Information Technology Reference
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Stewart Brand and Rolling Stone
In 1972, ten years after Slug Russell created Spacewar!, Stewart
Brand, a writer and computer enthusiast who had worked with Doug
Engelbart on the “Mother of All Demos” in 1968, watched students at the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory enthusiastically playing the
game. The game ran on a PDP-10 computer costing $500,000 and differed
greatly from IBM-style batch computing. Although the game was not yet
personal computing, it was clearly a very personal use of the PDP-10's
time-sharing system. Students were using the computer for fun, interac-
tively, with no thought for the cost of the computer time, just as personal
computers would be used only a few years later. Brand investigated the personal computing and gaming cul-
ture further, and Bob Taylor allowed him to talk to the researchers at Xerox PARC. The result was that PARC
researchers and their laid-back, freewheeling style of research appeared in a story in Rolling Stone in December
1972 ( Fig. 9.17 ). The story was titled “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer
Bums” and featured photographs by Annie Liebowitz and an interview with Alan Kay. Needless to say, this
publication caused considerable embarrassment back at Xerox's conservative East Coast headquarters and
resulted in the company ordering a more formal system of computer access at the Palo Alto laboratory.
Fig. 9.17. Stewart Brand's “Spacewar”
article in Rolling Stone .
Teletypes
The teletype ( Fig. 9.18 ) was an electromechanical typewriter
developed in the last century that could be used to send and receive
typed messages using point-to-point connections. Teletypes were
quickly adapted to provide a text-based user interface to the early
mainframe computers and minicomputers. Although they were
soon replaced by punched card readers and fast line printers for
most purposes, teletypes continued to be used as interactive time-
sharing terminals. It was not until computer terminals with moni-
tors - video display screens - became widely available in the mid- to
late 1970s that the teletype finally became obsolete. However, some
of their heritage still lives on. When video displays became available,
these could display thirty lines of text in a few seconds instead of
the minute or so required for printing on paper. On a teletype, users
typed commands after a prompt character was printed. Initially, games
kept the same user interface for the video display screen and this is
why the command line interface and prompts used by professional soft-
ware developers look the way they do today.
Fig. 9.18. The photograph shows the Teletype
Corporation's Model-33 terminal also known
as an ASR-33 (ASR stands for Automatic Send
Receive). The model was introduced in 1963 and
more than half a million teletypes had been
produced by 1975. The 500000th machine was
plated with gold and exhibited.
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