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Spacewar! on a PDP-1
Spacewar! on a PDP-1

Spacewar! is a space combat video game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell in collaboration with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders, Steve Piner, and others. The first video game known to be played at multiple computer installations, it was popular in the small American programming community in the 1960s. Players wage a dogfight between two spaceships with limited weaponry and fuel in the gravity well of a star. Spacewar! was written for the newly installed Digital Equipment PDP-1, a minicomputer, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the public domain code was widely ported. Saunders built an early gamepad controller for the game. It directly inspired many electronic games, such as the first commercial arcade video games, Galaxy Game and Computer Space (both 1971), and later games such as Asteroids (1979). In 2007, Spacewar! was named to a list of the ten most important video games of all time, which formed the start of the game canon at the Library of Congress. (Full article...)

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Daniel Noboa in March 2022
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Mistletoebird

The mistletoebird (Dicaeum hirundinaceum), also known as the mistletoe flowerpecker, is a species of flowerpecker native to most of Australia (though absent from Tasmania and the driest desert areas) and also to the eastern Maluku Islands of Indonesia in the Arafura Sea between Australia and New Guinea. The mistletoebird eats mainly the berries of the parasitic mistletoe and is a vector for the spread of the mistletoe's seeds through its digestive system. The mistletoebird is small, being 9–10 centimetres long and 7.5–11 grams in weight. The male is glossy blue-black above, with a red chest and a slight red under-tail, and a black centre stripe running down its white belly. The female is dark grey above, with a white throat, light grey underparts, and just a touch of pinkish-red under the tail. The eyes, bill, and legs are black; the bill is just over a centimetre long, slender, slightly down-curved and sharply pointed. Immature birds are similar to the female, but have an orange-pink bill instead of black. This male mistletoebird was photographed in the Round Hill Nature Reserve in New South Wales, Australia.

Photograph credit: JJ Harrison

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