Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Running Modern Code on Hardware from 1927”.
Hey i’m mike laserwalker uh these days, i am in cambridge massachusetts with the mit media labs, playful systems group uh. This is a western electric 551a telephone switchboard from 1927.. This exact switchboard was used at the mead paper mill in chillicothe, ohio, um and i’ve made it into a video game so that we took all the original wiring and hooked it up to a computer, we’re still using all the original wiring. We replaced the light bulbs, but other than that, it’s all original, and so this is sort of a simple time management game where you’re basically doing what your day-to-day job would have been. If you were actually using this hardware in the 20s, so i yeah – i started working on this project before we had this hardware um.
I first prototyped it maybe a year and a half ago at a game jam, but i started working on it more seriously. We fabricated our own switchboard out of wooden steel, that looked sort of like a korg synthesizer and then we realized you know. If we’re going to do this, we have to do it right. We have to use the hardware, and so we found this guy on ebay.
So the process of getting it set up was mostly a hardware issue and figuring out how the heck this thing is wired up. A lot of it was really unintuitive and, unsurprisingly, not documented, even basic things like we had access to the back, but to get to the front panel, where the switches were that was locked and we didn’t have a key and we brought in an expert lock pick. He couldn’t get in, we tried to unscrew it. We couldn’t do that.
We ended up having to cut through sheet metal to unscrew the lock, reverse engineer it and 3d print our own key, i think, sort of once once everything got connected, which was a lot of trial and error and a lot of just rote time, soldering many many Small wires um, the software side of it was fairly straightforward. The game was already written to use sort of any sort of interface you want. I can play it, as is on an ipad.
I can play it on this hardware. The old hardware, even sort of from from a command line for testing um the software side was pretty straightforward. So for this specifically we’re looking like this game is very much a proof of concept um.
I think there are a lot of ways that this as a time management game could be made more gamey and more compelling. I think the real interesting step forward is looking at narrative and so already one of the switches. The idea is when you flip it you’re listening in on a conversation, so once you make that step, you know what are the narrative affordances of this? What sorts of stories can we tell when there are three or four conversations going on at once, and you can choose to listen to any of them or when you know who someone might want to talk to, and you can choose to connect them to someone else? Instead and figuring out what that looks like um yeah, so so this project um essentially came out of last year’s all control gdc, where i showed a game where you’re a telegraph operator played with actual 19th century telegraph, hardware, um and sort of my glib joke about This is that it was the natural follow-up um and i’m not sure how i follow this up. Um i’ve been starting to do a lot of work with early 1970s micro computers, but i don’t know if that’ll turn into anything interesting or not.
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