Posted on 12/07/2014 1:10:09 PM PST by Monty22002
The father of video games, Ralph H. Baer, has passed away at age 92. He came to rest in his New Hampshire home on the night of Saturday, Dec. 6 according to Wikipedia and a Facebook post by video game historian Leonard Herman, a friend of Baer.
Dubbed the "Thomas Edison of the home TV game" by Popular Electronics Magazine in 1980, Baer's Odyssey game system was the first home video game system. The patent for the idea was filed on August 10, 1970 and the system was released by Magnavox in 1972.
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
And their one-time competitor Data General! Somewhere in my archives I have a copy of Tracy Kidder's very good book, "The Soul of a New Machine" (1980), about the development of the DG Eclipse! DG went from 1968 to 1999, while DEC, the former company of DG's founders lived from 1957 to 1998. That niche of mini-mainframes and distributed processing just got squeezed into nothingness.
I still remember when I was a small kid playing Pong for the first time, back when you put coins in the slot to play a video game.
Or you could say "the end of the beginning" which I do prefer. I had to explain to an older relative what that new TV Commercial on the advanced "Candy Crush" was about but he was under-impressed.
We used to joke about the difference between men and boy toys, now it is generational differences but it does lose things in translation and incomprehension! When you tell a pre-shaver that you got to the 12th ball in PONG or you got through the maze of "twisted little passages" but had a problem in "little twisted passages", well the eye-roll just has to be seen!
wasn’t the first game actually showed off at a Worlds Fair in 1958 or something
First CRT video game was patented in 1947.
http://www.google.com/patents/US2455992
I had the home version. Played for hours on the ol’ black & white Sears TV. Wore both out.
I worked in Data Storage at DEC and we were still building rack mount 9 inch drives when cheaper 5.25” drives were introduced (and later 3.5” drives; the standard now).
This was in the early 90s. DEC survived another 6/7 years but it was clear that management were in denial.
Now for a little over $100 you can buy a drive that is 200x the capacity of the fully loaded rack mount storage cabinet that we were working on.
wow
“The Soul of a New Machine” a very good read!
You may also like “Show Stopper!”: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
G. Pascal Zachary, Author
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-02-935671-5
As part of my home backup system I have a USB3 dock that I insert 3TB 'naked' drives for semi-weekly backups that go into my gunsafe (lost the guns in a boating accident) for rotation. Each 3TB has cost me from $200 to a decreasing basis of about $100. My first IBM PC had a 20MB HD Card that cost $800 and was cheap to IBM's HDs.
Our first computer, a 286, cost us $2000. We financed it.
Helped my wife study for college. I used it for video games and programming. :)
Caught flack from the guys at work (at DEC). They were convinced that I was a fool. “Why would anyone want a computer in their home.”
I met Mr. Baer at the White House ceremony in 2006. He was a nice man.
www.gpsdeclassified.com
That was the very smell of death! Behind the 8-ball, not running in front! Very scary and wearying to run in front but it is doom and the grave to run behind!
Now we ask just how much computer and memory do you want in your pocket? I got my first 'smart phone' last month, the iP6, and am amazed at its ability, especially in the connected universe! What will I see before I die if I live to my fathers age. It will be at least 3 more generations! WOW!
LOL!!! great picture... and sooooo true
that still amazes me to this day, learned to program on DEC stuff
Awesome pic. That kid playing pinball is probably approaching 60 now.
what did this Cathode-ray tube amusement device actually do??? couldn't figure it out from the patent
was it ever built or was it a patent on the idea...
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