The nuclear war origins behind some of the earliest computer lab games

polygon.com:

In the school computer labs of the 1970s, the games asked a lot of questions. More specifically, they asked for a lot of numbers. Typed-in numbers were the fuel needed to power the games — typically short programs written in BASIC — that filled the storage space on the minicomputers. There were no screens — only teletype machines, which sort of worked like typewriters except that the computers could type words on the page as well. When you played a turn-based strategy game like Hamurabi, the computer would print out key information, line by line:

HAMURABI: I BEG TO REPORT TO YOU,

IN YEAR 1, 0 PEOPLE STARVED, 5 CAME TO THE CITY.

POPULATION IS NOW 100.

THE CITY NOW OWNS 1000 ACRES.

YOU HARVESTED 3 BUSHELS PER ACRE.

RATS ATE 200 BUSHELS.

YOU NOW HAVE 2800 BUSHELS IN STORE.

After this came the questions, one at a time:

LAND IS TRADING AT 26 BUSHELS PER ACRE.

HOW MANY ACRES DO YOU WISH TO BUY? _

HOW MANY BUSHELS DO YOU WISH TO FEED YOUR PEOPLE? _

HOW MANY ACRES DO YOU WISH TO PLANT WITH SEED? _

Once answered, the game’s simulator component would come into play, processing your inputs across a series of complex equations.​​ Then the game would advance one year, and the whole thing would start all over again — provided, of course, that you did not fail badly enough for your people to overthrow you.

Despite the seemingly archaic nature of the tech, as well as the games, this was cutting-edge stuff in the 1970s school computer lab. And as it turned out, the origins of these games, and the systems used to program and play them, could be traced to one of the most important institutions of the post-World War II military-industrial complex: the RAND Corporation, based out of Santa Monica, California. Moreover, the question-and-answer