Book Review: Code the Classics

The history of computing is sometimes told as a history of serious analytical progress where scientists, businessmen, and engineers worked together to push electrons through silicon to aid societal advancement. This is total and utter tosh. The history of computing is the history of computer games.

Just as today, the most powerful computer systems ever devised are being used to share pictures of cats, previously, the majority of computer time was spent running, jumping, firing, and punching animated creatures around virtual worlds.

Code the Classics tells this real history of computing, or at least a part of it. We start with a look at Pong, the first computer game to achieve any sort of widespread success, and progress through the years to Sensible Soccer, a classic of the early 1990s.

In this 30-year timespan, computers went from being obscure machines in universities and the back rooms of larger businesses, to a common sight in homes, and it’s thanks to games like the ones covered in Code the Classics that this happened.