Videogames Turn 40 117
May 15th marks the 40 year anniversary of the first games hooked up to the television. An article on the 1up site tells the story of Ralph Baer, Bill Harrison, and Bill Rusch working at the Sanders Associates company on a little game called Pong. They go into a great deal of detail on the development of the console, going so far as to include a number of the group's original notes on the project. "Baer kept the tiny lab, a former company library in Sanders' early days, locked at all times. Only two men had keys: Baer and Harrison. The room would remain the base of operations for their controversial video experiments for years to come -- experiments that, had they been known about widely at the time, might have garnered intense ridicule from other employees of the prominent defense contractor. Pursuing them was an utterly audacious move."
SPACEWAR!! (Score:2, Informative)
You can view our Ralph Baer Interviews (Score:5, Informative)
Hey, I found an emulator! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SPACEWAR!! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:SPACEWAR!! (Score:3, Informative)
Even Ralph Bayer's Odyssey system might not meet some qualifications for videogame since it was an analogue system and not digital.
However, the article says "In May of 1967, the world's first videogames -- as we know them today -- made their quiet, humble entrance into the world.
Spacewar on original hardware! (Score:4, Informative)
Nitpick: It was a PDP-1 [brouhaha.com], one of which has been restored to working order, much to the delight of Spacewar's creators [computerhistory.org].
But everything else you said was essentially correct, including the homebuilt input device [pdp-1.org], which consists of five switches laid out in a pattern that anyone who played the coin-op versions of Spacewar and Asteroids will immediately recognize.
Re:really (Score:2, Informative)
As a post-script, a similar thing happened with my Atari 7800 in college when I was throwing clear images of channel 3 to my neighbors - through cinderblock walls - clear as a bell. It didn't interfere with chanell 3 signals being piped from other student's VCRs but one reported seeing my game action when they were getting ready to watch a movie.