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Physicist Edward Condon and colleagues at Westinghouse built a relay-driven cabinet that played the counting game Nim against visitors to the New York World's Fair, signaling its moves with light bulbs rather than any kind of screen.
Long before anyone spoke of computer games, a large manufacturer decided that a game was the clearest way to show the public what automatic machinery could do. That instinct, using play to make an unfamiliar technology legible, recurs in nearly every later demonstration of computing, from exhibition halls to chess matches carried on television.
