A strange little side quest
Zoom out from Monster Math for a moment and the timeline gets surprisingly deep. Arthur Wynne published a diamond-shaped 'Word-Cross' in the New York World on December 21, 1913; the name later shifted to 'Cross-Word' and then 'crossword'. The broader history adds one more wrinkle. Spacewar! appeared on MIT's PDP-1 in 1962 and became one of the earliest influential computer games shared among programmers. The screen is modern; the urge to test skill, pattern and timing definitely is not.
