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Edward U game design
For the Westinghouse display at the World's Fair, Edward U. Condon designs a computer that plays the traditional game Nim in which players try to avoid picking up the last matchstick. Tens of thousands of people play it, and the computer wins at least 90% of the games. -
Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann
They file a patent for a "cathode ray tube amusement device." Their game, which uses a cathode ray tube hooked to an oscilloscope display, challenges players to fire a gun at at a target. -
Claude Shannon/ Alan Turing
He lays out the basic guidelines for programming a chess-playing computer in an article, "Programming a computer for Playing Chess." That same year both he and Englishman Alan Turing create chess programs. -
A. S.Douglass
He creates OXO (a game known as noughts and crosses in the United Kingdom and tic-tac-toe in the United States) on Cambridge's EDSAC computer as part of his research on human-computer interactions. -
Programmers at New Mexico's Los Alamos laboratories
The birthplace of the atomic bomb, develop the first blackjack program on an IBM-701 computer. -
U.S. military designs Hutspiel
The long tradition of military wargaming enters the computer age when the U>S> military designs Hutspiel, in which Red and Blue players (representing NATO and Soviet commanders) wage war. -
Arthur Samuel
He demonstrates his computer checkers program, written on an IBM-701, on national television. Six years later the program defeats a checkers master. -
Alex Bernstein
Alex Bernstein writes the first complete computer chess program on an IBM-704 computer-a program advanced enough to evaluate four half-moves ahead. -
Willy Higinbotham
Willy Higinbotham creates a tennis game on an oscilloscope and analog computer for public demonstration at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958. Although dismantled two years later and largely forgotten, it anticipated later video games such as Pong. -
Students at MIT
Students at MIT create Mouse in the Maze on MIT'S TX-0 computer. Users first draw a maze with a light pen, then a mouse navigates the labyrinth searching for cheese. In a revised version, a bibulous mouse seeks out martinis yet still somehow remembers the path it took. -
John Burgeson
Computer programmer John Burgeson stays home sick from work at IBM and begins developing a computer baseball simulation. A month later (in January 1961), aided by his brother Paul, John runs this first-known baseball computer program on an IBM 1620 computer. -
The Raytheon Company
They develops a computer simulation of global Cold War conflict for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Although it is sophisticated and even models the benefits of arms control, the simulation proves too complex for users unfamiliar with computers, so Raytheon creates a more accessible analog version called "Grand Strategy." -
MIT student Steve Russell
He invents Spacewar!, the first computer-based video game. Over the following decade, the game spreads to computers across the country. -
U.S. Defense Department
Months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. Defense Department completes a computer war game known as STAGE( Simulation of Total Atomic Global Exchange) which "shows" that the United States would defeat the Soviet Union in a thermonuclear war.
