Replay: The History of Video Games Read Free

work on more serious projects.
    Another traditional game to make an early transition to computers was Noughts and Crosses, which was recreated on the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) at the University of Cambridge in England. Built in 1949 by Professor Maurice Wilkes, the head of the university’s mathematical laboratory, the EDSAC was as much a landmark in computing as the ENIAC. It was the first computer with memory that users could read, add or remove information from; memory now known as random access memory or RAM. For this Wilkes, who incidentally also tutored Bennett, is rightly regarded as a major figure in the evolution of computers but it would be one of his students who would recreate Noughts and Crosses on the EDSAC. Alexander Douglas wrote his version of the game for his 1952 PhD thesis on the interaction between humans and computers. Once he finished his studies, however, his Noughts and Crosses game was quickly forgotten, cast aside as a simple programme designed to illustrate a more serious point.
    Others tried their hand at Checkers with IBM employee Arthur ‘Art’ Samuel leading the way. As with all the other games created on computers at this time, Samuel’s computer versions of Checkers were not about entertainment but research. Like the Chess programmers, Samuel wanted to create a Checkers game that could defeat a human player. He completed his first Checkers game in 1952 on an IBM 701; the first commercial computer created by the company, and would spend the next two decades refining it. By 1955 he had developed a version that could learn from its mistakes that caused IBM’s share price to leap 15 points when it was shown off on US television. By 1961 Samuel’s programme was defeating US Checkers champions.
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    At the same time as the scientists of the 1940s and 1950s were teaching computers to play board games, television sets were rapidly making their way into people’s homes. Although the television existed before the Second World War, the conflict saw factories cease production of TV sets to support the war effort by producing radar displays and other equipment for the military. The end of the war, however, produced the perfect conditions for television to take the world by storm. The technological breakthroughs made during the Second World War had brought down the cost of manufacturing TV sets and US consumers now had money to burn after years of austerity. In 1946 just 0.5 per cent of households owned a television. By 1950 this proportion had soared to 9 per cent and by the end of the decade there was a television in almost 90 per cent of US homes. While the shows on offer from the TV networks springing up across the US seemed enough to get sets flying off the shelves, several people involved in the world of TV began to wonder if the sets could be used for anything else beyond receiving programmes.
    In 1947, the pioneering TV network Dumont became first to try and explore the idea of allowing people to play games on their TV sets. Two of the company’s employees – Thomas Goldsmith and Estle Mann – came up with the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device. Based on a simple electronic circuit, the device would allow people to fire missiles at a target, such as an aeroplane, stuck onto the screen by the player. The device would use the cathode-ray tube within the TV set to draw lines representing the trajectory of the missile and to create a virtual explosion if the target was hit. [2] Goldsmith and Mann applied for a patent for the idea in January 1947, which was approved the following year, but Dumont never turned the device into a commercial product.
    A few years later another TV engineer had a similar thought. Born in Germany in 1922, Ralph Baer had spent most of his teenage years watching the rise of the Nazi Party in his home country and the subsequent oppression of his fellow Jews. Eventually, in September 1938, his family fled to the US just weeks before