On 12/17/2018 05:08 PM, Tom Morris wrote: > When the Computer Museum was in MR2, they definitely fired up Spacewar! > for receptions and open houses. > > I think later on they hooked up an external controller to save wear > and tear on the front panel switches, but originally you played > standing shoulder to shoulder at the front panel switch register, > peering to your right at the display off to the side.
After they moved to Museum Wharf in Boston, they had an emulator running on, I think, a Mac, with a pair of hand-held controllers. Visitors could run it any time the museum was open. Which leads to this story: Sometime in the 1980s, I was in Boston with a day to kill, so I went to the Computer Museum. It was early in the day, and there were very few people there. I came to the Spacewar! display and found a young lad and his mother playing the game. The kid, as his kind typically do, was beating his mother every game, not even giving her a chance. It wasn't a fair fight. The mother eventually noticed me and asked, "Would you like to try it?" You could almost hear the pleading in her voice, "PLEASE!" "Of course", I replied, and sat down. The kid then "explained" the game to me, while I bit my tongue and kept silent about his mistakes. The first game ended badly for me. My reflexes were rusty, and the controller was unfamiliar. "Would you like to try again?", the kid asked. "Sure", I replied, as images of Dirty Harry ran through my mind. When he pressed "Start", the old reflexes kicked in. TURN, THRUST, FIRE! The torpedo looped around the sun and up his tail before he knew what hit him. The look of shock on his face was priceless; he had never had an adult beat him at any video game. He wanted a rematch. The remaining games went the same way. He couldn't understand how an old fart was beating him every time. I glanced at his mother, who now had a big grin on her face -- her son was getting a taste of his own medicine! Eventually I tired of this and got up to leave. As I walked away down the hall, I turned to look over my shoulder. The two of them were standing there, side-by-side, staring at my receding back. I could almost hear them saying the words from the end of many Lone Ranger TV episodes, "Who WAS that masked man?" :-) Kid, if you ever read this, I apologize. It was not a fair fight. Alan Frisbie _______________________________________________ Simh mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
