Futureproofing Artifacts: Spacewar! 1962 In HTML5 175
trebonian writes "In 1997 we posted a playable version of the Spacewar!, the first graphical computer game. Spacewar! was written by Russell et al at MIT in the early '60s. We did not re-implement the game. Rather, we found the original source code, rebuilt it to get an authentic binary and ran it on a PDP-1 emulator that we wrote in Java. We chose Java to implement the PDP-1 because we believed at the time — correctly as it turned out — that a Java version would survive the browser wars. Also, it would not require any effort to keep it running on all platforms well past the turn of the millennium, and through the traffic peaks of Spacewar's 40th and 45th birthday. It's now getting close to 15 years later. We would not want to bet that in another 15 years a Java program will still run on the latest popular platforms. As a hedge to the future, and in an effort to continue the preservation of this significant digital artifact, we've now ported the PDP-1 emulator to Javascript/HTML5. This should see the game through Spacewar!'s 50th (and hopefully 60th) birthday. Expect another update around 2025."
And then they got free (Score:5, Interesting)
Bah - now they've let those little spaceships out on the web. At least you can use them to kill adds - http://erkie.github.com/
A cool game to play. (Score:5, Interesting)
I played this at MIT - the setting was as cool as the game. Go down an alley, into a freight elevator, up to the top floor, where the elevator opens into a computer room, and play at the console. It felt like the game was embedded in a James Bond movie.
Benchmark? (Score:5, Interesting)
How does the speed of this Javascript emulator (on a typical PC) compare to the original hardware PDP-1?
Didn't have a PDP1 (or PDP 8 either) (Score:2, Interesting)
When I was in college (starting fall 1969), we took the original math and programmed an IBM 360 to print out a gravity map that could be pasted on posterboard/cardboard.
Then we played off of that.
The program got rewritten for a PDP-10, in interactive mode for use on graph paper (and one test version on a Techtronics 4010 graphics terminal).
It was the first programe to be banned by the computer center.
Re:Why not port to C (Score:4, Interesting)