The Computer History Museum in Mountain View spent 2 years fully restoring a DEC PDP-1. You can go see it - I don't even think you need to pay for admission to the museum.
During the presentation, they load Spacewar! from paper tape, and two members of the audience can battle it out.
It's pretty amazing to play one of the first graphical computer games ever, on a computer first released 50 years ago.
For everyone else reading this, if you live in the bay area, you should seriously visit the Computer History Museum. It's absolutely fascinating to see how far we've come in such a short time. I had assumed I wouldn't get much value from the trip, but I was blown away.
I saw that presentation last week. What I found even more awesome than the presentation itself was that the presenters were Peter Samson and Steve Russell, the two MIT hackers who had written the software originally.
Yes, that would be the guy, although in the context of the PDP-1, he was only talking about Spacewar.
Samson was demonstrating four part audio synthesis of Bach organ pieces. It turns out that during the restoration project, they came across some of his original data tapes encoding the music, but the software was long lost, so he recreated his hack 50 years later, with the additional constraint that he had to reconstruct his data format and remain compatible with it!
Speaking of Steve Russell: Meanwhile I've received a quite flattering mail from S.R. on the authenticity of the feel of the version of "Spacewar!" associated to the page.
http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar
During the presentation, they load Spacewar! from paper tape, and two members of the audience can battle it out.
It's pretty amazing to play one of the first graphical computer games ever, on a computer first released 50 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!#Spacewar.21_today