driving game

DAC-1 computer aided design program is released. In 1959, the General Motors Research Laboratories appointed a special research team to investigate the use of computers in designing automobiles. In 1960, IBM joined the project, producing the first commercially-available Computer Aided Design program, known as DAC-1. Out of that project came the IBM 2250 display terminal as well as many advances in computer timesharing and the use of a single processor by two or more terminals.

Pong is released. In 1966, Ralph Baer designed a ping-pong game for his Odyssey gaming console. Nolan Bushnell played this game at a Magnavox product show in Burlingame, Califoia. Bushnell hired young engineer Al Alco to design a car driving game, but when it became apparent that this was too ambitious for the time, he had Alco to design a version of ping-pong instead. The game was tested in bars in Grass Valley and Sunnyvale, Califoia where it proved very popular. Pong would revolutionize the arcade industry and launch the mode video game era.

SuperPaint is completed. SuperPaint was the first digital computer drawing system to use a frame buffer—a special high-speed memory—and the ancestor of all mode paint programs. It could create sophisticated animations, in up to 16.7 million colors, had adjustable paintbrushes, video magnification, and used a graphics tablet for drawing. It was designed by Richard Shoup and others at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Its designers won a technical Academy Award in 1998 for their invention.