flight Simulator started in 1977, when Bruce Artwickformed his own company, SubLogic. Artwick had tw

computer graphics and flying. The idea of simulating an aeroplane on a personal computer started to take form the sam

the first Apple II computer with a 10 KB assembly program.

Artwick also wrote articles about this idea in several magazines. As numerous readers wanted to buy the program, he la

official release of Flight Simulator on January 31st 1979. First sales occurred in February. The program became an insta

The program used very simple graphics, just a few lines on the screen to indicate the instrument readings and the terrai

illusion was realistic and powerful. In a few hours, any budding pilot was able to take off, fly circles around objects, find

again, and land without seeing "Crash!"

Several improved versions were soon developed for the Tandy TRS-80, the Commodore 64, and the Atari 800, they feat


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instruments including Oil pressure and Temperature, Fuel, Tachometer, and even a radar display.

In 1981, Microsoft bought the rights of Flight Simulator. One year later, the IBM-PC version was released and became the first suc

game program for the PC and compatible systems.

From then on, and until 2004, 9 major updates were released by Microsoft, millions of units were sold all over the world and quite

industry has grown up providing utilities as well as aircrafts, flight panels and sceneries to use with the main software. To date, F

Simulator is still the most popular entertainment title ever produced for the personal computer.

For more information, see this very detailedsiteabout Flight Simulator history.

FlightSimBooks.comprovides full text of eleven classic flight simulation books.
http://simflight.com/~fshistory/fsh/index.htmhttp://simflight.com/~fshistory/fsh/index.htmhttp://simflight.com/~fshistory/fsh/index.htmhttp://www.flightsimbooks.com/http://www.flightsimbooks.com/http://www.flightsimbooks.com/http://simflight.com/~fshistory/fsh/index.htm

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