There is a peculiar constant in the
history of human kind, which states that when engaged in warfare our
technology develops exponentially. I'd imagine it's because during
those times of hardship you can afford to engage in these kind of
activities while the public are two busy to worry about what
Governmental death rays are being produced. It's safe to say though
most premier technology development of the modern is tied up in the
arms races of the past. Even when we aren't expressively designing
new and exciting ways to kill each other the technology we use often
had a military use somewhere along the line. On that note lets talk a
little about a very significant piece of technology from World War 2:
Reich Harder.
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| Konrad Zuse (A German) With the Z3 |
In the 1930's there were various
computers being concepted and thrown into development but for now I
want to talk about Konrad Zuse an engineering student at the
University of Berlin. A man concerned less with the political aspects
of the time when it was all most could concentrate on and more on a
device used to negate the humdrum of repetitive calculation in his
line of work. Sounding familiar? We've more or less hit the point
where technology had caught up to the insane hopefulness of Charles
Babbage. In 1936 he quite his job and devoted himself to the
production of this machine. His baby was named the Z1 and was
remarkable in a number of ways like nothing of it's kinda before it
had a binary method of operation. It had a keyboard for the input of
instruction, memory, and something akin to a central processor. He
didn't stop here though Z2 his next build he switched out the memory
to a more effective system and replaced the input mechanism from a
keyboard to strips of punched paper tape. And would you believe it
the son of gun worked.
Here's an interesting if not slightly
horrible hypothetical for you though. Zuse made a friend shortly
after his production of the Z2 a certain Herr Schreyer who happaned
to be writing a thesis in electrical engineering. The two came to a
conclusion that if you could replace the relays in the machine with
valves that it would operate significantly past its current capacity.
At the time it wasn't practical but had enough effort been put in,
maybe it could have happened. Now if Germany at the time had
possession of a computer of this design, well that would have had a
significant impact on the outcome of the war. Of course at the time
they were too busy blitzkrieging their way across Europe to really
care, the investment seemed unnecessary considering Hitler thought
the war all but won by 1940.
Of course that didn't happen.
Britain's own expertise in the areas of code making and breaking made
sure of that. And it's developments like these that pushed
technological advancements to the point that we could start on much
more important things. You know like games and stuff.
Have you ever stopped to think what
the appeal to all this gaming stuff is? I'm sure plenty of people
have their own personal opinions on it, hell some people hate gaming
but here's the thing. Almost as soon as computers were capable of
containing what could be considered a “game” someone went and did
it. Even though gaming as an entity didn't actually exist yet.
It's great to think that somewhere
between using this new and exciting technology to bomb people and
finding out how to transmit gratuitous nude imagery world wide.
Someone thought. “Hey, lets do something fun.” I say this,
actually said guy did create a radar display for an experimental
bomber, essentially making him a merchant of death. On the flip side
though he did help to found the nuclear nonproliferation
group so he can't have been all that bad.
Enter stage right Willy Higinbotham.
Now this bloke after mucking around with all these radars
and....science for so long. You know generally trying to do something
useful for humanity. Well he clocked on that he could take one of his
radars and turn it into something else. You know get people excited
about, how relevant science is...Ironic considering one of the
arguments against gaming is how irrelevant and pointless it is.
Tennis for Two is arguably the first
game ever created and when the public got their hands on it at
Brookhaven lab's visitors day they went mental for it. Or as mental
as people could get in the 1950's. Though strangely enough as popular
as this game was it didn't really kick off until some years later
with new incarnations of the game. But here we had it, a piece of
technology purely for the purposes of one persons entertainment and
procrastination, and that my friends, is a beautiful thing.
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| Tennis for Two Interface |
Sources:
Evans, C. (1981.) The Making of the Micro - A History of the Computer. Victor Gollancz LTD.
http://pongmuseum.com/history/FirstElectronicGameEverMade.php
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