How the first games were created for tube computers at the beginning of the Cold War
According to DFC Intelligence, in 2022 the year before last, the audience of video game users in the world reached 3.7 billion people, that is, almost half of the world’s population, more precisely (45%). The numbers are impressive, but the situation is by no means new in the history of mankind.
According to the Newzoo company, in the past 2023, gross revenue in the global gaming market amounted to $184 billion. If we proceed from the ancient Roman formula of popular happiness – “bread and circuses”, then this figure must be compared with the revenue for the same 2023 in the world market of grain products (grains, flours, cereals, which still serve as the basis of the global diet, making up half of it). According to the FAO, it amounted to $345 billion last year, that is, the ratio of “bread” to “shows” in the world economy today is 2:1, which is quite consistent with the ancient Roman proportion. It took electronic engineers just over 70 years to successfully revive the Roman modus vivendi of twenty centuries ago, that is, this happened over the lifetime of only three generations of inventors.
Four of them from the first generation now claim the title of the progenitor of online video games. Chronologically, Thomas Goldsmith Jr. was first. More precisely, the inventors of the first video game, who received US Patent No. in December 19482455992 for “Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device” (with priority dated January 1947), there were two – Goldsmith and Astle Ray Mann. But it just so happened that the second of them, Mann, has long been forgotten. All that remains are the years of his life and a dozen of his digitized patents in various fields of electronics, including this patent.
Why it was lost in the history of electronics is easy to explain. Goldsmith was the director of research for DuMont Laboratories in New Jersey, which developed and manufactured equipment for television. Engineer Mann was Goldsmith's subordinate and in those years, together with his boss, he worked intensively to improve the durability and resolution of CRTs for TV receivers. In 1947, Mann was 43 years old and Goldsmith was 37 years old. In 1965, Mann died, and Goldsmith lived until 2009, deservedly receiving numerous honorary titles and awards as “a bright individual and an innovator in the field of television development” and giving equally numerous interviews, and eventually, along with Zworykin, he became a pioneer and legend of American TV . His archive, including photographs, designs and originals of his TV enhancements, as well as congratulatory letters and cards, is now housed in the Library of Congress. In a word, everything is known about Goldsmith: where he was born, who he married, etc., but nothing about Mann, in full accordance with the laws of myth-making of any big business.
But something else is much more interesting about their patent. The application for it was filed in the name of Goldsmith and Mann by their company DuMont Laboratories. So the talk that they invented and assembled a “Device for Entertainment Based on a Cathode Ray Tube” on their own initiative in their free time is most likely just talk. Such an idea could indeed have flashed through their minds during their main work, but most likely it was immediately reported to where it should be, and there they were given the go-ahead to implement it. You didn’t have to be a genius in the field of entrepreneurship to immediately understand a simple thing. Equipping arcade slot machines with CRT screens with animation promised the first one to do this and skim off, so to speak, the cream of the crop, not just big, but very big profits. That’s exactly how it all happened later.
As for the video game by Goldsmith and Mann, in the patent application they described the essence of what was happening on the screen as follows: “The invention uses a cathode ray tube, on the front side of which a trace of a beam, or electron beam, can be seen.” In this case, the beam did not go straight, but along a curve, like the trajectory of a real projectile or rocket. “One or more targets, such as, for example, images of aircraft, are placed on the front side of the tube (on a transparent sticker on the screen – Red.), and the player has controls that allow him to manipulate the beam's path across the face of the tube… The goal is for it to hit one of the objects of his choice on the face of the tube, and the beam will become unfocused just as it hits of a given object, thus simulating the destruction of an object, for example, an airplane. The game can be made more spectacular… if, when hitting a target, an “explosion” of the cathode ray occurs on the screen.”
This was achieved by setting a sliding contactor (a relay switch that controls the flow of energy through a circuit) that would overwhelm the resistor in the CRT with such a strong signal that the display at that point would go out of focus and it would appear as a blurry circular spot, thus creating the appearance of an explosion. .
There were no investors for this first video game, which would now be classified as a “shooter”, or more precisely a “first-person shooter with ranged weapons,” in the immediate post-war years. Only a hand-made prototype was created. This happened for various reasons. Including, probably, because the inventors themselves warned in the very first sentence of their patent application: “The game is of such a nature that it requires increased attention and skills when playing it or controlling the device with which the game is played. These skills can come with practice and can be achieved with careful attention.” Not the best advertisement, you will agree, for an arcade game that is played in places of entertainment, often in a not very sober state.
Goldsmith and Mann's game was built on the basis of analog electronics, there is no storage device, programming, computer graphics, and there is no computer itself. Therefore, now this game is often refused to be considered as the foremother of modern online video games, starting their history with “real” digital games. There is a reason for this. But in fact, it all comes down to the interpretation of the term “computer video game,” and in real life, as soon as all of the above appeared, the first “real” video games, whatever one may say with the terminology, were created in the image and likeness of that very “fake” Goldsmith video game and Manna.
However, in the social gaming and professional communities of developers and IT specialists in the field of video games, issues of priority in this area are treated with great reverence. Dozens, if not hundreds of serious studies have been published on the origins of the first computer video games, which analyzed not only objective data and official documentation, but also conversations and rumors circulating in engineering and invention circles of that time.
As a result, today’s priorities include:
in first place (no later than July 1952) was the teacher of mathematics and physics at the famous London Harrow School, Christopher Strachey, with the game of checkers on the Ferranti Mark I mainframe. His game did not have a proper name. Then, to distinguish it from other similar games, one of the early historians of online games suggested calling it “MUC Drafts” (“Checkers on the Manchester University Computer”).
in second place (no later than November 1952) was IT engineer and graduate student from Cambridge Stanley Gill with the game “sheep and gate” on the EDSAC mainframe, the program of which was included in his dissertation for the PhD degree. In this game, a conditional sheep (a point on the computer monitor screen) approaching the pen (vertical line on the screen) could be driven there through the upper gate (above the horizontal line on the screen), for which the player interrupted the light beam of the computer punched tape reader with a wave of his hand) . If this failed, the lower gate to the pen was opened and the sheep entered through it.
in third place (no later than March 1953) was another Cambridge PhD candidate, Alexander (Sandy) Douglas, with the game OXO (Tic Tac Toe) on the same EDSAC mainframe. Now you can get acquainted with it in person by downloading the latest version of the EDSAC simulator.
There were two other earlier games. Built by Joseph Cates of the University of Toronto specifically for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition, the Bertie the Brain mainframe played tic-tac-toe with visitors to the exhibition. And in 1951 in London, as part of the “Festival of Britain”, the Ferranti company’s Nimrod mainframe (a simplified and specialized version of the Ferranti Mark I, built by John Bennett specifically for the exhibition) played with visitors the game “Nim”, which has no established Russian name, but all its they know. Players take turns taking matches, pebbles, chips or any other objects from different piles, the one who has the last match loses. And although these games were played on a computer, they were denied priority for the reason that their picture was not displayed. CRT display, and a light electromechanical display with conventional light bulbs.
Unlike Goldsmith and Mann, the inventors of the first computer games did not take out patents on them. They had other tasks. All of them were programmers and explored on the first computers what is now called “artificial intelligence”, and then, with the light hand of Turing, they called it “machine intelligence”, or their “mental ability”. In Stanley and Gill's dissertations, games were a good illustration of the thinking power of early computers. Bennett had already written his dissertation after becoming a doctor and, while working at Ferranti, he did the same thing as the rest of the company’s employees – improving and promoting to the market the first commercially available general-purpose mainframe, Ferranti Mark I, released in February 1951. The exhibition in London was a good opportunity to demonstrate “machine intelligence”.
True, the people did not understand this. John Bennett recalled: “My car was a great success, but not quite as intended. I saw this while working as a “barker” at our stand at the London Festival. Most of the crowd was quite happy to watch the flashing lights. Some showed interest in the algorithm and even persisted to the point of beating the machine. Only rarely did we receive any evidence that our real message about the fundamentals of programming was understood.”
The Germans did not understand this either: after the London festival, Nimrod went to an industrial exhibition in West Berlin, where, by the way, he played not only checkers, but also chess, only very slowly and in very conventional chess, where castlings and moves were not allowed pawn on two squares, stalemate was no different from checkmate and there were a number of other restrictions (the chess program was written by Bennett’s colleague from the Ferranti company Dietrich Prinz). In general, their company had to urgently release a special brochure called “Faster than Thought” for the dull people to explain what exactly they meant by demonstrating a computer game.
It is clear that the idea of taking a patent for a game and then installing a computer weighing 3.5 tons (its general-purpose version Ferranti Mark I weighed 6 tons), with an area of 6 square meters, in the gaming pavilion. m and a cost of tens of thousands of pounds sterling, to collect sixpence coins in its coin acceptor could hardly have occurred to anyone.
Joseph Cates's “Bertie the Good Guy” was about the same size. It was very tall (4 m), but noticeably lighter and slimmer than its prototype – the first Canadian UTEC 12-bit mainframe computer, and, interestingly in this case, it was made before the final tests of UTEC. Cates, who was UTEC's development director at the time, created “Bertie the Smart Guy” specifically for the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto to demonstrate to potential investors the operation of the pencil-sized Additron vacuum tube he had invented. “It was designed specifically to perform binary addition in one tiny tube, replacing a network of about 10 interconnected conventional radio tubes,” Cates told reporters at the exhibition, who wrote: “12 of these tubes will do the work that was previously performed a square yard of wires, large tubes and connections.”
Cates had just applied for a patent, not for his tic-tac-toe game, but for his Additron, which, by the way, was never used in the final version of UTEC. For some reason, which modern IT historians have not fully understood, Cates’ patent application was, as they say, suppressed by the patent offices of Canada and the United States. US Patent No.2784312 he received the “Electron Vacuum Tube” in March 1957 (with priority from January 17, 1951). But this priority was no longer of any use; at the end of the 1950s, there were already commercial transistor computers on the market, including the Canadian DRTE.
Christopher Strachey was the only one among the pioneers of computer games listed above who was not limited to official duties and dissertation topics, but was, as they say, in free flight. He already had experience during the war years of working on a differential analyzer, that is, essentially a mechanical analog computer, designing lamps for radars. But circumstances turned out to be such that he was not accepted into graduate school at Cambridge, where he wanted to go, and he taught mathematics and physics to the boys of the elite, as they would say now, Harrow School in London for 50 pounds a month. The money, by the way, is decent; the engineers who worked on the creation of the first computers received no more. However, money did not play a big role here; Strachey was from a very wealthy family.
In his free time from school work, through an acquaintance, he helped programmers at the London National Physical Laboratory (NPL) test the capabilities of one of the first computers, the Pilot ACE. And at the same time he wrote a program for playing checkers for her, and, in his own words, with the same academic goal – “to better understand the logic of machines,” that same “mental ability” that Turing spoke about. But for his “checkers” the memory of the Pilot ACE turned out to be rather weak. Suitable for a full game of checkers at an “acceptable”, that is, human speed, memory was available in the Ferranti Mark I at the University of Manchester, where Turing served as assistant director of the computer laboratory. Strachey knew him; he entered King's College, Cambridge, when Turing was already graduating.
Turing found Strachey's game “very interesting” but first put him to work on programs for their computer. Strachey worked, his tracing program consisted of about 1000 instructions, and only then recoded the program for his “checkers” under the Ferranti Mark I. And while he was doing this, Newman, a professor of mathematics at the University of Manchester, informed him that he was ready to take him on as soon as space will be freed up for him. But earlier a place for Strachey was found at the National Research and Development Corporation (NRDC), where he was hired in June 1952 with a salary of 100 pounds a month. So formally, his game of checkers, the official debut of which took place on the Ferranti Mark I in July of the same 1952, was no longer invented by a school teacher, but by an NRDC engineer. But in real life, teacher Strachey spent another three months completing assignments at his elite school and, in his free time, rounded out his work as a volunteer programmer at the University of Manchester. He did not file a patent application for his checkers game.
William Higinbotham from Brookhaven Laboratory, who in 1958 assembled a game console for the Donner Model 30 analog computer for playing Tennis for Two, also did not bother with a patent. It was the first multiplayer video game, two players played against each other, each with their own remote control for the “racquet”. It already used germanium transistors to switch the image of the net/court/ball on the oscilloscope screen at a frequency of 30 “frames” per second (in cinema, the standard frequency was 24 frames per second). But the game did not go further than the annual exhibition of the Brookhaven Laboratory; two years later, Higinbotham dismantled the console, and his game was forgotten for a while.
Thus, in the bottom line of video games from the 1940s-50s of the first generation computer era, we have a single patent, and that one is for an analog game, which has a very indirect relationship to computer programming. The era of video game patents was upon us.
Apart from “Tic Tac Toe” by Joseph Cates and “Nim” by John Bennett, in which the game picture was displayed on a regular light screen, in the rest the display was an oscilloscope screen with primitive vector (calligraphic) graphics and animation. As New York University computer science professor Alvy Ray Smith, who was a graphics engineer at Microsoft in the 1980s and is now a venerable IT historian, delicately put it in a recent publication: “All the first drawings, video games, and animations are with the exception of the calligraphic bouncing “ball” – they were special transformations of simple geometric objects (letters, numbers, lines, curves and squares) into one-bit pixels. These were naive visualizations without explicit use of the Nyquist-Shannon theorem (we call it Kolobov’s theorem – Ed.). No one had yet realized its exceptional importance, namely that the widespread use of pixel displays throughout the world would allow all types of digital media to be combined into one visual medium – the pixel. No one ever expected that the calligraphic display would disappear and could be completely imitated by a raster display.”
An exception that the professor cites as a worthy computer animation of the time is MIT engineer Charles Adams's program for the institute's Whirlwind I mainframe, published in its programming manual on June 11, 1951, with a sketch of the trajectory of a bouncing ball on the oscilloscope display computer. Subsequently, Adams and his colleague Jack Gillmor modified it into a game, but exactly when is not known. Either immediately in 1951, or at the end of the 50s. And whether they did it or a certain MIT student, whom some historians silently mention, is also a question.
Adams' game with the ball consisted of the players changing the frequency of the ball's bounces (there were three fixed modes), and the one whose ball, instead of the next bounce, fell into a hole in the floor (a break in the horizontal line on the screen) won. There are no photographs or footage of this game, and since it was played only by MIT programmers, it has not left a significant mark on the canonical history of computer video games.
Computer graphics didn't shine in later games either. Even those who personally played early computer games are now so accustomed to the fact that even individual hairs and drops of sweat on the faces of characters in current games are visible on the display that they hardly think about how computer graphics have evolved over 70 years. However, this is a different story.
To be fair, it must be said that the programmers of the first computers could not and did not pay special attention to animation, and especially to animated games. Time on a computer was expensive, and not in monetary terms, but in the literal sense. There were few computers, and priority tasks, mainly of a defense nature, were solved on them. This is not a general discussion, but memories of very specific foreign and domestic programmers of the first post-war years. But the main thing is that digital interactive video games with animation appeared, and then, as they say, it was a matter of technology.
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