Remembering Alan Kotok 23
Milktoast writes "Alan Kotok, one of the forefathers of gaming, died of a heart attack in May at the age of 64. He helped invent one of the first videogames and game controllers (Spacewar and the Joystick), and has been involved with the W3C for many years. His obituary is hosted at MIT, and there are thoughtful reflections at Ars Technica and Joystick101.org." From the Ars article: "While he didn't write any of the code himself, he did help to build the controller used to fly the ships in the game, and also supplied Stephen Russel with the sine and cosine routines from the DEC. Think about it: he designed a gaming controller when no one knew what that even was."
Spacewar Lives! (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks, Alan. Gamers everywhere are in your debt.
Shoulders of giants (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, look, I'm not trying to downplay Kotok's contribution, but is it really fair to say that a game controller was something totally unimaginable? Were there any flying vehicles around back then that were piloted at least in part with some kind of stick? So wouldn't it kind of make sense that you move the ships in a simulation/video game with some kind of stick? If someone walked in him, say, a retired military pilot, would they have said "What the hell are you making? I have no idea!" or "Oh, are you building a controller?"
It seems to me that you could say he stood on the shoulders of giants rather than doing something really revolutionary. I mean, car steering wheels had been around for a while -- is it really such a jump to think that you could control something with a stick?
Re:Shoulders of giants (Score:4, Interesting)
However, design them he did, and he must have had his reasons. I would love to know more about his thought process.
Re:Shoulders of giants (Score:2)
It requires two hands for what you can do with one on a joystick.
(cue the obligatory masturbation jokes)
(and of course the one about not knowing that it was obligatory)
Re:Shoulders of giants (Score:2)
Re:Shoulders of giants (Score:2)
Re:Shoulders of giants (Score:3, Informative)
"Back in the day", cars were controlled by some number of levers, before the invention of the steering wheel. After all, we went from reins to a steering device, and the only vehicle you actually steered back then was a ship. While large ships were using wheels, small boats typically
Re:uh? (Score:5, Funny)
And in fact to this day there are still no lettuce-based game controllers. And we call ourselves advanced.
Re:uh? (Score:3, Funny)
Interesting... Never heard of him before (Score:2)
Good post from slashdot. Interesting stuff.
Best known for the PDP-6, DEC-10 (Score:5, Interesting)
His obituaries note his early work with computer games, but that's like noting that George Washington was an important surveyor. Alan's biggest accomplishment was as lead hardware architect of DEC's 36-bit family. It began as the PDP-6, and went into volume production as the PDP-10, which became the DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20 families. These were incredible machines, too -- with BBN's TENEX operating system, which DEC adapted into TOPS-20, they were efficient, user-friendly timesharing machines. It's miles away from today's style of computing, but we got a lot done on those machines with our VT-52s!
Later, he worked on some big RISC machines that DEC didn't build, and he also designed one of the later large VAX machines. Nowadays, processor design is mostly done inside chip firms. There aren't many people like Alan, and we'll miss him.
Re:Best known for the PDP-6, DEC-10 (Score:1)
With all due respect.. (Score:2)
I won't believe it....until I see a body. Just a little too convenient.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=190353&cid=156 61709 [slashdot.org]
If you really wish to know, then you only have one way to know; DNA.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=190353&cid=156 61943 [slashdot.org]
Prove he's dead.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=190353&cid=156 61738 [slashdot.org]
Details on who signed the death certificate are fuzzy, but there are no plans fo
Re:With all due respect.. (Score:2)
(On second thought... I've met some computer scientists who might actually be crazy enough to try something like that...)
Just out of curiosity (Score:2, Interesting)
The obit dates June 13, and the reflections article dates July 11. And a quick search through slashdot history shows no other articles on the gentleman.
Alan Kotok, RIP. Better late than never, of course. And thank you for everything!
my respects (Score:1)
R.I.P. (Score:2)