Racing the Beam (2009)

Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost unpack the architectural tightrope of the Atari 2600, a machine designed with no frame buffer and a minuscule 128 bytes of RAM. Programmers were forced to race the cathode-ray tube's electron gun across the screen, calculating graphics line by scanline in hard real time. This technical dissection illustrates how radical hardware frugality sparked unprecedented programming virtuosity.