This is about as niche as a post of mine can get. What happened is I’ve been deep at work on my next game, which requires some history going back to the 1950s, and more specifically, Christopher Strachey makes a cameo appearance.
Strachey at the piano, date unknown. From Christopher Strachey, 1916-1975: A Biographical Note. Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 7, Number 1, January 1985.
For gaming history he is particularly known for a draughts (checkers) program that sometimes gets designated as the “first videogame”. There’s a lot of conditionals to that, including if a program called Bouncing Ball counts once a hole is added (and when that happened), but I’ll defer to the discussion here for details. I instead want to discuss what the game looks like. This it the picture most commonly seen (including on Wikipedia):
I wanted to mention Strachey’s videogame-pioneer status as aside before I went into his totally different part to play in my upcoming story, and as my way of compressing this information, I wanted to drop the image above with a descriptive caption and be done with it. However, I had the nagging feeling something was wrong.
After some expert consultation (specifically with Quarter Past and Ethan Johnson) I realized what the problem was. Quarter Past pointed to A Biography of the Pixel by Alvy Ray Smith as having good coverage.
Strachey was working on the Pilot Ace at Teddington, one of the first computers built in the UK (based on a more complex design of Turing’s). He wrote a letter to Turing about how he got a draughts (checkers) program to work, then found out that the Ferranti Mark I computer at Manchester had not only more memory but visible memory. He managed to re-do his program for the system, and used Turing’s “incomprehensible” manual to get it working. This led to an actual checkboard display on an arbitrary video system (hence “video”game). A figure from Smith’s book gives pictures:
These photos were found in Oxford’s archive of Strachey’s work, and Smith specifically mentions a folder number, C30, as containing photographs from Strachey. He gave a presentation with lantern slides of an actual game being played by the computer (at a conference in Toronto, where a new Mark I had just been installed) and these seem to have been part of that.
So, what’s wrong? If you don’t see it yet, let me zoom into one of the photos, and then give the one from Wikipedia (and elsewhere, including Ahoy’s video with 2.5 million+ views).
The Wikipedia board is left-right flipped! There should be a checker in the lower left corner. Wikipedia has a second error because it states it is a “A modern reproduction of Checkers, as it would have appeared on a Ferranti Mark 1” which isn’t true at all; it’s more like a scrubbed version of the photo from the real Mark I, reversed the wrong way. We’re not just talking Wikipedia; an academic paper here from 2012 also has the wrong view.
The figure’s in Strachey’s own paper (“Logical or non-mathematical programmes” from 1952) confirms he intended for checkers to be in the lower left corner.
However, I’m not quite done yet, as there’s still the question: is the picture rotated upside down?
This is from the biography article I mentioned at the top (with the picture of Strachey playing the piano). You’ll notice this time O is on bottom and X is on top. The book on pixels has this flipped over. Which one is right?
Strachey puts White at the bottom, and generally speaking Black is X and White is O. So it looks like all the book photos might need a 180 degree flip:
I haven’t been able to confirm this, but I figured I needed to share all this with you. (Also, the next post is going to be complicated, so likely it won’t be up until at least Monday.)
Renga in Blue 