Apathy Curve: Tennis for Two

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Friday, October 24, 2008

Tennis for Two

A team at Brookhaven National Laboratory has re-created the first video game.

Since no vacuum tubes were available to rebuild the original version's computer, the team had to re-create the 1958 game with micro-circuits... which led to an interesting problem:

[The] newfangled chips don’t tolerate the big voltage spikes generated by the game’s operation as well as the old-school analog computer, and they kept blowing out. Takacs and his colleagues had to put protective circuits in to keep them from being destroyed.

Vacuum Tubes: The REAL MAN'S Computer Component.

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