A space-combat simulation game, inspired by
E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" books, in which two
spaceships duel around a central sun, shooting torpedoes at each
other and jumping through hyperspace. This game was first
implemented on the PDP-1 at MIT in 1962. In 1968-69, a descendant of
the game motivated Ken Thompson to build, in his spare time on a
scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that became Unix. Less
than nine years after that, SPACEWAR was commercialized as one of
the first video games; descendants are still feeping in video
arcades everywhere.
