Wapsi Square Forum

The Never-Before-Told Story of the World's First Computer Art (It's a Sexy Dame)

The Atlabtic wrote:During a time when computing power was so scarce that it required a government-defense budget to finance it, a young man used a $238 million military computer, the largest such machine ever built, to render an image of a curvy woman on a glowing cathode ray tube screen. The year was 1956, and the creation was a landmark moment in computer graphics and cultural history that has gone unnoticed until now.

<full story - with pictures>

...and the first 'game' was the Navy's flight sim mentioned in the article, I would suppose?

I'm pretty sure I saw on TV that the first game was an Asteroids style game with the "A" character representing the ship. It was definitely on one of those round screen government computesr, possibly those same SAGE systems.

The earliest game i know was Spacewar.

BTW: The first use of the term "virus" as a computer term seems to have been in David Gerrold's SF novel When HARLIE Was One. "Worm" seems to have made its first appearance in John Brunner's novel Shockwave Rider.

And "cookie" - which is a shortened from of "magic cookie" - seems to have originated in the comic strip Odd Bodkins

Fairportfan wrote:The earliest game i know was Spacewar.

Correction, it is called Spacewar! (with an exclamation point ). Yes, that is the game I was thinking of, my memory was either mixing things up or whatever show I watched provided bad information.

shadowinthelight wrote:

Fairportfan wrote:The earliest game i know was Spacewar.

Correction, it is called Spacewar! (with an exclamation point ). Yes, that is the game I was thinking of, my memory was either mixing things up or whatever show I watched provided bad information.

And I remember playing it in Arizona back in the mid-70s, at the Tuscon planetarium. Fun stuff.

Commercially, the first arcade game was Computer Space, and played that too. Later, the place got a Pong game and the quarters went there.

FYI, Spacewar! was the arcade game played in one scene of the movie Soylent Green.

They had to explain punch cards? Am I that old?

Jabberwonky wrote:They had to explain punch cards? Am I that old?

Yes. We are.

Fairportfan wrote:

Jabberwonky wrote:They had to explain punch cards? Am I that old?

Yes. We are.

Some kids can't read a clock with hands. Digital or nothing!

Jabberwonky wrote:They had to explain punch cards? Am I that old?

How about this one 'kiddo', "What's a record?"
I get that one all the time when kids come over and I play say, The Doors, or Wagner's Ring cycle. They ask me what that funny plastic thing is I am playing with. All. the. time. Records are awesome,and I love my portable turntables. My son will know how far technology has come, and what it was like back when I was very young. If they don't know, they won't learn anything and become spoiled and lack the appreciation for the finer things in life. He rather likes my old vinyl. Some of the neater things aren't on CD. BTW, if you aren't flirting with the 40's, you ain't getting old yet...just saying.

I remember when Purdue University's Computer "lab" was a huge building with ONE computer in it. I was pint sized, and my Father was attending for engineering. The things that impressed me were that, and his access to Valparaiso University's HUGE library. The books!
I think the funniest thing ever was the day we were there and the big guy was in use for math computation. I do not to this day remember what it was about but Dad said I answered the math question faster than the machine, and even pointed out the user entered the data wrong. Even back then the ID 10T principle was being perfected...=p~ The Professor couldn't believe I was only five at the time. Thank whatever Gods were watching out for me that I avoided the whole prodigy thing and get put in HS too soon. It was just better being able to be a mean wil kid...

Atomic wrote:

Fairportfan wrote:

Jabberwonky wrote:They had to explain punch cards? Am I that old?

Yes. We are.

Some kids can't read a clock with hands. Digital or nothing!

Some people literally cannot see black-and-white images without conscious effort.

Heh, I used to play our Atari 2600 on a small black and white TV. We also had a combo turntable/8 track player our room.

shadowinthelight wrote:Heh, I used to play our Atari 2600 on a small black and white TV. We also had a combo turntable/8 track player our room.

I remember those days. I still kinda miss 8-Tracks, In an era before auto reversing cassette decks they made listening to music much more fun.

AM Radio and ASCII images FTW.

Heh, I used to do FORTRAN programming, so yea, I know all about the shoeboxes. And heaven help ya if you bumped into someone and your boxes both got dumped... that's why you always sign and number each card. It doesn't hurt the machine any, and makes it *SO* much easier to clean up such messes.

And then there were the kids who tried to use rubber bands, which bent the cards and caused them to get stuck in the machine... pfffft, n00bz.

Fairportfan wrote:

Jabberwonky wrote:They had to explain punch cards? Am I that old?

Yes. We are.

And God forbid you drop the box of punch cards, and get them out of order. Even slightly.

Jabberwonky: "They had to explain punch cards? Am I that old?"
Fairportfan: "Yes. We are."
Atomic: "Some kids can't read a clock with hands. Digital or nothing!
Fairportfan: "Some people literally cannot see black-and-white images without conscious effort.

Or dial a phone. I mean with a rotary dial.

bmonk wrote:

Fairportfan wrote:

Jabberwonky wrote:They had to explain punch cards? Am I that old?

Yes. We are.

And God forbid you drop the box of punch cards, and get them out of order. Even slightly.

Heh. I remember when i was at Georgia Tech in 1972 - i'd see guys coming into the Computer Center with multiple boxes of cards (what - a thousand to a box? More?) making up one COBOL program.

And if you got one card outta place, it generated a hundred pages or so of "Fatal Error" messages and died.

Admiral Grace was a wonderful computer person ... but COBOL is a blot on her escutcheon.

Fairportfan wrote:Admiral Grace was a wonderful computer person ... but COBOL is a blot on her escutcheon.

And the alternative was what? Fortran?

Atomic wrote:

Fairportfan wrote:Admiral Grace was a wonderful computer person ... but COBOL is a blot on her escutcheon.

And the alternative was what? Fortran?

Well, they had different uses.

COBOL was designed mostly for business admin, banking, accounting, and such. Hence the name: COmmon Business-Oriented Language.

FORTRAN, on the other hand, was designed for more scientific applications and number crunching, being able to run complex formulas very rapidly. In fact, that's where the name came from: FORmula TRANslation.

And FORTRAN had the same problem COBOL did with the punch cards. Get even ONE out of order and the whole thing crashes. Hence why you numbered them in the corner, if you were smart. Well, you *could* have numbered them with the first six spaces, binary style, but that was considered very bad practice since it ate up computation power for no reason, and it encouraged GOTO statements.