A space-combat simulation game, inspired by E. E. Doc
Smith's Lensman books, in which two spaceships duel
around a central sun, shooting torpedoes at each other and jumping through
hyperspace. This game was first implemented on the PDP-1 at MIT in 1962.
In 1968-69, a descendant of the game motivated Ken Thompson to build, in
his spare time on a scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that became
Unix. Less than nine years after that, SPACEWAR was
commercialized as one of the first video games; descendants are still
feeping in video arcades everywhere.