Old pinball machines are amazingly complex

You still use paper. Instead of writing the game in a general purpose programming language you write it using logic gates. You get abstraction and modularity by designing larger components (adders, flip-flops, timers, shift registers) on separate pieces of paper and then including them as named black boxes in a higher-level diagram. The good news for the Pong developers is that most of those larger components were already available off-the-shelf. Common families of these chips, such as the venerable 4000-series and 7400-series logic families, began to appear on the market in the mid-1960's. Edit just to add another bit of nuance . If it still seems like an extremely difficult task without much precedent, I think the lineage of these early arcade games can be traced back through their older arcade siblings: pinball machines. People had been building more and more sophisticated pinball machines over the decades since their inception in the early 1930s. For a look into pinball machines, some of their history, and an amazingly deep dive into the workings of a 1970's model, check out Alec's pinball series on Technology Connections [1]. [1] [this video]

I think it's pretty charming. Games have so much abstraction these days it feels like there's no way to truly understand what it is they're even doing. One can spend months agonizing over the true nature of things and how ideas and concepts relate to each other and eventually distill it all into some object oriented organization that implements not just your game but all possible games. One can also just cycle the game's state machine in a big function, haha switch statement go brrr. Reminds me of the old NES games which would statically allocate memory for game objects, very much in the "structure of arrays" style, they too had game logic just like that. Also reminds me of old electromechanical pinball machines. You can literally see the machine cycle. [this video] [link]

The Rotary Switch - which is both input and output in the real Minivac - is absolutely wild yeah. One of the crucial things I didn't get to yet is making that wheel controllable - some circuits in the manuals do require you to turn it. That's high in the todo list (with mobile support). I also really want to share all of the videos I've been collecting of similar "wheels" - in (modern-ish) elevators [0] and light shows [1]... And also pinball machines! [2] Re: RadioShack boards, I did have the "300 in 1" kit growing up, so yes... it's full circle for me. :-) [0] [link] and [link] [1] [link] [2] [this video]