Robert Smith

And...

It was fun if you understood, like, Newtonian gravity, right?

You, like, have a spaceship, and there's a star, and it's like... You have to go around the sun to get velocities.

I guess the gravity goes into the square of the distance, whatever.

So he's thinking about space war, exclamation mark.

And, you know, when he first played it in college, he played it at the university on this extremely expensive computer where it obviously wouldn't work...

Anywhere else, it wouldn't work as a business because the computer was too expensive.

You just did it at night for fun.

But by the time he's in Silicon Valley in the early 70s, you know, Moore's Law, like we talked about last time, is cranking along.

Computers are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and faster and faster and faster.

And he's like, oh, maybe now that technology has got to a place where I could make Space War...

On a machine that I could build cheaply enough to put it in a bar next to a pinball machine and get people to put quarters in it.

And so he starts working with this other guy from Ampex.

And, you know, he buys a black and white TV at Goodwill.

And he actually, interestingly, he builds essentially a computer from the ground up, right?

Because he is optimizing for cheapness, right?

He wants to build the cheapest functional machine he can.

And he gets like a little coin slot like they have in pinball machines.

It has like a paint thinner can for the coins to go into.

And they build a functional prototype of a game that is a lot like Space War.