The Massachusetts Institute of Technology celebrated the 50th birthday this week of Spacewar, an early computer game written by four students that ran on a refrigerator-sized Digital Equipment PDP-1 computer. The game, similar to the videogame Asteroids, pitted two spaceship pilots firing torpedos at each other and avoiding the gravitational pull of the sun at the middle of the screen. Current students ported the game to an Arduino microcontroller that has the same computational power as the PDP-1 and fits in the palm of a hand.
