Sony plans UK e-reader launch at London BookFair 2008

[Xenophon]

...my Dad would take my older sister and I in to Harvard so we could play SpaceWars on the PDP-1. You sat in the machine room watching the graphics on the main console, and had a little four-button controller -- the only thing I was allowed to touch in the entire room. This would have been about 1965. The software was the original SpaceWars brought over from MIT (where it was written). I'm not sure if it was transported on paper tape or on one of the (then) super-hi-tech DecTapes.

The same software showed up as a video arcade game in the early 80s -- bugs and all. Some clever arcade game maker realized that the SpaceWar program was public domain, wrote (found?) a PDP-1 emulator for the chip in their arcade unit, and brought it out as a coin-operated arcade game. That was a real blast from the past!

Xenophon

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

I'm not sure if it was transported on paper tape or on one of the (then) super-hi-tech DecTapes.

Paper tape I would imagine - that was the standard even in the late 70s, when I was using the PDP-8. On that machine, to boot it you fed it a "boot loader" on paper tape. That loaded enough software to allow it to use its disk drives (we're talking 8" floppy disks here) from where it would load the operating system proper. When we did analysed the results of our physics experiments (the real reason the machine was there), we typed in the data on a teletype, the teletype punched a paper tape, and you fed the tape into the PDP's paper tape reader.