In just a few weeks, Steve Russell produced one of the first, or the first, video games: Spacewar. He used a DEC PDP-1. He invented a way to maneuver two points on the screen, then converted them into two spaceships, and then created another subroutine that allowed each to fire a missile, represented by a point propagating in a straight line. Russell was a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club, an MIT geek organization in 1946. They met in the same building where Radar was born. In 1961, they received a PDP-1 as a gift from DEC. Spacewar would later become an open-source project, and gravitational force and the ultimate panic button (teleportation) would be added. He would be a pioneer of open sourcing. DEC would provide it for free, preloaded on their computers. He would also inspire Nolan Bushnell, a Spacewar fanatic, to create all of this in hardware. And he will found Atari (where a certain Steve Jobs will also go to work, but that’s another story…).
