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Early mainframe games
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==Early games== The very first computer games began to appear in the 1950s, starting with ''[[Bertie the Brain]]'', a computer-based game of [[tic-tac-toe]] built by [[Josef Kates|Dr. Josef Kates]] for the 1950 [[Canadian National Exhibition]].<ref name="CNE"/> While the status of these games as video games depends on the definition used, the games developed during this time period ran on the large antecedents of mainframe computers and were primarily developed for the purposes of academic research or to showcase the technological development of the computers on which they ran. Access to these computers, located almost exclusively in universities and research institutions, was restricted to academics and researchers, preventing any development of entertainment programs. Over the course of the decade, computer technology improved to include smaller, transistor-based computers on which programs could be created and run in real time, rather than operations run in batches, and computers themselves spread to more locations.<ref name="Replay50s"/> By the 1960s, improvements in computing technology and the early development of relatively cheaper mainframe computers, which would later be termed minicomputers, led to the loosening of restrictions regarding programming access to the computers. At the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] (MIT), access to the [[TX-0]] experimental computer was opened to students and employees of the university. This in turn led to the development of programs that in addition to highlighting the power of the computer also contained an entertainment aspect. The games created for the TX-0 by the small programming community at MIT included ''Tic-Tac-Toe'', which used a [[light pen]] to play a simple game of noughts and crosses against the computer, and ''Mouse in the Maze'', which let players set up a maze for a mouse to run through.<ref name="Mouse"/><ref name="cc"/><ref name="TCMR-V08"/> When the [[Digital Equipment Corporation]] (DEC) [[PDP-1]] computer was installed at MIT in 1961, the community built a video game to showcase its abilities, ''[[Spacewar!]]'', which then became the first known video game to spread beyond a single computer installation as it was copied and recreated on other PDP-1 systems and later on other mainframe computers.<ref name="cc"/><ref name="UDG"/> Over the course of the decade, computers spread to more and more companies and institutions, even as they became more powerful—by 1971, it is estimated that there were over 1000 computers with monitors, rather than the few dozen at the beginning of the 1960s.<ref name="KINso"/> While different computers could generally not run the same programs without significant changes to the programs' code, due to differences in the physical [[computer hardware|hardware]] or [[machine code|machine languages]], the expansion of the computing industry led to the creation of catalogs and user groups to share programs between different installations of the same series of computers, such as DEC's PDP line. These catalogs and groups, such as the [[IBM]] program catalog and the Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society ([[DECUS]]), shared small games as well as programs, including, for example, "BBC Vik The Baseball Demonstrator" and "Three Dimensional Tic-Tack-Toe" in the April 1962 IBM catalog,<ref name="Catalog"/> and dice games and question and answer games in the DECUS newsletter.<ref name="Dice"/><ref name="Socratic"/> Mainframe games were developed outside of the IBM and DEC communities as well, such as the 1962 Polish ''[[Marienbad]]'' for the [[Odra (computer)|Odra 1003]].<ref name="Marienbad"/> By the latter half of the 1960s, higher-level programming languages such as BASIC which were able to be run on multiple types of computers further increased the reach of games developed at any given location. While most games were limited to text-based designs, rather than visual graphics like ''[[Spacewar!]]'', these games became more complicated as they reached more players, such as baseball and basketball simulation games.<ref name="Baseball"/><ref name="Baseball2"/><ref name="Basketball"/> Access to the computers themselves was also extended to more people by systems such as the [[Dartmouth Time Sharing System]] (DTSS), which connected several thousand users through many remote terminals to a central mainframe computer. By the 1967–68 school year the DTSS library of 500 programs for the system included, [[John G. Kemeny|John Kemeny]] and [[Thomas Kurtz]] wrote, "many games". Over a quarter of the system's usage was for casual or entertainment purposes, which Kemeny and Kurtz welcomed as helping users to become familiar with and not fear the computer. They noted that "we have lost many a distinguished visitor for several hours while he quarterbacked the [[Wikipedia:Dartmouth Big Green football|Dartmouth football team]] in a highly realistic simulated game".<ref name="dtss196810"/><ref name="dtssbrochure"/>
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