Truco and clones: the beginnings of Argentinian computer gaming

Summary

Part of my series on national beginnings: Spain – Argentina – more to come I could not find any magazine showing a game of Truco, so to represent Argentina in the 80s I used this one showing a robot creating money out of thin air for no particular reason. Currently stuck between a monster wargame (Gulf Strike) and a Civ-like (Incunabula), I looked for short articles to fill the gap, and so selected a Spanish game called Reyes y Castillos. However, as I was playing it, I found the Spanish difficult to read, odd (“lo hizo de goma“, “sonaste macho“) and full of words I had never heard before (“amarrete“, “linyera“). I initially attributed that to how rusty my Spanish is, then to odd colloquialisms of the early 80s. However, when I finally accepted I did not understand the game, I asked a certain artificial friend for help, he made me realize I had chanced upon my first Argentinian game. Prologue: My Darling Clementina The history of computing in Argentina really starts in 1961, when mathematician Manuel Sadosky and his team at the Calculus Institute of the University of Buenos Aires finished setting up a Ferranti Mercury computer. This specific machine came with the song “Oh My Darling, Clementine” pre-programmed. The rendition was crude, but impressive enough to give the computer a name: Clementina. This auspicious beginning was brutally interrupted by the (right-wing) 1966 Revolución Argentina coup and the Night of the Long Batons that followed. Most the the staff of the Calculus Institute either left or were expelled, Sadosky exiled to Uruguay where, of course, he helped build the first national computer in 1968 (the unimaginatively named “la máquina“), before leaving again for Venezuela (which already had a computer so Sadosky could not complete a Bolivarian computing slam) and ultimately Spain. As for Clementina, she was eventually dismantled by 1970. The simmering years of Argentinian computing The regime wasn’t anti-technology; it was anti-technology in the left...