SPACEWAR: n. 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.
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