Category Archives: Computing

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution – Steven Levy

Posted on July 29, 2021 by 1960s: Days of Rage

“There was the great chess showdown of 1965, when MacHack won a chess game against a critic of artificial intelligence named Herbert Dreyfus, who had bluntly asserted that no computer program would ever be able to beat even a 10-year- … Continue reading →

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Kotok-McCarthy – A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090 Computer

Posted on May 25, 2021 by 1960s: Days of Rage

John McCarthy “Kotok-McCarthy also known as A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090 Computer was the first computer program to play chess convincingly. It is also remembered because it played in and lost the first chess match between two … Continue reading →

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Stewart Brand

Posted on May 19, 2021 by 1960s: Days of Rage

“Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the … Continue reading →

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Machines That Play (Chess — Before Deep Blue)

Posted on April 20, 2021 by 1960s: Days of Rage

Mac Hack “… It will cover a little bit of the history of computer chess, focusing on: Turk, El Ajedrecista, Shannon and Turing’s approaches to build chess programs, MANIAC, Bersnstein’s Chess program, Mac Hack VI, Cray Blitz, HiTech, ChipTest, and … Continue reading →

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Spacewar!

Posted on March 4, 2021 by 1960s: Days of Rage

Spacewar! Video Games Blast Off. Model of the 1962 PDP-1 computer at this Museum of the Moving Image exhibition. “Spacewar! is a space combat video game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell in collaboration with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob … Continue reading →

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HAL 9000

Posted on January 29, 2021 by 1960s: Days of Rage

“HAL 9000 is a fictional artificial intelligence character and the main antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke‘s Space Odyssey series. First appearing in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL (Heuristically Programmed ALgorithmic Computer) is a sentient HAL/AL 9000-series computer … Continue reading →

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The First Computer Musician

Posted on January 19, 2021 by 1960s: Days of Rage

Max Mathews with Joan Miller. “In 1957 a 30-year-old engineer named Max Mathews got an I.B.M. 704 mainframe computer at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N. J., to generate 17 seconds of music, then recorded the result for … Continue reading →

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The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s Game of Life

Posted on January 1, 2021 by 1960s: Days of Rage

1969 “In March of 1970, Martin Gardner opened a letter jammed with ideas for his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Sent by John Horton Conway, then a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, the letter ran 12 pages, typed … Continue reading →

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Cryptanalysis: Martin and Mitchell defection

Posted on June 25, 2020 by 1960s: Days of Rage

Close-up of the rotors in a Fialka cipher machine “In September 1960, two U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) cryptologists, William Hamilton Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, defected to the Soviet Union. A secret 1963 NSA study said that: ‘Beyond any … Continue reading →

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Sterling Hall bombing – August 24, 1970

Posted on May 8, 2020 by 1960s: Days of Rage

“The Sterling Hall bombing that occurred on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus on August 24, 1970, was committed by four men as a protest against the university’s research connections with the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. It resulted in … Continue reading →

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