Lyle Bickley explains the PDP-1 (and we play the original Spacewar!)

Lyle Bickley tours the restored DEC PDP-1 at the Computer History Museum and demonstrates the original Spacewar game running on its CRT display.

Lyle Bickley, of the PDP-1 restoration team, gives us a tour of this amazing, early scientific interactive computer at the Computer History Museum. The first machine built by DEC in 1959, it features a superb graphics screen. DEC gave one to MIT, and some very bright students went wild. Gems such as Spacewar!, Snowflake, 4-voice music programs were all developed by moonlighting MIT students, unencumbered by its measly 12kW memory and pokey 100,000 instructions per second. Along with much more serious debugging and programming languages of course. You can come and see the real machine for yourself at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California: computerhistory.org/ Also, Norbert Landsteiner made this incredible simulation of the PDP-1 that can run the original Spacewar! and Minkytron code in your browser: masswerk.at/spacewar/ masswerk.at/minskytron/ He also made a gate exact replica with Verilog code on github: youtu.be/iymD9eysqXo Our sponsor for PCBs: pcbway.com Support the team on Patreon: patreon.com/curiousmarc Merch on Teespring: teespring.com/stores/curiousmarcs-store Learn more on companion site: curiousmarc.com Contact info: youtube.com/curiousmarc/about