Talk:Early mainframe games/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Indrian (talk · contribs) 21:49, 19 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I got this. Indrian (talk) 21:49, 19 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@PresN:Sorry, I've been slammed recently. Just wanted to let you know I had not forgotten about this. Should be able to get to it this week. Indrian (talk) 17:25, 29 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Indrian: Hey, no rush, as there's no one I'd rather have review this and I'm not in any hurry, just reminding you of this. Also noting that I've got the other 1960's game article Space Travel at GAN if you want, and more importantly, finally got Spacewar! to GAN, if you want to reserve that one. --Pres N 03:32, 9 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I've let this one sit way too long, so it's time to put it to bed.

Lead

"Mainframe computers are computers used primarily by businesses and academic institutions for large-scale, multi-user processes" - What do you mean by multi-user here? If you are talking about simultaneous access, then that definition does not work for this article because timesharing did not become prevalent until the mid 1960s and much of this article covers an earlier period. If you mean something else, it probably needs to be clarified.

I just cut it, it's too complicated to go into for a lead sentence. --Pres N 02:50, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"became widely available to the general public in the early 1970s" - Late 1970s. The Altair was the first microcomputer that could be considered any kind of success and it appeared in 1975. Really though, it was the arrival of the "trinity" (Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET) in 1977 that marked the point microcomputers were widely available.

Modified to just be 70s, and dropped the "also" from the rise of the video game industry. --Pres N 02:50, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Background

"though the 1959 PDP-1 minicomputer cost US$120,000" - This gets us into the weeds a little bit, but I don't think the PDP-1 is really a minicomputer. Some people call it that today, but I think this is more of a retroactive appellation of the term based in the size and price of the machine rather than on its capabilities and intended uses. The PDP-5 is really considered DEC's first minicomputer.

Cut the PDP-1 part out, as a definitional debate right there would be a bit of a tangent. --Pres N 02:50, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"did not persist after the original computer design or programming language was discontinued" - Most of the high-level programming languages of the 1950s and 1960s continued to persist for a long time, and many of them still exist today. It's not so much that programming languages were discontinued, its that games were not programmed in high-level languages; they were programmed in machine language and were therefore not portable.

Yeah, I meant the computer-specific machine language, but that came out wrong. --Pres N 02:50, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"but the rise of personal computers meant that beginning in the 1970s the majority of the audience and developers of video games were no longer based on mainframe computers" - I am not sure I agree with this statement. I mean, certainly the arcade-going and home console crowds were larger than the mainframe crowd, but if we are talking about home computer game developers, there really weren't any of consequence before 1978. All the action was still on mainframes and virtually every major genre in early computer games originated on mainframes in the 1970s. Maybe this point could be made in a slightly different manner.

Reworded to make it closer to reality, hopefully. I'm really coming to realize that while grouping these 1971 and earlier games together is handy and makes some sense as an "early" article, I really should go back and make another "Mainframe games" article to gather up the rest of the 70s, etc., as the distinction between these games and ones that came out in 72-78 is not that large. Sourcing would be a gigantic pain, but there's something to be said for fighting the trend for early history books to focus on console games only from 71 on, ignoring all computer games, just like the "early history of video games" article pushes against the tendency for them to ignore all pre-Odyssey/Pong games. --Pres N 02:50, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Early games

Right now, this section is a bit of a jumbled mess with a lot of games mentioned and no through line. I would completely reorganize as follows:

Paragraph 1: Games like Bertie that were one-off demonstrations.

Paragraph 2: Spread of computing to college students leads to MIT hacker scene and Spacewar.

Paragraph 3: Rise of software catalogs and program sharing organizations like DECUS leads to games being shared on a small scale.

Paragraph 4: BASIC greatly expands the programmer base on college campuses, leading to an explosion in the number of games being created in the late 1960s.

Ugh... yeah, this section wasn't well thought out, it's kind of a half-done attempt at not making this "mainframe games, 1968-71". --Pres N 02:50, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

101 BASIC Computer Games

"but instead had text-based graphics" - A little nitpicky, but these are generally referred to as character-based graphics.

Yeah, we don't have an article on it and "text-based" is what the Dwarf Fortress article uses. I agree, though, that "character-based" makes a better distinction from the actual textual games also mentioned here. --Pres N 02:50, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Other Games

"As a part of porting the game to the PDP-7, Thompson developed his own operating system, which later formed the core of the Unix operating system" - This is a common misconception. Porting the game to the PDP-7 served as a way to learn how to program on the PDP-7, but no part of UNIX was created for the game. Previous to starting the game, he had brainstormed some ideas for an OS, and after learning the ins and outs of programming the PDP-7 while making the game, he decided to create UNIX. The first source you cite to actually has this correct.

I was eliding that away, actually, to avoid bogging down in a section that had it's own article- I agree, it was pretty plain while writing Space Travel that the game was an excuse to write an operating system, not an actual reason. "Game is running a bit slow? Better write an entire custom-designed file system based on my previous designs that I wanted Bell to fund!" "Slightly annoying to take the compiled code down the hall on tape? Better write my own custom compiler!" Changed it to "while" porting the game, though. --Pres N 02:50, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

And that's it for my first pass. There are some rather serious structural problems in the early part of the article, but with some work I think we can whip it into shape. I'll go ahead and put it On hold while changes are made. Indrian (talk) 19:08, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Got everything but the rewrite of the "early games" section done; I think it's just trying to hard to be a cut-down version of the relevant bits of "early history of video games", rather than what it should be, as you say, a narratively-coherent line through the changes in computing culture in the time period. I'll get to that pretty soon, hopefully. --Pres N 02:50, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good. I let this one sit awhile, so there is certainly no rush to fix things on your end. Pleasure working with you as always. Indrian (talk) 03:06, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Indrian: Alright, rewrote the "early games" section. --Pres N 20:26, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@PresN:Now that the structural issues have been taken care of, I have taken another pass at the article and noted just a few more things. We should be able to promote this in short order.

Lead

"These games were largely created between 1968 and 1971, with some smaller games developed in the years beforehand" - Now that the "Early Games" section has been redone, this line should be rewritten in a way that better summarizes the section.

Rewritten. --Pres N 17:49, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"which led to the creation of the Unix operating system" - As above, it did not lead directly to the creation of the OS. Perhaps "played a role in the creation" would work better?

Done. --Pres N 17:49, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Early Games

"By the 1967–68 school year the DTSS library of 500 programs for the system included, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz wrote, "many games", with several thousand users on and off campus." - "with several thousand users on and off campus" appears to be a non-sequitur in the context of the sentence. The info is good, it just needs to be rewritten.

Moved it back slightly modified to connect with the "extended to more people" and "many terminals", rather than the number of programs. --Pres N 17:49, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

And that's it. Almost there! Indrian (talk) 16:33, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Indrian: Responded! --Pres N 17:49, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@PresN: Let's get this sucker promoted. Sorry it took so long, but we made it! Indrian (talk) 18:16, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]