Peter Samson and the PDP-1

I spent a good chunk of my Saturday at the Vintage Computer Festival, which was an opportunity to see some of the old eye-burning blocky graphics, listen to barely filtered square waves, and muse about my humble beginnings as a programmer. We also caught the tour of the Computer History Museum’s Visible Storage, and caught a demo of their recently restored PDP-1, demonstrated by none other than legendary PDP-1 programmer Peter Samson, who wrote some of the first computer music software for the PDP-1. It was quite a thrill to see him flip the power switch, and listen to the relays inside clack into action. Since the machine had core memory (which is non-volatile) it didn’t require anything to load: Peter just toggled in the run address, and played some music, demonstrated “The Minskytron”, the predecessor of what we would call a screensaver, and ultimately Spacewar!, which could lay claim to being the first video game. If you scan back through my archives, you can see I’ve written about this machine before, and have even written my own PDP-1 simulator so I could play Spacewar!

Back in May, I attended this video lecture at the opening of the PDP-1 exhibit, and it’s worth watching to learn some of the background around this nifty computer.