Core War - History

History

Core War was inspired by a program called Creeper and a subsequent program called Reaper that destroyed copies of Creeper. Creeper was created by B. Thomas at BBN. Dewdney was not aware of the origin of Creeper and Reaper and refers to them as a rumor originating from the Darwin game and the worm experiments of Shoch and Hupp.

The 1984 Scientific American article on Core War nonetheless cites the game Darwin, written by Victor A. Vyssotsky, Robert Morris Sr., and M. Douglas McIlroy at the Bell Labs in the 1960s. The word "Core" in the name comes from magnetic core memory, an obsolete random access memory technology. The same usage may be seen in other computer jargon terms such as "core dump".

The first description of the Redcode language was published in March 1984, in Core War Guidelines by D. G. Jones and A. K. Dewdney. The game was introduced to the public in May 1984, in an article written by Dewdney in Scientific American. Dewdney revisited Core War in his "Computer Recreations" column in March 1985, and again in January 1987.

The International Core Wars Society (ICWS) was founded in 1985, one year after Dewdney's original article. The ICWS published new standards for the Redcode language in 1986 and 1988, and proposed an update in 1994 that was never formally set as the new standard. Nonetheless, the 1994 draft was commonly adopted and extended, and forms the basis for the de facto standard for Redcode today. The ICWS was directed by Mark Clarkson (1985–1987), William R. Buckley (1987–1992), and Jon Newman (1992–); currently the ICWS is defunct.