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by masswerk·6mo ago·view on hn ↗
Regarding "The Second Oldest Game Developer", there are also the authors of "Spacewar!": Steve Russell was born in 1937, meaning, he's either 89 or will be 89 this year. Dan Edwards must be around that age, as well.
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Spacewar was ported to Plato from Control Data; I played a little, but I played a lottt of Avatar. There are a number of Plato games that probably have some older / early game developers. Out of curiosity I just looked up Avatar, Bruce Maggs coded it in ‘76 and went on to among other things be one of the Akamai founders. But he’s 20 years younger than Russell.
I am definitely sharing this with Michael he will be happy to be pushed down in the dinosaur ranking!
A few more candidates for the ranking: Peter Samson (of Expensive Planetarium fame, the background star simulation of Spacewar!, and known for his music on the PDP-1, also author of the TMRC Dictionary [0], still active with the CHM PDP-1 team) born in 1941, Ellen Kuhfeld (Minnesota Spacewar [1] for the CDC 3100 at the University of Minnesota, 1966-68) is also in her 80s.

[0] https://www.gricer.com/tmrc/dictionary1959.html

[1] https://masswerk.at/spacewar/kuhfeld/

The two developers mentioned/compared were for the games the op has ported.
Spacewar.com was such a classic game. Why wasn't it an exe??
> Why wasn't it an exe??

It was originally a PDP-1 game. If you are talking about the PC remake by B. Seiler, it was only 9KB. There is no need to bother with a relocation table if it's under 64KB.