Nimrod was a computer built specifically to play Nim, inspired by the earlier Nimatron electromechanical slot machine. It was designed by John Makepeace Bennett and built by the British company Ferranti, led by engineer Raymond Stuart-Williams, for the 1951 Festival of Britain National Exhibition, where it was exhibited to demonstrate Ferranti’s computer design and programming capabilities. NIMROD was the first digital computer designed specifically for a game, although its real purpose was to illustrate the principles of digital computing to the public when hardly anyone had seen or worked with a computer. It was 3.7 × 2.7 × 1.5 meters in size. Its electronic equipment consisted of 480 vacuum tubes. Visitors to the National Exhibition could play a round of Nim against the computer. The player pressed buttons on a raised panel that corresponded to lights on the machine to select his moves. The Nimrod then displayed its move in the same way and its calculations by additional lights. The speed of the calculations could be reduced so that the demonstrator could demonstrate exactly what the computer was doing. The computer was considered all the more significant because „famous German politicians were present, including Konrad Adenauer, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and Ludwig Erhard, the Federal Minister of Economics.“ The Nim game on the Nimrod is considered one of the first video games, although it can be objected that the game display by light bulbs is not a video graphics display and therefore a definition criterion for video games is not met. However, since the Nimrod is a computer, the common term computer game applies to the game.
