While it is as far from the eventual commercial videogame systems that come later as a walk in the park is to a walk on the moon, a physicist trying to make the public tour of his lab a little more exciting to bored visitors designs what some consider as a precursor videogame system in 1958. Working at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a US nuclear research lab in Upton, New York, William A. Higinbotham notices that people attending the annual autumn open houses, which are held to show the public how safe the work going on there is, are bored with the displays of simple photographs and static equipment. Educated at Cornell University as a physics graduate, Higinbotham had come to BNL from Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, and had actually been witness to the first detonation of the atomic bomb. A chain-smoking, fun-loving character and self-confessed pinball player, he wants to develop an open house exhibit at BNL that will entertain people as they learn.
His idea is to use a small analog computer in the lab to graph and display the trajectory of a moving ball on an oscilloscope, with which users can interact. Missile trajectory plotting is one of the specialties of computers at this time, the other being cryptography. In fact, the first electronic computer was developed to plot the trajectory of the thousands of bombs to be dropped in WWII. As head of Brookhaven's Instrumentation Division, and being used to building such complicated electronic devices as radiation detectors, it's no problem for Higinbotham, along with Technical Specialist Robert V. Dvorak who actually assembles the device, to create in three weeks the game system they name Tennis for Two, and it debuts with other exhibits in the Brookhaven gymnasium at the next open house in October 1958. In the rudimentary side-view tennis game, the ball bounces off a long horizontal line at the bottom of the oscilloscope, and there is a small vertical line in the centre to represent the net. Two boxes each with a dial and a button are the controllers...the dials affect the angle of the ball trajectory and the buttons 'hit' the ball back to the other side of the screen. If the player doesn't curve the ball right it crashes into the net. A reset button is also available to make the ball reappear on either side of the screen ready to be sent into play again. No score is tabulated, and it is displayed in glorious phosphor monochrome on a puny 5' oscilloscope screen, but it is still a big hit with everyone who visits the display. There are people in line for hours to play it.The game reappears for the 1959 open-house, and modifications include a larger monitor to display the action, and changeable gravity settings to show what it would be like to play tennis on another planet. After this final appearance, the system is then dismantled and its components put to other uses. Willy doesn't market or copyright his invention, thinking the idea so obvious as to be not worth pursuing. But his testimony is called upon years later during legal attempts to break the Magnavox videogame patent obtained through the development of their Odyssey home videogame system. While Higinbotham's set-up would seem to predict electronic ping-pong games such as those featured on the Odyssey and in Atari's PONG, the courts eventually rule against it as a viable videogame system and every company hoping to enter the videogame market ends up paying some sort of settlement to Magnavox.
The exact nature of 'Tennis for Two' has been called into question by some; Brookhaven National Labs and David Ahl both uphold Higinbotham's accomplishments. Ahl recalls playing the game during his tour of Brookhaven in his teens as a Grumman scholarship winner, during one of the open houses at Brookhaven. He goes on to found Creative Computing, an early, influential magazine on the industry. On the other side is Ralph Baer, filer of the first home videogame patent for what would become the Odyssey. During many years of litigation defending his patent, Baer learns of Higinbotham's creation, and he describes it as a simple, oscilloscope-based ballistics demonstration. Unfortunately, the man at the centre of this controversy cannot speak for himself: William Higinbotham, owner of 20 patents concerning electronic circuits, passes away on November 10, 1995, at the age of 84. After they release Tank under the Kee label in 1974, Atari produces another game, Shark Jaws, under a pseudonym in 1975. The first game featuring animated characters, it's a conversion using the Tank hardware. The manufacturer is Horror Games, created by Atari to avoid any possible legal hassles from the producers of the obvious inspiration for the game: Universal Studios' smash-hit movie Jaws. Even flyers sent out to prospective buyers prod them to 'cash in on the popularity, interest and profits associated with sharks'. What's a few maimed swimmers between profit margins, right? The ability to eliminate any affiliation between the two isn't helped by the fact that the cabinet artwork features the word shark in tiny letters with JAWS looming large next to it. It's one of a few variations on the theme, including Shark by U.S. Billiards, Maneater by PSE, Blue Shark by Midway, and Shark Attack by Pacific Novelty.The first fully programmable video game system is the 8-bit Fairchild Channel F, manufactured by Fairchild Camera and Instrument in 1976, retailing for around US$170. It is originally known as the Video Entertainment System (VES), until Atari releases the similarly named Video Computer System (VCS). Its designer is Jerry Lawson, and the Channel F utilizes the first microchip, the F8, invented at Fairchild by Robert Noyce. 'Programmable' means that the user can change games by inserting big yellow ROM cartridges called Videocarts into the machine in order to change games. The first videocart available is titled 4-in-1, and does indeed hold four games: Tic-Tac-Toe, Shooting Gallery, Doodle, and Quadra-Doodle. Hockey and Tennis are also available as games built into the console. There are 21 games in all released by Fairchild, each selling for US$19.95. The system also features a 'pause' button to freeze
on on-screen action. Obsolete by the time of its debut, the Channel F is totally eclipsed by Atari's wildly popular VCS unit. Zircon International purchases the machine from Fairchild in 1979 and after adding detachable joysticks and other cosmetic changes, renames it the Channel F System II and gives it a price tag of US$99.95. They produce five more cartridges before the system drops off the market for good.Along with a mainframe Star Trek adventure game, the next widely popular computer game after Spacewar is Hunt the Wumpus aka Wump, developed by Gregory Yob on a Time-Sharing System at the University of Massachusettes in Dartmouth in 1972. A text based game, you move around a system of connected caves, arrmed with only five arrows, searching out the elusive Wumpus creature which is also roaming about. In each room you are given clues to happenings in the surrounding caves...you may feel a draught from one of the lethal bottomless pits scattered around, hear a pack of bats that will carry you away to a random cave, or even smell the mighty beast itself. The object is to fire an arrow into the room which contains the Wumpus.
The code is eventually published in the magazine Creative Computing in 1975, after the game becomes a huge hit over the ARPAnet. You can't throw a brick at the Web without hitting six online Wumpus games nowadays. Probably the most complex, with graphics and a multi-player element, is Web Wumpus from Glenn Bresnahan at Boston University. Here is a following timeline :
May day, or Worker's Day, is first observed.
Johannes Brahms' performance of 'Hungarian Dance' is recorded on an Edison Phonograph cylinder.
Dishwashing machines are first sold in Chicago.
'The Sneeze', a groundbreaking film experiment by Thomas Edison, is screened. It features sound effects from a syncronized phonograph player.
The first Bell Telephone logo is introduced.
50,000 white settlers pour into Oklahoma during the land rush, with all 1.9 million acres available claimed by sundown.
Two white men in Missouri, newspaper editorial writer Chris L. Rutt and miller Charles G. Uncerwood, invent the first self-rising pancake mix. After seeing a show at the local vaudeville house with two comedians in blackface, Rutt take the name of the show stopping song sung by one as a household 'mammy' for the trademark name of his creation, 'Aunt Jemima'.
The centennial of George Washington's inauguration becomes the first observed U.S. national holiday.
William Gray from Hartford, CT obtains the patent for the first coin-operated telephone.
George Eastman's Kodak box camera, the mechanical adding machine, the death of Coca-Cola inventor Dr. John S. Pemberton, the National Geographic Society, Adolph Hitler, the hamburger, and the Jack the Ripper killings are all one year old.
