[Kde-games-devel] kspaceduel

[Ian Wadham]

On Thu, 14 Dec 2006 02:41 am, Dirk wrote:
> As I really like kspaceduel and (in my opinion) it would be a real pity
> if it won't be included in KDE4 ...
> 
Amen to that.  It is a genuine classic and might well be the first-ever
graphical computer game, so it is well worthy of preservation.

AFAIK the world's first super-computer, the Control Data 6600,
designed by Seymour Cray (later of Cray Research) and released
in 1966, was also the first mainframe to do away with the usual
typewriter, multiple buttons and scads of flashing lights on the
operator's console.  Instead it had just two vector-graphics tubes
(green monochrome), a keyboard and on-off buttons.

Some enterprising programmer in the development labs programmed
a SpaceDuel game to run on one of the tubes.  It became a legend
within Control Data (where I was working at the time, in the Australian
subsidiary), but it was severely frowned upon by senior management
and marketing and was NOT released to field installations.  So I never
became one of the elite few who played it, although some of my
colleagues had played it when visiting Head Office in the USA.

Hope you are interested in this blast from the past.  Go for it, Dirk! :-)

All the best, Ian W.

P.S. The CDC 6600 ran at a blazing 3M floating-point ops. per second
with 60-bit precision.