Enjoy computer games? They’ve been around longer than you think. In fact, they’ve almost certainly been around longer than you! The first graphic computer game was OXO (a version of tic-tac-toe, or noughts and crosses), and Alexander Douglas created it in 1952.
Alexander “Sandy” Douglas was born May 21, 1921 in London. He evidently had a pretty average childhood, and after serving in the Royal Corps of Signals during WWII, enrolled in the University of Cambridge. He was working on his PhD thesis in 1952 and needed an example to support his arguments about human-computer interaction. Luckily, one of the world’s first electronic computers, EDSAC (for “Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator”) was located at his university, and as a PhD student in computer science he had access to it. “Computer science” wasn’t his actual major; the world’s first computer science degree program started in 1953 — but also at Cambridge.
Douglas decided to program a simple game — OXO — where humans competed against the computer. EDSAC had three small cathode-ray tube screens (they were round, not square) that usually displayed the current state of the system’s memory, which was far less than a modern pocket calculator — only 512 18-bit words. Douglas used one of the screens to display the game to the user.
EDSAC was pretty rudimentary by modern standards; one of the subsystems we take for granted now is a way to save your work, or back it up. EDSAC didn’t have any provision for backup, so after Douglas had used OXO to complete his demonstration, the game disappeared. He still had his source code, of course, and was able to reconstruct OXO later. The computer opponent you were playing against in OXO was technically an “artificial intelligence,” and could play a perfect game. Which is obviously pretty easy to do in tic-tac-toe, but come on…it was 1952!
Douglas didn’t continue his work in computer games. Instead he pursued an academic career and published over 60 papers on an unusually wide variety of subjects, including computer design, oil mining, crystallography, and nuclear physics. He also worked in the private sector for Scientific Control Systems and was chairman of Leasco Systems and Research Ltd. He was made CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in recognition of his work.
You can try an online simulator of EDSAC here, but for some reason the OXO game isn’t included. That’s possibly because the simulation is described as “a faithful software evocation of the EDSAC computer as it existed in 1949-51” — that is, prior to Douglas’ program.
