Dr. Dobb's Journal March 1998
Every industry has its scrap heap of legends, milestones, and skeletons hanging in corporate closets. The automobile industry, for instance, can boast that the first car was manufactured in 1896 by the Duryea Motor Car Company -- with the first automobile accident occurring shortly thereafter, when one of those cars became one with a bicycle. This was followed by the first stoplight in Detroit in 1914, the first car radio in 1930 (and the melding of "motion" and "radio" into "Motorola"), and, in 1958, the Edsel. As for the movie biz, who can forget D.W. Griffith's 1915 Birth of a Nation, Orson Wells' famous 1941 Citizen Kane ceiling shot, or Joe Eszterhas and Paul Verhoeven's 1995 Showgirls.
The computer industry has its share of milestones, too. Recently celebrating its 50th birthday, the transistor was developed by physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at AT&T Bell Labs in December, 1947. (The trio subsequently received the 1956 Nobel Prize for their invention.) A few years later, Fairchild's Robert Noyce and TI's Jack Kilby independently figured out how to put transistors and other components onto silicon, launching us into the semiconductor age. Although originally designed to control and amplify electrical signals in long-distance telephone calls, transistors are today found everywhere, fueling an estimated $866 billion high-tech industry employing more than 4.25 million people in the U.S alone.
So how important are transistors? Well, if it weren't for semiconductors, we'd never have had Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, or Super Mario Bros., let alone Myst and Riven. Yes, it's hard to believe, but video games have passed a milestone, too, celebrating their 35th birthday. Today's video games are, of course, a far cry from Spacewar, the first video game, written by MIT student Steven Russell (with help from Pete Sampson and Dan Edwards) in 1962. (Yes, there are those who would argue that "the" first video game was Brookhaven National Lab's William Higinbotham's 1958 "Tennis for Two," which was played on an oscilloscope. Okay, so it's really the 40th anniversary of video games. I can live with that.) Written to run on a DEC PDP-1 (one of the first computers sporting a video display), two players played Spacewar by flipping toggle switches to maneuver spaceships. One of the few people at the time who had access to a PDP-1 and a penchant for playing video games was, of course, University of Utah student Nolan Bushnell, who eventually founded Atari to market Pong and a ton of other games. As for Spacewar, DEC ended up using it as a tool for testing its computers, in much the same way Flight Simulator was later used to gauge Windows compatibility.
To celebrate the history of video games, by the way, the SciTrek Science and Technology Museum (Atlanta, Georgia) has put together a roadshow called the "Cyber Playground" that traces the evolution of video games. The exhibit features working arcade games such as Sprint (1976), Asteroids (1979), and Battlezone (1980), along with information on computer history, computer graphics, and the like. For more information on Cyber Playground, see http://www.scitrek.org/.
One milestone that certainly shouldn't be missed is the 20th anniversary of Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's 1978 C Programming Language. A second edition (published in 1988) covered C as defined by the ANSI Standard. C Programming Language is a no-nonsense book -- written by the guys who created the language in the first place -- that took a powerful programming language into the mainstream. In doing so, C Programming Language set a standard for programming books in terms of completeness, conciseness, and accuracy that's rarely been matched over the past 20 years.
Just to keep things in perspective, the March 1978 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal, led by Haphazard Editor Jim Warren and Actual Editor Tom Williams (hey, I'm not making this stuff up) included a status update on the UCSD Pascal Project; "Renumbering and Appending BASIC Programs on the Apple II Computer," by Steve Wozniak; "STRUBAL: A Structured BASIC Compiler," by Robert Grappel; "A Z-80 Tracer," by Arthur Cline; and "ACT: An 8080 Macroprocessor," by Alex Cecil.
Finally, it was 15 years ago that Richard Stallman, frustrated by the program editors available for LISP at the time, sat down and wrote Emacs -- a program that more or less introduced the notion of "free software" (that's "free" as in "freedom," not "price," as Stallman would be quick to point out). Emacs led to the 1983 GNU project, which was conceived to foster a cooperative spirit among software developers. Over the past 15 years, free software has spawned a raft of software (most notably Linux, Perl, and the like) and a slew of companies supporting it (Cygnus, Red Hat, Slackware, O'Reilly, and others).
We've come a long way over the years -- but the fun will be in seeing where we go from here.
--Jonathan Erickson