Links

And there was also...

Blinkenlights in Berlin

blinkenlights heart Arcade is not the first creation of Project Blinkenlights. The group derived its name from its first installation in Berlin. Blinkenlights ran for almost half a year on the "Haus des Lehrers" building at Alexanderplatz in the heart of Berlin.

While Arcade took a couple of months of planning, things developed much faster in Berlin. In only 4 weeks, this first prototype of an interactive building was perceived and completed. Instead of Tetris, people could play the classic game Pong.

After the project has finished, a comprehensive documentation video was created. It is available for download in various formats.

Chaos Computer Club

Chaos Computer Club Logo The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is a galactic community of life forms, independent of age, gender and race as well as social position. The CCC fights for unlimited freedom of information and deals with the consequences of the use of modern technology for the individual.

For over 20 years, the CCC contributes to public information and discussion. Members of the CCC show up on numerous conferences, organizations and international activist groups. Furthermore, the CCC focuses on supporting young people and bringing them closer to understanding and use of modern technology. The CCC organizes the annual Chaos Communication Congress - the biggest event of its kind in Europe.

Blinkenlights was perceived and created to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the CCC in 2001. This is where Project Blinkenlights came to life that now further develops the then-created technology and software and tries to bring it forward to realise new ideas in the future.

Tetris

Tetris Screen Shot Tetris was invented by Alexey Pajitnov in 1985 was first implemented on a Electronica-60 (DVK-2M) computer. A few years later, Tetris was running on almost every computer platform and game console available. The success of the simple but intelligent game was unstoppable.

Who has trouble dealing with Tetris should take a look at the excellent Learn Tetris in 21 Days page. This step-by-step instruction leaves no questions unanswered.

Electronica-60

DVK-2M Computer Electronica-60 is an LSI-11/03 clone (16 bit, multiplexed A/D bus). LSI is a "high-integration" version of the PDP-11 architecture of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

Electronica-60 was basically a CPU/memory block without any peripherals. DVK-2M comprised the Electronica-60 module, a dual 8" floppy drive, and a 15IE-0003 terminal (monochrome (green) alphanumeric, 24x80, the first Soviet terminal which could support upper & lower case in both Latin and Cyrillic registers).

Implementations

Futurama Scene with robots playing Tetris Vadim Antonov did a clone ("The Real Tetris") of the original Tetris in C for the 386/BSD Unix system. It should compile on all Unix variants. The only difference is that the direction is counter-clockwise by default and not clockwise as in the original. This version is really cool to play. Our recommendation! http://gato.kotovnik.com/~avg/old_page/tetris.c http://gato.kotovnik.com/~avg/old_page/

Not much later, a version for the IBM PC running PC-DOS was created by Vadim Gerasimov, Alexey Pajitnov and Dmitry Pavlovsky which was the basis for the rapid distribution of the program. You can still get the latest version of that program here: http://vadim.www.media.mit.edu/Tetris.htm