Nimatron

The Nimatron was an electro-mechanical machine that played Nim. It was first exhibited in April–October 1940 by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation at the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair to entertain fair-goers. Conceived of some months prior by Edward Condon and built by Gerald L. Tawney and Willard A. Derr, the device was a non-programmable digital computer composed of electro-mechanical relays which could respond to players' choices in the game in a dozen different patterns. The machine, which weighed over a metric ton, displayed four lines of seven light bulbs both in front of the player and on four sides of an overhead cube. Players alternated turns with the machine in removing one or more lights from one of the rows until the lights were all extinguished. The calculations were purposely delayed to give the illusion that the machine was considering moves, and winners received a token.

The reception of the machine during the fair was positive, with around 100,000 games of Nim played. After the fair it was moved to the Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science Building in Pittsburgh. Despite this success, Condon considered the Nimatron a failure, because he had designed and intended it to be solely a piece of entertainment for fair-goers, but within years of the exhibition programmable digital computers began to be produced around the world by other companies and groups that used some of the same principles around storing digital information. The Nimatron is considered one of the first electro-mechanical games and a precursor to the video game, but its direct impact on the early history of video games and beyond is minimal. It may, however, have inspired the Nimrod computer, which was demonstrated at the 1951 Festival of Britain playing Nim using banks of lightbulbs like the Nimatron eleven years prior.