1st gen

Hey it's almost 2008 so I better get a post in or two. Took an extended week off from the blog to do some first hand beer research and plug Stella Artois. If I ever do a series on wine I have a bit of leg work completed too.

When I first looked at the video game "thing" I was a little surprised at how far back it all started. Like many, PONG was the game I thought was the first. Since it came out as a coin op arcade game, I was too young to actually get into bars to play it, but I did get a glimpse at the local pool hall where it was a sensation. Really odd to see the pool hall cool guys getting their licks down on this thing.

Atari came out with the arcade version in November 1972, a year after Computer Space. But it did something that all the other games didn't: it became a hit. As goofy as it seems nowadays to slide a white bar up and down, it was serious fun 40 years ago. The very first ping pong type game, Tennis for Two by William Hinginbotham, came out in 1958, but was played on a tiny oscilloscope screen. Few homes had TV's let alone electronics test equipment. What were they thinking?

Anyway, along came the Magnavox Odyssey home video game console with a version of ping pong on it in 1971. So Atari co-founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney had a legal fight on their hands. No matter, the profits from Pong would more than settle it up. Bushnell's concept was brilliant: devise a game that everyone already knows how to play. He had discovered from his release of Computer Space that consumers didn't read the written instructions provided with the game. But everyone can play pong.Pong's instructions were "Avoid missing ball for high score".

The game was tested at 2 bars and became a huge instant hit. One major reason was that almost all arcade games were for one player at a time, you took turns if you were playing against a foe, but Pong allowed two players to go head to head. Both machines were played till they broke down.

The lawsuit mentioned above was launched in 1974 by Magnavox and they won on all counts, but in one of the gaming industries first dramatic twists, Magnavox discontinued the Odyssey a year later and never went into the video game fray again. Atari did, and released the home version of Pong in 1975.

Say goodbye to 2007, see you in 2008.

Blah Blah Blah

A few more posts and I hit the century mark! In anticipation of the coming year I thought I'd give readers a hint at what's coming around the bend. I will definitely be going back to beer for a few updates, I plan on doing a series on recluses(especially kooky ones)and I'm going to go out and buy a model airplane and try to build it. This one will have a photo diary to chronicle the progress. OOh, and yes, the launch of WellBoy is nigh.

I will be posting through the hols and should pass 100 in a few days. Stick around.

Now its getting complicated.

So not long before the Magnavox Odyssey was launched an intrepid engineer named Nolan Bushnell had a few ideas of his own about where video games were going to go. Mr. Bushnell was thinking that no one was going to play games on their stupid TVs. You had to connect it up, they didn't have sound anyways and whats with those weird stick on backgrounds? He figured pool halls and dives was a much better place to learn your video game chops. Pinball arcades, long the haunt of rebellious youth, were a perfect spot to set one of these bad boys up.

After seeing a demonstration of Spacewar! in 1970 he built a hand wired arcade machine to play a version of it called Computer Space. Bushnell, along with his partner Ted Dabney, moved pretty quick in getting Computer Space to market. They had also seen a demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey and were concerned in getting out of the gate first. Now technically, the Odyssey is considered first but only really if you count the fact that it was a "take home" game. Computer Space, released 6 months before Odyssey, was the first commercially available computer game, though designed to go as a stand alone machine in arcades.

The actual machine is quite cool looking, even if its almost 40. With its moulded sparkle blue cabinet and deeply recessed screen giving the player a real sense of immersion. The game electronics are absurdly basic. It didn't use a computer chip or IC's for that matter. Just hard wired components. Output was to a 15" B/W picture tube from a General Electric portable television.


Bushnell and Dabney moved on from Computer Space (it wasn't a huge hit) and formed Atari, who gave us Pong, which was a huge hit.

Crackle and pop.

Okay, here's one for the books: On this day in 1957 the first atomic power station opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. Called "the world’s first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses"

Built by the Duquesne Light Company the first reactor went critical the beginning of December and the first watt of power ran through the wires on December 18th. The plant was built under the Atoms for Peace program of President Dwight Eisenhower.

It ran until 1982 when it was decommissioned and taken apart. A new plant,the Beaver County Power Station, was built adjacent to the old site and continues to run today.

What can brown do for you?

German / American scientist / engineer Ralph Baer (enough slashes for you?)came up with the idea in 1951 to attach a gaming system to an ordinary TV set. This earth shattering idea, in 1951 no less, would mean that any home with a TV could play games. Doesn't say much for the TV shows back then does it? TV out only 5 years and people are already thinking of playing video games on the damn idiot box.

Ralph came over to America with his family from Germany in the late 1930's. His father had quite rightly diagnosed the coming hell that would be Nazi Germany and moved his Jewish family pronto. He attended technical school and graduated a radio service technician in 1940. After a stint as an intelligence officer in the war he went back to school and earned a BSc degree in 1949. His specialty was the little known science of television. He eventually joined Sanders Associates and stayed with them till he retired in the late 80's. The company is a defence contractor
specializing in electronic systems.

Although he thought about the idea in 1951, it wasn't until 1966 that he started work on the first video game console ultimately called the "Brown Box". What his bosses thought about it I don't know. Still it must have seemed odd when their primary contracts were complex electronic devices for military applications.

By 1971 he had the thing going and Sanders Associates licensed the gizmo to Magnavox whose clever marketing department spotted a dud with its original name and changed it to the Magnavox Odyssey. By today's standards it was pretty plain. It lacked sound and had a bizarre method for dealing with black and white TVs (by far the dominant set in the homes of Americans then): the system was furnished with coloured plastic sticky overlays to put on the TV screen to simulate colour. Yeesh. Wonder how that worked if you changed game and left the old overlay on?

It did, however, have some epochal developments, genre defining technology, such as game cartridges and cool extras like the first "light gun". You plugged it into the console, loaded the shoot em up game and you could actually aim at the screen and, in real time with not that shabby accuracy, develop a video game "skill". Pretty heavy for 1972. Trouble was any light source worked for the gun, but hey, not many homes had electric lights then either.

Magnavox had its headaches marketing the machine and spent more time either suing or being sued by rival video game companies over the next few decades. In an ironic twist, video game giant Nintendo actually got its start in the industry marketing the Odyssey in Japan in 1975.

December 12 in music history.

Every so often I get looking at stuff online and find some pretty intriguing info. It's the Internet after all, and should come as no surprise. The neat thing is that you can assemble a pile of stuff and look at it side by side, like comparing washing machines or melons at the market.

So since I usually have a today in history thing or who died on this date post I was getting stuff together and realized that December 12 had some pretty awesome and shitty music hit the charts then.

How about Dec 12, 1957 when Presley had Jailhouse Rock and Buddy Holly had Peggy Sue. Parents all over North America learned how to yell `Turn that goddamn racket down!`

Or 1965 when Turn, Turn, Turn by the Byrds and I Got You (I Feel Good)by James Brown made the charts. Wow.

But you gotta have some balance too. 1973 had the Carpenter`s Top of the World and in 1981 (brace yourself) Physical from Olivia Newton-John. Sorry.

And here`s one, not a song, but still big news: the Chairman of the Board, Francis Albert Sinatra, was born this day in 1915.

To finish up and totally unrelated because I`m in a mood tonight, I watched (for the 3rd time) last night on PBS, the Buena Vista Social Club. Superb.

Use the fork, Luke.

It surprises me that during the late 50's when the first space shots had captured the public imagination and the cold war and all it's technological sabre rattling held the generals gaze, that somewhere, someone didn't put the pieces together and come up with a space video game. It seems obvious that the public would go for it. There was such a game, much heralded in programming circles, but rarely seen outside of the engineering department at MIT, called Spacewar! (don't forget the exclamation point)

Conceived by Steve Russell, Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen to run on the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1, which came out in 1960. It boasted a whopping 9 K of memory and became notorious as the first computer to elicit the hacker mentality in computer science students. Back in 1960 hackers were the crazy into computer people, rare animals indeed in a world of less than a thousand computers. The idea of constant debugging and upgrading to improve performance can be blamed on them.

The three formed the Hingham Institute (named after the street their house was on) to study how to take advantage and exploit the limits of the PDP-1. The result of their toils was Spacewar! They wanted to "demonstrate as many of the computer's resources as possible, and tax those resources to the limit", "it should be interesting, which means every run should be different" and "it should involve the onlooker in a pleasurable and active way -- in short, it should be a game."

The game was simple; as the best games usually are. Two competing spaceships maneuver and shoot at each other, dodging and weaving to avoid being hit against a background of moving stars. Early versions had random dots, while later ones had actual correct star charts moving along. Originally control was via the computer's input controls, but that was a real snarl for 2 players to get at and one player was always farther from the screen, a decided disadvantage. Since joysticks were not available then they designed a simple Bakelite control box and had the institutes model railway club bodge them together.

The program was ready in April 1962 for MIT's annual Science Open House in May. At the end of the academic year the MIT hackers moved on to professional careers around the country. For a fun first hand account of the birth of this game I dug up this article written for long gone (1985) Creative Computing Magazine. http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/creative/SpacewarOrigin.html

Lay a patch.

You know you're having a good day when there is a choice of cool things invented on the same day. I am torn between tire (tyres for those British folk) and the Dewey Decimal System. Seeing how in my own way, I have had a few discoveries about tires in the last few weeks, I will run with the invention of the pneumatic tire by British engineer Robert William Thompson in 1845. Mind you I will get back one day soon and prattle on about Melvil Dewey.

Born in 1822 in Stonehaven Scotland, he was one of several very famous Scottish inventors of the 19th century. He ranks with John Baird (television), Alexander Graham Bell (telephone) and another rubber pioneer, John Dunlop. More about that relationship in a minute.

The 11th of 12 children he was chosen for the ministry but couldn't figure out Latin, so at 14 he went to North America to stay with relatives in South Carolina. That didn't pan out either, so he was back in under 2 years. He did, however, have a natural ability with chemistry and physics.

His father, recognizing a budding mind, set up a shop for him. His first project was the rebuilding of his mothers washing mangle (that must have gone over well).He apprenticed with an engineering firm and started work in Edinburgh as a civil engineer.One of his early engineering coups was coming up with a way to ignite explosives with electricity. Miners loved him.

Off to London in 1844 to work in the budding railway industry. It was here he came up with his patent for an air filled tire or aerial wheel as he called it.The trouble was there were no cars then, bicycles were a curiosity, and no one with a cart could afford the luxury of air filled rubber tires to run their chickens to market. It was almost 35 years later when Dunlop re-invented the pneumatic tire that they actually took off commercially. No matter. Thomson also patented the fountain pen and steam shovel, so there.

Numero Uno

So in tramping around the Internet and the libraries looking for video game lore the "first video game ever" mantle steadily fell upon a quaint little game called Tennis for Two. The 2 games I wrote about in the posts were definitely out before this one, and they were real games, totally meant for distraction and amusement. So why is this one still called the first?

William Higinbotham, a scientist, developed the game to amuse visitors to Brookhaven National Laboratory on, not surprisingly, visitors day. Higinbotham was a scientist of the highest order having first worked Los Alamos National Laboratory, where like at Brookhaven he headed the electronics division. He also had a conscience, being a founding member of the Federation of American Scientists, the seminal nuclear non proliferation group.

The game itself, according to Higinbotham was pretty simple. "Back then, analog computers were used to work out all kinds of mechanical problems. They didn't have the accuracy of digital computers, which were very crude at the time, but then you didn't need a great deal of precision to play TV games. " The tiny screen, actually an oscilloscope, was connected to an analog computer programmed to play the game. The "gamer" saw a tennis court from ground level on the side with the net a vertical line in the middle, inverted T style. A dot was the ball and users used a dial to change trajectory and a switch to hit it. The program was quite cool because it played like tennis in that the ball would drop on a long shot because of gravity and a hard shot bounced back farther than a weak one.

Barely ten years later, a very similar game broke onto the scene that was actually a hit, Pong.

OXO

The early 50's were a watershed for video game development. After the rampant popularity of NIM came OXO. Odd how the engineers and scientists of the day seemed to be insistant on making ccomputers approachable by coming up with the shortest names possible for their creations.

OXO, as you can guess, was a simple tic tac toe game. Programmed on the EDSAC computer: Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, by Alexander S. (Sandy) Douglas. It differs from NIM in that it displays the game as its being played on a tiny screen inches across. NIM simply flashed lights in patterns which were interpretted by the players.

EDSAC was originally made in 1949 for the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory. The machine was there for the exclusive use of the mathematical department and turned out to be the first of two versions. EDSAC 2 came out in 1958. It's fine pedigree lived on as the LEO 1, the world's first commercially avialble business computer that was based almost solely on the EDSAC design.

Highly addictive

Back when the Second World War was a recent memory and folk had time on their hands and seemingly a future in which to have the time, men and women of science turned their efforts towards more trivial matters, like video gaming. In those heady days of the late Forties and early Fifties, people just had to have the latest game.

In 1951 that means you were going to play NIM, and play it on the Nimrod console, what else? There has been a few other "video game-ish" programs but they were basically lay persons adaptations of miltary programs used to shoot targets with missiles, one of the very reasons digital computers wee invented anyway. But NIM was designed to be just a game.

It debuted May 5th of that year at the Festival of Britain. This festival showcased the best of British endeavors and cutting edge science. It actually appeared at the Exhibition of Science in South Kensignton.

For those of you wondering what NIM is, its not a totally unique game made only for the computer that ran it. It was actually a NIM simulator, a small digital computer (the only kind they had then) which was perfect for it. NIM is a mathematical game usually played with stacks of objects, like match sticks, pebbles etc. Two players take turns removing amounts of objects in rotation until they are all gone. There are many, many websites out there where you try your hand at it. I played it a bit and its surprisingly satisfying for such a basic game.

Nimrod was a hit at the festival and then moved on to Berlin for a stint. The device was huge: 9 feet high by 12 feet long and contained hundreds of vacuum tubes. Everything was wired together, no plugs and sockets, so the designers had to build it correctly from the start. It wasn't actually, a flaw surfaced that caused grief for a few days, but once located it ran fine.

Blah blah blah

I have run the beer thing far enough for now, though like most of my other rants, I found out more in my snooping than I can ever hope to get on the pages of this blog the first time around. I found myself over the weekend trying to decide where to aim the mighty "Barn" ship this time, but I had a few distractions that got on my nerves.

Such as, I have a few lingering doubts about 9/11 and it bugs me that in the news again is the "other" airliner seen over Washington during the attacks. I had once hoped to do a few pages on the subject but it just got me so depressed thinking about how to approach the subject: On the one hand is the skeptic, the doubter who knows in his soul that the official reports don't add up. On the other a yearning for order and a simple plausable explanantion so we can get on with it. I'm still torn up over the Kennedy assasination and Marilyn's suicide.

I'm also feeling that Vietnam thing going on in Iraq, no matter how upbeat the reports get. I have plans for pieces on the American Civil War for 2008 and hopefully a shot at a few minor sized conflicts such as the Falklands War, the one that was never declared. Oh well.

So to keep the bow in the wind and the owls alert and ready I instead will spend a day or two in December, the final days of 2007, going on semi-knowledgably about video games.