The Adams Brothers and the First 16-Bit Home Computer — Melbourne, Florida

Three brothers enrolled at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne in the early 1970s: Scott Adams, class of 1975, Richard Adams, class of 1976, and Eric Adams, class of 1978. According to Florida Tech News, Richard built what the university calls the world's first 16-bit personal computer in 1974, Eric programmed it, and in 1975 Scott wrote the first graphic video game for a personal computer to run on it. The machine is known as the Adams IMP-16, after the National Semiconductor chip at its heart.

The world's first label comes from Florida Tech's own Secret History series by historian Gordon Patterson, and the sources reviewed for this page do not include an independent ruling on it. What the record does show is a sequence of specific work on the Melbourne campus and in a shared house in Eau Gallie, ending with Scott Adams launching the game company Adventure International in 1978.

Florida Tech was a young school with a head start in computing. The university's About page says it was founded in 1958 as Brevard Engineering College, a night school for the early missilemen of the space program, and its state historical marker on S. Country Club Road credits founder Jerome P. Keuper. In September 1966, a month after taking the name Florida Institute of Technology, the college opened an undergraduate computer science major, and in January 1967 it leased an IBM 1130, as Patterson recounts in a companion Secret History article. That article notes Keuper later described the major as one of the first rather than the first.

Scott Adams heard about the Melbourne college as a North Miami High School senior who wanted to study computer science without leaving Florida. He moved into a Florida Tech dorm in mid-September 1970 and, through the federal work-study program, talked his way into the computer center in the basement of Grissom Hall, home of the IBM 1130 and run by director Robert A. Brown. He started by putting mailing labels on the alumni newsletter. By 1973 he oversaw the university's entire accounting system, and before taking an 18-month RCA tracking job on Ascension Island he helped install a Xerox Sigma 5 in the computer center's new home on the first floor of the Crawford Science Tower.

Richard Adams reached Melbourne in 1972 and Eric followed in 1974; the brothers shared a house in the Sherwood Forrest subdivision of Eau Gallie. Richard's first public computing project was musical. For a class taught by mathematics head David Clutterham, he wired an electric organ and a pair of salvaged speakers to the university's DDP-24 in the Crawford computer lab, and after three months of programming it played Waltzing Matilda.

The DDP-24 also pushed him toward building his own machine. Florida Tech News says the computer, donated to Florida Tech from mission control at the Cape, lacked offline storage, and the lab's card punch was often broken. In 1974 the hobby kits on the market used the 8-bit Intel 8008, which Richard judged too limited. He bought circuit boards and a set of National Semiconductor IMP-16 chips from a surplus dealer; marketed in 1973, the IMP-16 was the first multichip 16-bit processor.

The rest of the Melbourne machine was scavenged and hand built. Richard reused components from a discarded card reader, added a power supply and designed a control panel. Eric adapted a TV typewriter as the input device and wrote the software that made the Adams IMP-16 run.

The game that ended up on the Melbourne machine began on a Caribbean tracking station. After finishing at Ascension, Scott Adams, still short of his Florida Tech degree, took an RCA programming post on Antigua, where he found a Star Trek program on the station's Sigma 5 mainframe that printed slowly on a teletype. He realized the radar screens around the room could display the game instead, and turned the multimillion dollar computer into a video game machine overnight.

In 1975 Scott returned to Melbourne to complete his computer science degree, which took nine months, and wrote a Space War game for Richard's computer. Florida Tech News reports that he penciled the 1,000-byte program onto 14 pages of notebook paper. The Starship Enterprise appeared on screen as the letter E and the Klingon ships as C, because, Adams said, the letter K did not look good on the playing field. Florida Tech describes Space War as the first graphic video game for a personal computer.

The clearest independent witness to the Adams computer was a Florida Tech professor. In the winter quarter of 1976, Richard took George Abdo's numerical analysis course, which covered vibrating systems. A few weeks later he invited Abdo and Clutterham to the Eau Gallie house to see what he had done.

In a 2008 letter quoted by Florida Tech News, Abdo described a single string vibrating from a triangular starting shape, limited by the machine's memory, and called it the first time he had seen or heard of a computer graphics output with a real-time animated display of a vibrating system. He also called the Melbourne computer obviously home brew. Abdo photographed the machine, and that photograph accompanies the Florida Tech account. For Richard, the demonstration doubled as coursework: Abdo recalled Richard telling him that he, Abdo, had inspired the student to configure the hardware and software for the display, a link between a Florida Tech lecture hall and a home workbench in Eau Gallie.

Richard Adams graduated from Florida Tech in 1976, and his work with the IMP-16 earned him a job at National Semiconductor, the chip's maker. Scott joined Stromberg-Carlson to work on a digital telephone switch. In 1977 his wife bought him a Radio Shack microcomputer, a TRS-80, and in 1978, inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure, he devised a new language, compiler and interpreter and wrote Adventureland.

Scott Adams formed Adventure International in 1978. Florida Tech News reports that between 1978 and 1983 it became a $3 million-a-year business with about sixty freelance writers and a Marvel Comics game contract, then went bankrupt when the market collapsed in 1983. The bust came well after the brothers had left Melbourne, but the Florida Tech account treats the Adams IMP-16 and Space War as the starting point of that business story. Patterson closes it by crediting three graduates of the Melbourne campus with a share in the home computer game industry that followed.