This project is not a homage or a themed toy. It is a serious technical reconstruction built to answer a falsifiable question:

Could a system as complex as W.O.P.R. — its networked terminals, its game engine, its persona, its NORAD integration — actually have been built with the technology available in the early 1980s?

Every architectural decision is therefore measured against two axes:

1. Period authenticity — would this approach have been possible on early-1980s hardware, software, and communications infrastructure?
2. Modern accessibility — can a person in a browser today experience it without owning an IMSAI 8080 and an acoustic coupler?

Where the two conflict, we keep both: we build on a modern substrate but we model the period constraints explicitly (see comms-protocol.md) so that the authentic behavior is observable, measurable, and toggleable.

Who this is for

A second goal is to engage veteran engineers who worked on systems of this era. The project is structured so that their knowledge has a place to land:

• The feasibility analysis makes specific, falsifiable claims per module ("a 1981 IMSAI-class micro could drive this terminal at 300 baud") that veterans can confirm, refine, or refute.
• The game catalog is contributor-extensible: only tic-tac-toe and Global Thermonuclear War appear in the film, so the rest of W.O.P.R.'s repertoire are non-blocking placeholders awaiting community interpretations.

Non-goals

• Pixel-faithful recreation of a single scene at the cost of system coherence.
• A local LLM. Joshua's persona runs on a cloud model (see §6).
• Period-correct deployment (we deploy to modern infra); period correctness applies to behavior and architecture, documented in feasibility.md.