Recreational math and games boosted both computing and science.
Unix was born to play games. And Curses was born for Rogue.
Unix was born to play games. And Curses was born for Rogue.
Please correct me if I am wrong but I thought this was only the reason for the predecessor of it on the PDP-7: Thompson wanted Space Travel to run on the PDP-7 and the necessary boilerplate became a rudimentary OS. But porting this to the PDP-11 was not motivated by Space Travel -- or was it?
Though games are perhaps a subset of simulation in general (even if their simulation might be of an imaginary world rather than the real one.)