Space Travel (video game)


For travel through space, see Human spaceflight.

Space Travel was an early computer game that simulated travel in the solar system. It was the development of this game that spurred the development of the Unix operating system.[1][2][3] It is sometimes claimed that the unrelated game Spacewar! had led to the development of Unix. While Spacewar! was an early (and much more popular) computer game, such claims are not accurate and have likely arisen from confusion of the two different games.

Development history

The game was originally written in 1969 by Ken Thompson for a Multics system, then ported by him to Fortran on a GECOS system, and eventually ported by Thompson and Dennis Ritchie to a PDP-7. It was in the process of porting the game to the PDP-7's assembly language that Thompson and Ritchie wrote underlying code that eventually grew into the original UNICS/Unix operating system. Some consider Space Travel the first Unix application program.

Notes and references

  1. ^ Space Travel
  2. ^ Unix History
  3. ^ Ken Thompson: developed UNIX at Bell Labs in 1969
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