As previous replies have pointed out, advances in hardware were key. In 1962, integrated circuits were still in their infancy. They had only been invented four years earlier, and the only ones in production were being built for U.S. military projects like the Minuteman nuclear ballistic missile. And even those were very small-scale circuits, with only a few logic gates per chip.

Computers like the PDP-1 were built using thousands of discrete transistor components for their logic and magnetic cores for their main memory. The price for a basic PDP-1 at that time was around $100,000 in 1962 dollars, equivalent to about $800,000 today. That's a *basic* system; the point-plotting CRT display used in Spacewar! would have added quite a bit to the cost. The machine with all its peripherals took a good fraction of a room and probably weighed at least 2000 pounds. And running Spacewar! pretty much consumed the PDP-1's entire processing power. (Since the display was point-plotting only, the spaceships had to be drawn as series of dots, and the display had no storage ability, so a lot of processing overhead was needed to constantly refresh the entire list of currently displayed dots.)

When Spacewar! was written, the video game was basically a science-fiction concept, and computer graphics itself was just beginning to develop. Arcade games at that time were purely electromechanical games, such as pinball. The first commercial arcade video games (Galaxy Game and Computer Space, both of which were ports of Spacewar!) didn't appear until 1971; Atari's Pong came out the following year. Arcade video games of the early 1970s used custom state machines built from TTL logic chips instead of programmed computer systems; the first microprocessor-based arcade video games appeared starting in 1975 with Taito's Gun Fight, which used the Intel 8080. It was those programmable microprocessor-based systems that really allowed video game development to take off; for example, Asteroids was based on a 6502. Incidentally, Asteroids' vector display system first appeared in an arcade game with Cinematronics' Space Wars in 1977.

Spacewar! was widely ported to various computer systems during the 1960s and 1970s, so it's no surprise that Asteroids bears a strong resemblance to it.

The devices which people are concerned about are much more powerful, 0.1 watts and up. These are not legal for use as laser pointers in many countries, but they can easily be purchased online and can also be built from components used in consumer electronics.

The Wikipedia article on lasers and aviation safety may be of interest. Judging by the content there, this has clearly become a real concern for aviation people.

And as I explained above, they added their words not to English, but to the British languages which English displaced. Some Latin-derived words in English come from French via the Norman invasion; other Latin words and Greek words were imported later through contact with continental Europeans, who used Latin and Greek as common languages of trade and academic correspondence. As you said, there's no shortage of invasions in the history of English, but they're not the entire story. :)

While your other examples are good, the Germanic Anglo-Saxon tribes who "conquered England" did not alter English. They were the ones who imported the language in the first place. Before they arrived, there was no "England", only the Roman province of Britannia, and the Romano-British spoke British languages or Latin. The British languages died out in England after the Anglo-Saxon conquest; their closest descendants are Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, the product of refugee Britons in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany.

To be fair, they did that after a civil war, and their democratic government has since been stable for the last 60 years. Considering the tendency for Central American militaries to get involved in government, Costa Rica seems to be doing pretty well. If worse comes to worse, they could always raise a citizen levy. Might not be as effective as a professional force, but their motivation might more than make up for that...

From the article it sounds like Costa Rica is quite disturbed about this. Depending on how much Nicaragua cares about its image, it seems to me that simply having some civilians camping out in the area with guns and cameras might be enough to dissuade further shenanigans. If Nicaragua is rash enough to challenge them, it ends up looking like the bad guy and possibly enraging its neighbor into amassing a large citizens' militia for war.

Flying Test Bed Takes Off - giving a whole new meaning to the mile high club.

Reminded me of the Flying Bedstead.

This comment on the article at Technology Review challenges the conclusions reached. Quoted below; I've added in square brackets a couple of little elaborations of terms.

We've Been Down This Road Before
This model suffers from the same problem as the dry gully hypothesis put forth by Shinbrot et al. (2004) (http://www.pnas.org/content/101/23/8542.abstract). Yes, you can get an alcove and an apron, but it's missing the key defining characteristic of gullies, which is the channel. Their experiments did not produce the sinuous, anastomosing [branching and reconnecting] channels often observed in martian crater wall gullies. They call some features in their experiments "channels," but terrestrial geologists studying landslides on sand dune faces wouldn't call those features channels. They're more like chutes [a term from avalanche geology]. The gullies on Mars also aren't just simple landslides of loose sand/dust on slopes; in many places the channels cut into the underlying rock, which requires something able to erode such rock (i.e. liquid water).

Interesting. Such giant microbial mats used to be the dominant biological communities in the Precambrian, often forming structures called stromatolites, but most of them were believed to have met their demise during the Cambrian, when lots of new large multicellular critters could literally munch or burrow their way through them. Stromatolites are still present today in a few places, generally in environments too harsh for multicellular organisms to live in, like Shark Bay in Western Australia. But this discovery would indicate that large microbial mat communities proved more evolutionarily durable than previously thought.

For smaller stars, yes, but very massive stars only last for around 10 million years before going supernova. For the most massive ones, the lifetime can be as short as a few million years.

That's what theoretical physics is. It's the experimentalists and observationalists who confirm or refute the theorists' predictions.

Yeah, but that doesn't sound like what the original poster meant by "beating the 6502", nor would I count it as such. I think it's misleading to use the future development of the architectures as arguments for competitive strength or weakness of their ancestors. During the 8-bit computer era, the 6502 was a very strong competitor to the Z80. True, the 6502's descendants ceased to be major players, but that's a different issue from the 6502's own competitiveness in its heyday.

Intel's 8086 family, although it kept some features of the 8080 and 8085, wasn't a direct descendant of the 8085, let alone of Zilog's Z80, which was a different line of development. 8085 assembly code could be automatically converted to 8086 code, and the 8086 could use some 8085 peripherals, but that was the limit of the compatibility.

The Z80 I had took four clock cycles for the first memory access (the first byte of the instruction) and three for each following memory access. There were a few exceptions, but overall that was pretty accurate. There were instructions that took four cycles.

*goes back and checks*

Argh, you're absolutely right. It was 3 to 4 cycles, not 2 to 3. That's what I get for trusting my own memory rather than checking it. Thanks for setting that straight.

Correct, if 2 to 3 means 7!

No, it means 2 to 3. :)

I think you're confusing "memory cycle" with "instruction cycle". By "memory cycle", I mean a single bus access to memory: the memory address gets put on the bus, and then the data value is received or sent. Most Z80 and 6502 instructions require several such accesses: 1 to fetch the opcode byte, possibly additional ones to fetch further operation bytes, if any, followed by memory accesses for operand fetch and/or writing the result.

one reason I think the 8080/Z80-series beat the 6502 was an early version of the megahertz myth. The 4mhz base clock rate of the z80 was faster than the 6502's base clock rate of 1Mhz. But the z80 used 4 clock cycles and a few wait states for most instructions. the 6502 complete nearly every instruction in one instruction.

I'm not sure why you think the 8080/Z80 "beat" the 6502. While it's true that many early 8-bit microcomputers were based on the 8080 and Z80, especially in the CP/M world, some very popular and successful 8-bit systems used the 6502, like the Apple II, Commodore 64, and Atari's home computers and game consoles.

As for the clock speeds, they are indeed misleading, partly because they measure different things. 8080 and Z80 systems used "fine-grained" clocks, with 2 to 3 clock cycles per memory cycle. The 6502, and its predecessor the Motorola 6800, used "coarse-grained" clocks, with a single clock cycle per memory cycle. As long as the two types of systems used similar memory technology, the memory cycle times would be similar, and performance of these systems was almost totally dominated by memory traffic.