1954 · Sport · Legacy Computer
A game of pool (billiards) developed by William George Brown and Ted Lewis in 1954 on the MIDSAC computer, intended primarily to showcase the computing power of the MIDSAC. "The game displayed a 2-inch rendition of the pool cue for the players to line up their shots and ran a simulation of the colliding and ricocheting balls in real-time, implementing a full game of a cue ball and 15 frame balls for two players. Graphics were drawn in real-time on a monochrome 13" point plotting X-Y display, the screen being updated by the program 40 times a second (that is, in a normal in-game situations with 2 to 4 balls moving at once). However, for time constraints, the table and its pockets weren’t drawn by the computer graphics, but were rather drawn manually onto the display using a grease pencil." - Norbert Landsteiner for masswerk.at