Ralph H. Baer, father of video games, passes away at 92

Examiner ^ | 12/7/2014

[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.

[Chode]

i thank you Sir...

[dhs12345]

Ya. DEC was the leader in innovation, too. Just too bad that they were stuck in the “not invented here” mode. the Group that I worked for was given some leeway.

A lot of the ideas around clustering and RAID were developed by DEC.

Anyway, it is all moot now. The company doesn't exist any more. Or if it does it has been rebranded as HP.

[ShadowAce]

I actually owned one of those systems—it was pretty cool.

[Dr. Sivana]

Odyssey had nothing on my Fairchild Channel F video game system.... Still have in my attic somewhere.

No, but the Channel F came out several years later. VERY cool controllers on the Channel F, as you could TWIST the joystick to rotate.

[Dr. Sivana]

The father of gaming would be whoever invented the idea of changeable cartridges, so that one system could play multiple games. I believe the Atari 2600 was the first home console to do that, or at least the system that popularized it.

Nope. The original Odyssey had cartridges already. Keep in mind that these devices had NO CHIPS in them! The carts were simple shorting different combinations of leads, very primitive. Very cool.

[Dr. Sivana]

It was an elegant design, but had nothing in common with modern digital video games.

It had enough in common that EVERY home video player (except GCE Vectrex) paid royalties on the patent for 17 years. Mattel went to court over it and got spanked.

[Dr. Sivana]

Magnavox must’ve been really poorly managed, since they basically blew the entire game market at home.

Yup, after they came out with the Odyssey2, which was a marginal player (full flat keyboard, 2 KB RAM, pathetic processor), they decided to make its successor backwards compatible, despite the small installed base of games.

As North American Phillips, they released some Atari 2600/ColecoVision games that were really excellent (War Room on Coleco was GREAT!). Bad timing, as they came to market during the great video game melt down of 1983-84.

[Dr. Sivana]

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.”

The real question then was "Why would anyone want a DecMate in his home?" [The Rainbow was actually somewhat usable, if immovable]

[Dr. Sivana]

and you say you worked for DEC???

He might well have. They didn't WANT to make the DOS/CPM-86 Rainbow, and DecMates were used at those stations that were doing "personal computing" type stuff. The DecMates were based on the same 12-bit processor used in the PDP-8s.

[Dr. Sivana]

i had one of the first Micro-VAX's the company ever bought under my desk back in the day, and THAT, was the t!ts...

With the worst mouse ever (ROUND) until Apple ripped off the design with the original iMac.

[Chode]

never saw one with a mouse, musta been after i left

[dhs12345]

Lol. My pc was a DOS based machine. It was an Epson running word perfect and lotus 123.