UT Austin Computation Center and Decwar; Some History

Halloween, October 31, 1982, the DECsystem-10 at the University of Texas at Austin was  turned off for the last time. Photo shows some of the staff and users in attendance that night.

The existence of analog computers to solve specialized problems goes back thousands of years, the discovery of the Greek Antikythera mechanism (ca. 205–60 BCE) being a much discussed example.  A more recent example was the subject of the movie Imitation Game (2014), about Alan Turing who designed a digital computer to automate the process of deciphering Nazi Enigma-encrypted messages during World War II (1940). And after WWII the ENIAC (1945) is cited as the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer.

All to say, yes, computing is definitely a topic of historic importance.

In May 2023 I wrote a short article "Some History of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Austin": 

https://traviscountyhistorical.blogspot.com/2023/05/a-history-of-ai-winter-and-austin.html  

This is another article in that same theme: the history of computer science in Austin. 

Several professors at UT and their collaborators have been working to document the history, restoration, preservation, and archiving of historical computing, especially associated with UT Austin and the UT Austin Computation Center. The effort began in 2025 with an emphasis on Decwar, among the first multiplayer computer games (eighteen players battling across a shared galaxy) developed in 1978 on UT Austin's DECsystem-10, AKA PDP-10. That project will continue including oral interviews. The goal of this short blog is simply to link to the excellent work they are doing; it's part of Austin's history.

Here's a link to their blog; the bottom of their page provides additional links:

https://decwarorg.blogspot.com/p/about.html

Some material on this topic has also been filed with the Austin History Center:

Richard Denney Photograph Collection (AR.2018.022). Austin History Center, Austin Public Library, Texas. https://ahc.access.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/1742 Accessed April 11, 2026.