<story><title>Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor</title><url>https://www.falstad.com/pong/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajp11</author><text>In the year 1974, Practical Wireless, a UK magazine, published a design for a pong game that connects to a television, called PW Tele Tennis.&lt;p&gt;It uses sixty four NAND gates, twelve NE555 timers, two dozen diodes and some analog parts.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s about the most basic version of the game. They later published a sound effects board and an on-screen scoring board that uses a couple of dozen more chips.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;searle.x10host.com&amp;#x2F;TeleTennis&amp;#x2F;PWTennis.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;searle.x10host.com&amp;#x2F;TeleTennis&amp;#x2F;PWTennis.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nonrandomstring</author><text>The implications of Karnaugh maps and state machine reduction, which
we did in &amp;quot;Digital Logic&amp;quot; when I was a student, were that you could
take &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; problem, express it as a set of states and transforms, and
boil that down to an optimal netlist of discrete logic gates.&lt;p&gt;Of course, in the mid 80&amp;#x27;s that was a pedagogical tool to lead us
toward register machines and von Neumann architectures, but there were
still some old-skool EE hackers around who built things like guidance
systems for the Navy which were hybrid analogue&amp;#x2F;digital &amp;quot;computers&amp;quot;
totally without CPUs or code. Today we have FPGAs and high level tools
for building ASIC, but cheap microprocessors effectively swept aside
an entire &lt;i&gt;approach&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Maybe we missed something. Many small and well constrained problems in
IoT type applications might better be served by hard-configured
solutions. They would use less power, be immune to malicious network
hacking, not need &amp;#x27;firmware&amp;#x27; updates,</text></comment>
<story><title>Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor</title><url>https://www.falstad.com/pong/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajp11</author><text>In the year 1974, Practical Wireless, a UK magazine, published a design for a pong game that connects to a television, called PW Tele Tennis.&lt;p&gt;It uses sixty four NAND gates, twelve NE555 timers, two dozen diodes and some analog parts.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s about the most basic version of the game. They later published a sound effects board and an on-screen scoring board that uses a couple of dozen more chips.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;searle.x10host.com&amp;#x2F;TeleTennis&amp;#x2F;PWTennis.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;searle.x10host.com&amp;#x2F;TeleTennis&amp;#x2F;PWTennis.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>a9h74j</author><text>In probably 1976 for $1 I bought a one-page schematic for such a thing, from classified ad in the back of a magazine. I suppose it was a related version, but IIRC it relied upon 74123 style monostables.</text></comment>