English Essay

Running head: VIDEOGAMES

The History of Videogames
Alejandro Leon Medina
UVM Lomas Verdes

Level 5
Luz Maria Cortes Olmos
15/NOV/2012

The History of Videogames
What is the origin of the game? When and how did it start? Hard as it is to believe, the game got its first signs of life in the late 40s, particularly after the end of World War II, when the major victorious powers began atechnology race to build the first supercomputers programmable as ENIAC, a huge computer that occupied an area of ​​167 square meters and weighed 27 tons.
The first games were mostly academic tests and experiments by scientists and physicists, it was not until the arrival of the 70's when the game would start to have a more commercial, marking the beginning of an unstoppable transformation andevolution of the concept the game that would eventually become the mass cultural phenomenon we know today, even to achieve the status of artistic media in some countries.
1947: Entertainment Device Cathode Ray Tube
On January 25, 1947, Thomas T. Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann patented an electronic system called "Cathode-ray tube amusement device" (Entertainment Device Cathode Ray Tube) based radarsused in World War II, becoming the first "program" to be developed in a CRT (cathode ray tube). Unfortunately, being only an experiment, there is no actual evidence of it, but thanks to the descriptions and annotations of the original patent was we know how.
1950-1951: Chess Program
During World War II, the prestigious British mathematician Alan Turing and the computer scientist Claude Shannonworked together to decipher the secret codes used by the Nazi army with the Enigma machine and teletype coders FISH. The result of this union, Turing and Shannon with other mathematicians Alonzo Church and as Kurt Gödel and laid the foundations of the theory of computation, artificial intelligence where indicated as the most important field to which you had to direct all research efforts in thefuture.
Thanks to this research in the field of artificial intelligence, in March 1950 Claude Shannon introduced by the economist and mathematician D. G. Champernowne an article called "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess" in the journal Philosophical Magazine, in the article specified the first techniques and algorithms to create a chess programs, but at that time there was no computer andhas the potential to run, so it was not until November 1951 that Dr. Dietrich Prinz could write the original program into a Ferranti Mark I, the first commercial electronic computer.
1951: Nimrod
On 5 May 1951, the Australian company John Bennett Ferranti presented at the Festival of Britain the Nimrod, a huge computer capable of playing Nim, a mathematical game original ancient China.
1952: OXO(Tic-Tac-Toe)
In 1952, Alexander "Sandy" Shafto Douglas presented his doctoral thesis in mathematics at the University of Cambridge (England) based on the interaction between humans and computers. This thesis included a computerized version of tic tac toe called OXO, a program that allowed a player to face human versus machine EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator), the firstcomputer that could store electronic programs. OXO did not have any impact or popularity because aside from being a research thesis could only be played on the EDSAC at Cambridge, he was the only one that existed worldwide.
1958: Tennis for Two
After these first steps, it was time for Tennis for Two, the first computer game officially considered history because of discrepancies with the OXO. It wason 18 October 1958 when William Higinbotham, an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project (codename for the development of the atomic bomb) during World War II, presented a program that simulated a game of tennis through An oscilloscope Brookhaven National Laboratory. Unlike most modern tennis game, used a side view where you could see a horizontal line representing the pitch...