Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/21/how-old-is-tetris-really.html
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If there are 12 pentomino variations (i.e., mirror images counted as the same), then we would have 5 tetromino variations.
Of course in the game you can’t flip them over so there are 7 distinct varieties. In so counting mirror images distinctly we would have 18 different pentominoes.
SMH
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I realize this is from the Wikipedia article, but it seems to confuse not having a graphical interface, which, true, the Electronika 60 (a Soviet copy of the DEC PDP/11) didn’t have, with lacking any graphics at all (a different issue as many computers from the 1980s lacked a graphical interface but still had graphics, unlike the Elektronika 60).
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Technically when we’re talking about a system like the PDP/11 it’s a matter of if the serial attached terminal is or isn’t capable of displaying graphics. For the computer itself it’s just a matter of the software running on it generating the appropriate commands to pass to a graphics capable terminal (if present), not a hardware limitation.
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The Enterprise facing off against a Klingon D7:
=.- -:[
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Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by graphics. Yes, some terminals like Tektronix ones could output blocks and even lines based on control characters (which would probably be enough for Tetris), but true graphics would need hardware support just like how PCs have graphics cards. I’m not sure if there were such things for PDP-11’s, but there were a series of PDP-10 compatible mainframes made by Foonly that had hardware graphics (mostly famously used to create the early CGI sequences in 1982’s Tron)
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Physical xwindows capable terminals were a few years away still when Tetris first came out but the principle of operation is the same. It’s just drawing commands passed from the xserver software running remotely on the computer to the not-so-dumb terminal that does all the work of rendering graphics to the screen. There’s no requirement for any graphics hardware in the host computer. There were various proprietary equivalents that preceded that standard. I think Bell Labs’ “Blit” terminals in 1982 were probably one of the earliest examples of what we’d recogonize today as approaching a modern graphics capable terminal. I don’t think the system was commercialized until 84 starting with Teletype’s 5620 terminals though so that’s a bit late for it to be cloned behind the iron curtain in time for the initial development of Tetris.
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