“Core war is a game surreptitiously played by systems programmers on large installations, where a player's goal in each fixed time slice of real time is to propagate his program elsewhere in memory, while doing as much “damage” (read: clearing to zero) as possible at random places in the hopes of causing the opponent's program to blow up. The game of core war is rarely mentioned with more than a whisper, and thus tends to be lost amid the din of easier and less abstract games such as Star Trek, Adventure or Dungeons and Dragons”
-- BYTE Magazine, July 1978, page 106-107
This brief description was published 6 years before A. K. Dewdney's first Core War article in Scientific American (May 1984, page 14-22).
Have you seen any other early mentions of Core War?
