1 apr 1940 anni - Nimatron

Descrizione:

Wikipedia: The Nimatron is a computer that allows one to play the game Nim. It was first presented in April 1940 at the 1939 New York World's Fair purely as a form of entertainment. Designed in the winter of 1939 by Edward Condon for the sole purpose of entertaining, it is a digital computer composed of electromechanical relays which allows the lighting of four lines of seven bulbs. Each player can turn off one or more of them in any line, then the machine takes a turn, and so on. The last to extinguish a light is the winner.

The reception of the machine during the fair was positive and was a success with nearly 100,000 games of Nim played. Despite this success, Condon considers the Nimatron one of the biggest failures of his career because he had not realized the potential of the machine. It is considered the first fully constructed computer game and the first computer dedicated to the game of Nim, but its impact on digital computers and computer games is negligible. John Makepeace Bennett nevertheless was inspired to design the Nimrod, a similar machine considered as one of the precursors of the video game, in 1951.