Write 6 pages thesis on the topic computer architecture and computer games. For the next ten years, computer gaming was reserved for academic enthusiasts, and there was very little awareness of the potential of this medium outside the big universities. During the 1970s computer manufacturers were the sources of early games. They wrote simple programs which were designed to work on the equipment that the firm produced. The games were not the main focus for these companies, but they were included because they had novelty value and made programming fun. From the start, development of games went hand in hand with the development of hardware. Atari was an early market leader with its games Pong 1972 and Asteroids 1978. The screen technology was unwieldy and the technology prohibitively expensive in those days. Manufacturers sought to recoup their costs by the use of arcade machines where players used coins per game. An important development came in 1977 when Atari introduced its cartridge-based console Atari 2600. With a tiny ROM capacity of the only 2K, it was surprisingly successful. Over time the Rom capacity increased to 16K by 1983 (Computer History, no page number) but the limitations of RAM were more of a problem. Since RAM was built into the hardware, it was a major undertaking, and very expensive, to upgrade this element in the system. Throughout the 1980s a series of technical improvements were introduced. Since early systems like the Commodore 64 (1982) used the BASIC programming language, many teenagers developed an interest in imitating the simple games of the time by writing their own code. During this period computer gaming was therefore still a domain dominated by young male students, who grew up to be programmers and designers, within a geeky international community. Systems like the ZX Spectrum and the BBC micro proved incredibly popular, and an important development was the point and click system which removed the need to enter text via a keyboard.
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