When I first began my education in programming there were no PCs and of course I had courses in ASM (assembly language) and COBOL (the business industries main language at that time). When we had open house for the school I consorted with another student who was interested in game making when he saw the results of another main frame programming expert. He had some skill at drawing but this would be easy because it would be a stick figure of sorts. What we came up with was a stick figure that walked across the screen--from left to right--carrying a welcome banner. When he bumped into the right edge of the monitor his exclamation was "OUCH" and the string pulling the banner would "snap" or break and the banner would bounce a couple of times when it hit the floor. You will never guess what we used to program this.
We used COBOL and CICS Command Level Programming. We chose this because of the paging technique used by CICS. Just like any animation (especially cartoons) it is simply a bunch of drawings and when you flip through them at a decent frame rate you will get a sense of animation. My cohort did an excellent job in drawing a certain number of frames and I did the programming. It turned out marvelously if I do say so myself.
Here is a good time to share with those who are further interested in who developed the first video games.
The first video game was invented by Willy Higginbotham. Willy was no teenage computer wizkid, however. In the early 1940s he worked on advanced radar displays for B28 bombers and went on to work for the Manhattan Project where he designed the timing mechanism for the first atomic bomb. In 1958, bored by the displays of the Brookhaven National Labs annual open-day exhibition, Willy designed a tennis game simulation, the world’s first video game. It was called Tennis For Two. Willy did not take out a patent but even if he had the royalties would have been paid to the US government.
Game development on main frame computers continued through the years, with Spacewar! being one of the first and certainly one of the most known games. Launched in 1962, it was programmed on a DEC PDP-1 by Steven Russell.
The first game console was called the Brown Box, created by Ralph Baer in 1966 to control a video home console ping-pong game. Baer sold the console to Magnavox Odyssey and went on to design the first game light gun for the Shooting Gallery game.
Before 'Pong,' There Was 'Tennis for Two'
Before the era of electronic ping pong, hungry yellow dots, plumbers, mushrooms, and fire-flowers, people waited in line to play video games at roller-skating rinks, arcades, and other hangouts. More than fifty years ago, before either arcades or home video games, visitors waited in line at Brookhaven National Laboratory to play “Tennis for Two,” an electronic tennis game that is unquestionably a forerunner of the modern video game.
Tennis for Two was first introduced on October 18, 1958, at one of the Lab’s annual visitors’ days. Two people played the electronic tennis game with separate controllers that connected to an analog computer and used an oscilloscope for a screen. The game’s creator, William Higinbotham, was a nuclear physicist lobbied for nuclear nonproliferation as the first chair of the Federation of American Scientists.
I have an interesting and funny anecdote regarding the results at the open house in which I will share at another time in this thread.
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Photos are of Willy and his oscilloscope in the exhibit on visitors' days.
When in doubt -- C4 :heh, heh, heh:
-Jamie Hyneman
