History of video game consoles (first generation)
The
first generation of video game consoles lasted from 1972 until 1979.
Television engineer
Ralph Baer conceived the idea of an interactive television while building a television set from scratch for
Loral in
1951 in
Bronx, New York. He explored these ideas further in 1966 when he was the Chief Engineer and manager of the Equipment Design Division at
Sanders Associates. Baer created a simple two-player video game that could be displayed on a standard
television set called
Chase, where two dots chased each other around the screen. After a demonstration to the company's director of R&D
Herbert Campman, some funding was allotted and the project was made "official". In 1967
Bill Harrison was brought on board, and a
light gun was constructed from a toy rifle that was aimed at a target moved by another player.
Bill Rusch joined the project to speed up development and soon a third machine-controlled dot was used to create a
ping-pong game. With more funding additional games were created, and Baer had the idea of selling the product to
Cable TV companies, who could transmit static images as game backgrounds. A prototype was demonstrated in February 1968 to
Teleprompter Vice President
Hubert Schlafly, who signed an agreement with Sanders. The Cable TV industry was in a slump during the late 60's and early 70's and a lack of funding meant other avenues had to be pursued. Development continued on the hardware and games resulting in the final "Brown Box" prototype, which had two controllers, a light gun and sixteen switches on the console that selected the game to be played. Baer approached various U.S. Television manufacturers and an agreement was eventually signed with
Magnavox in late 1969. Magnavox's main alterations to the Brown Box were to use plug-in circuits to change the games, and to remove the colour graphics capabilities in favour of colour overlays in order to reduce manufacturing costs. It was released in May 1972 as the
Magnavox Odyssey.
The Odyssey was built using mainly
analog electronics, based on concepts originating from the 1950s. It was not a large success due to restrictive marketing, although other companies with similar products (including Atari) had to pay a licensing fee for some time. For a time it was Sanders' most profitable line, even though many in the company had been unsupportive of game development.
Many of the earliest games utilising
digital electronics ran on
university mainframes in the
United States, developed by individual users who programmed them in their idle time. In 1961, a group of students at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology programmed a game called
Spacewar! on a
DEC PDP-1. In 1970
Nolan Bushnell saw
Spacewar! for the first time at the
University of Utah. Deciding there was commercial potential in an
arcade version, he hand-wired a custom computer capable of playing it on a black and white
television. The resulting game,
Computer Space, did not fare well commercially and Bushnell started looking for new ideas. In 1971 he saw a demonstration of the
Magnavox Odyssey, and hired
Al Alcorn to produce an arcade version of the Odyssey's ping-pong game (using
Transistor-transistor logic), called
PONG.
Home video games achieved widespread popularity with the release of a home version of
PONG in the Christmas of
1975. Its success sparked hundreds of clones, including the
Coleco Telstar, which went on to be a success in its own right, with over a dozen models.
The first console to feature a
CPU was the
second-generation console
Fairchild Channel F released in August 1976, which was based on the
Fairchild F8. Bushnell's company
Atari released the
Atari VCS based on the
MOS Technology 6502, in 1977.
Image:Magnavoxodyssey.jpg|Magnavox Odyssey (1972-1973)Image:Home Pong thumbnail.JPG|Atari PONG (1975)Image:Coleco Telstar Alpha.jpg|Coleco Telstar (1976-1979)Image:AFP TV Fun.jpg|APF TV Fun (1976)History of computer and video games*
How Video Games Invaded the Home TV Set by Ralph Baer
*
Home computer*
History of computing hardware (1960s-present)*
The Dot Eaters: Bits From the Primordial Ooze*
ClassicGaming Expo 2000: Baer Describes the Birth of Videogames 
