Gabe Newell's Early Gaming Days: Punch Cards and Star Trek on a Raytheon 703

In an insightful interview, Gabe Newell, the visionary co-founder of Valve, shed light on his formative encounters with digital entertainment. His journey into the world of computing began not with sophisticated graphical interfaces, but with primitive, yet captivating, systems that laid the groundwork for his future endeavors.

Newell recounted his high school days when access to advanced computing was a rarity. The University of California, Davis, played a pivotal role in this, providing students with the opportunity to interact with a Raytheon 703 computer. This setup, far removed from contemporary gaming, required users to create commands on punch cards, feed them into a reader, and then await printed output from a line printer to see the results of their actions.

During this period, Newell's initial exposure to what he considers a \"real video game\" was a version of \"Star Trek.\" This text-based adventure, common on university mainframes in the early 1970s, represented starships and Klingons as simple characters like 'E' and 'K'. Players would input their decisions via punch cards, a process so time-consuming that each \"move\" in the game could take up to fifteen minutes to process and display.

He humorously referred to these lengthy waits as turning \"frames per second\" into \"minutes per frame,\" highlighting the stark contrast to today's instantaneous gaming experiences. Despite the cumbersome nature of this interaction, it was through these rudimentary programming exercises and this early version of Star Trek that Newell cultivated a profound interest in computing and game design. This passion eventually led him to study programming at Harvard and, subsequently, to a significant career at Microsoft before he co-founded Valve, underscoring the unconventional beginnings of a titan in the gaming industry.