Tristan Donovan, a U.K. writer who has contributed to Edge and The Guardian*, has just released a new book called Replay: The History of Video Games.*
While other history books have covered the topic, Donovan's 500-page tome is the most exhaustive and wide-ranging history I've read. It's especially notable for its extensive treatment of the history of European game development, which has been noticeably absent from other books.
Wired.com is delighted to share a few excerpts from this book with you over the next several days. First up: A look at Nimrod, an installation at the 1951 Festival of Britain that was the first computer designed exclusively to play a game.
Excerpt: Replay: The History of Video Games
In 1951 the UK's Labour government launched the Festival of Britain, a sprawling year-long national event that it hoped would instill a sense of hope in a population reeling from the aftermath of the Second World War. Herbert Morrison, the deputy prime minister who oversaw the festival's creation, said the celebrations would be "a tonic for the nation." Keen to be involved in the celebrations, the British computer company Ferranti promised the government it would contribute to the festival's Exhibition of Science in South Kensington, London. But by late 1950, with the festival just weeks away, Ferranti still lacked an exhibit. John Bennett, an Australian employee of the firm, came to the rescue.
Bennett proposed creating a computer that could play Nim. In this simple parlour game players are presented with several piles of matches. Each player then takes it in turns to remove one or more of the matches from any one of the piles. The player who removes the last match wins.
Bennett got the idea of a Nim-playing computer from the Nimatron, an electro-mechanical machine exhibited at the 1940 World's Fair in New York City.
Despite suggesting Ferranti create a game-playing computer, Bennett's aim was not to entertain but to show off the ability of computers to do maths. And since Nim is based on mathematical principles it seemed a good example.
Indeed, the guide book produced to accompany the Nimrod, as the computer exhibit was named, was at pains to explain that it was maths, not fun, that was the machine's purpose: "It may appear that, in trying to make machines play games, we are wasting our time. This is not true as the theory of games is extremely complex and a machine that can play a complex game can also be programmed to carry out very complex practical problems."
Work to create the Nimrod began on the 1st December 1950 with Ferranti engineer Raymond Stuart-Williams turning Bennett's designs into reality. By the 12th April 1951 the Nimrod was ready. It was a huge machine – 12 feet wide, 5 feet tall and 9 feet deep – but the actual computer running the game accounted for no more than 2 percent of its size. Instead the bulk of the machine was due to the multitude of vacuum tubes used to display lights, the electronic equivalent of the matches used in Nim.
The resulting exhibit, which made its public debut on the 5th May 1951, boasted that the Nimrod was "faster than thought" and challenged the public to pit their wits against Ferranti's "electronic brain." The public was won over, but few showed any interest in the maths and science behind it. They just wanted to play.
"Most of the public were quite happy to gawk at the flashing lights and be impressed," said Bennett. BBC radio journalist Paul Jennings described the Nimrod as a daunting machine in his report on the exhibition: "Like everyone else I came to a standstill before the electric brain or, as they prefer to call it, the Nimrod Digital Computer. This looks like a tremendous grey refrigerator.... It's absolutely frightening.... I suppose at the next exhibition they'll even have real heaps of matches and awful steel arms will come out of the machine to pick them up."
After the Festival of Britain wound down in October, the Nimrod went on display at the Berlin Industrial Show and generated a similar response. Even West Germany's economics minister Ludwig Erhard tried unsuccessfully to beat the machine. But, having impressed the public, Ferranti dismantled the Nimrod and got back to work on more serious projects.
Image courtesy computer historian Pete Goodeve. Photo was scanned from September 1951 issue of Electronic Engineering magazine.
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