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1 entry of 164 involving Maurice Wilkes

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1950-1959 The 1950s

A Cambridge thesis puts noughts and crosses on a tube

For his doctoral research at Cambridge, A. S. Douglas programmed EDSAC to play noughts and crosses and drew the board on a small display tube, one of the earliest games rendered on a screen by a stored-program computer.

Key facts and significance Hide details
Region
Europe
Period
The 1950s

Why it matters

This is the earliest well-documented case of a game drawn on a computer display and played by a person in real time, produced not for amusement but to study how people and machines could work together. It set out in miniature the arrangement of screen, input device and immediate feedback that every later game depends on.

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