Do you know about Charles Babbage?

(This column of slides contains material
that we can talk about in the tutorial sessions,
but will probably skip over during the lectures...)

"By the way, I hope you do not take upon yourself
to alter any of my corrections. I must beg you not.
They all have some very sufficient reason.

And you have made a pretty mess and confusion in
one or two places (which I will show you sometime)
where you have ventured on my M.S.’s to insert or alter
a phrase or word and have utterly muddled the sense"

-- Lovelace to Babbage (1843)

"I then suggested that she add some notes to Menabrea's memoir, an idea which was immediately adopted. We discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced: I suggested several, but the selection was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process."

Babbage's memoirs (publ. 1864)

...who showed the Manchester Machine
performing an exciting prime-number test in 1949.

He connected the computer to an oscilloscope, and made this:

(via an article by Brookhaven's Peter Takacs)

Another summary, including quotes from "Willy" himself.

In 1968, an inventor and TV engineer called Ralph Baer,
who'd been toying with the idea of making "TV Games",
built an experimental device called "The Brown Box":

The Brown Box was a piece of custom electronics, and is not an actual computer, but it was the first system for "video games". It was commercialised as the "Odyssey", complete with hilarious transparent TV screen overlays:

(One of) "The Father(s) of Video Games"

March 8, 1922 – December 6, 2014

Spacewar and the Odyssey both inspired an electrical engineer called Nolan Bushnell to set-up a company in 1972 which would make its own "video games".

In need of a variation on the PONG theme, Bushnell thought it would be cool to flip it on its side and replace one of the paddles with a destructible "brick wall".

Early arcade machines were still
"hard-wired" using custom TTL circuitry.

However, once companies like Intel started making
single-chip CPU "microprocessors", the games
started to take advantage of those instead...

A one-man effort by Tomohiro Nishikado, who designed the game, made the art, and the sounds, wrote the code, and apparently customised the electronics used to implement it.

Created for Atari, using a MOS 6502 CPU and Atari's
own specialised DVG ("Digital Vector Generator")
chip to handle the novel vector graphics.

A Zilog Z80 CPU @ ~3MHz

16 KB ROM

2KB Main RAM +  2KB VRAM

224 x 288 pixels (on a 28 x 36 grid)

with 16x16 pixel sprite overlays

16 total colours with 8-bit depth (R3G3B2)

4 colours per object, with table lookup 

Pac-man colour info here

For Too Much Information about Pac-Man, go here.

In parallel with the development of CPU-based arcades came the creation of the early CPU-based home machines.

The second* (and most influential) of these was essentially a programmable generalisation of the fixed-function home PONG machines which had come out in the mid 70s.

It was the Atari VCS, later renamed as the Atari 2600.