The Very First Video Game Console

The very first video game, every schoolchild knows, was Pong, the thrill-a-minute table tennis adventure in which players bounced a white cube back and forth forever. Designed by Allan Alcorn, the first Pong prototype appeared on an Atari system in a Sunnyvale, California bar in 1972. “In no time at all,” writes Wired, “videogames went from almost zero to a multi-billion dollar global industry.” This brief history, however, doesn’t get it quite right.

Atari deserves credit for pioneering early gaming machines, but the first home video game console appeared several years before their 1972 founding. Invented by Ralph Baer in 1966, under the auspices of his employer, defense contractor Sanders Associates, it was known as the “Brown Box” (or “TV Game Unit #7”). Baer’s invention, crude-looking by any standards today, established the basic design for virtually every console system since.

To learn more about Ralph Baer and his landmark invention, as well as view gaming system photographs from the Dinosaur Age of Gaming, you may visit here.

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Someone should do a street survey to see how many kids/people know Pong by name or by seeing an image of it. I was just thinking to myself - most gamers today probably don't know what Pong is. But they may see an image of it and say "oh yeah i know what that is".

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Let me be the first to say: What do you do about the sweet, loveable old lady who just doesn't like cats of any kind, at all? She got scratched when she was three, and for the last eighty years, she's advocated at every opportunity that ALL Cats should be rounded up, and ground up into dog food. And some neighbourhoods have actually listened to her, notably around the corner in Australia. And all the cat-lovers there were really surprised when one day, they were ordered (Ordered! in a democratic country!) to bring their cats down to the grinder. Of course, some tough guys hid their cats and never gave them up. And now, nobody who loves cats in that place can have one, and the only ones left are the bad face-scratchers. And it's a bigger problem than it ever was.

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To start, there are places with cat bans. For an example from New Zealand, http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-36865776 . Second, who are the "wrong people" we want to not have guns? Does it include police whose rules-of-engagement allow them to shoot people more freely than the US military in Afghanistan? (I'm thinking of the death of Ronald D. Williams.) Does it include all the people who are so ill-trained that they shoot themselves and others when cleaning their weapon? Nor does this cat metaphor extend to the racism in gun violence and rights.

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