Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
resembles another cultural figure, the hacker, who also came to
prominence in the mid-'
s. On the other hand, the rave culture of
which Techno is a part offers a promise of community and connec-
tion outside of the constraints of capitalism and state repression.
Thus it is unsurprising that Techno and allied cultural phenomena
are often invoked in relation to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix
Guattari, as well as those of writers such as Toffler, ostensibly on the
other side of the political divide between right and left. Techno
thus becomes a kind of metonym of techno-capitalism, not just in
the machine aesthetic of the music itself, but in the social and
cultural arrangements and possibilities it proposes.
80
video games
At the same time as Techno emerged in the early '
s, the increasing
ubiquity and visibility of computing was beginning to be reflected
in mainstream culture. Video and computer games were beginning
to become popular, offering many people their first experience of
the computer as a medium and as a visual experience. The idea
of using digital technology to play games supposedly goes back
to the late
80
s, when an engineer, Will Higinbotham, designed
a tennis game to run on an oscilloscope in the Brookhaven National
Laboratory. But the first recorded digital computer game was
Spacewar , designed in the early '
1950
at the
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. Though Spacewar was not
intended to be commercial it rapidly found its way outside of MIT
to other institutions and individuals who also owned PDP-
60
s to run on the DEC PDP-
1
s. The
engineers at DEC even used it to demonstrate the powers of the
PDP-
1
to potential customers. One of those exposed to Spacewar in
the early '
1
s was Nolan Bushnell, an engineering student at the
University of Utah. Bushnell was inspired by what he saw and,
later, attempted to develop a version for arcades. In order to do so
he started one of the first computer games companies, Atari. In
60
Search WWH ::




Custom Search