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Found the teenager. When i went to school in the 90's pagers and cell phones were banned, if your family even had enough money to afford a cell phone. If you needed to make calls you did it from one of multiple pay phones the school had during your lunch or in passing between classes or after school let out.

Kids should not have or at least not be using these things at school during the time they should be paying attention to their studies. School in the 90's banned far less distracting tech like CD players, tape players, hand held game systems.

Ok, dating myself, but in my day..they had to ban the Mattel LED electronic football games.

Even if you had the sound off, they still made you turn them off if they caught you playing them in class.

This is nothing new.

Wasn't that Nintendo who invented the modern mobile gaming revolution? I remember playing Mattel Electronic Football when I was in grade school (1977). But the Nintendo Game Boy (1989) was a game-changer because it (1) let you load different games into the same mobile device, and (2) plugged into another Game Boy with a cable so two of you could play head-to-head. It was the first example I can think of of multiplayer gaming in the modern sense (each player has their own dedicated device).

I'm not really sure what the iPhone introduced that was new? Maybe virtual game distribution (software-only, no cartridges) and online sales (App Store)?

Seeing this reminded me of an old handheld electronic pinball game I found in my grandparents' attic as a kid. I figured it had to be almost this old, possibly predating the Merlin, and so Googled it... Sure enough, it is from 1979 and invented by one Bob Doyle.

Here they are, both by Mattel Electronics:

Mattel Football
Mattel Auto Race

Auto Race came out in 1976, and Football in 1977, both predating the Merlin (which I had and loved).

Here they are, both by Mattel Electronics:

Mattel Football
Mattel Auto Race

Auto Race came out in 1976, and Football in 1977, both predating the Merlin (which I had and loved).

Coleco 21 LED football handheld game = about 3 years total time of my life playing this game. How awesome watching a few led lights flash on a tiny screen. Could you even imagine if you handed this to a 10 year old today? They would look at you like you were stark raving insane.

Tell them it's cultural history - immortalized in SuperTramp's "Logical Song."

http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Movies/LogicalSong.htm

The Virtual Boy was portable.

Also a friend of mine had a game that looked like a pair of binoculars far older than the Virtual Boy. It had a passive back light, meaning it was best played outside or under a lamp. It was from the late 70's or early 80's, it was akin to an LCD game though it was 3D.

If the Virtual Boy was portable, the PS3 is portable, too. VB just had a built-in display.

Oh, and if you're thinking of what I think you're thinking of, it was the series of Tomy 3D games listed here. I had Sky Attack, my brother had Thundering Turbo (which was much more fun).

I mean whoever wrote Pacman, etc.. never thought they would be able eventually to play it on a phone.

Why not, we were playing it on watches in the 80s?
http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Nelsonic/PacMan.htm

I'm in the same boat - I lug two Dell laptops back and forth to work on the bus, and on business trips in a backpack. I tried putting my personal MacBook Pro in and lugging that along too....but it quickly got old. The bag was too heavy, because I was not only carrying the laptop, but also the power cord adapter because my MacBook Pro's battery only lasts about 1.5 hours (it is a couple of years old now).

I switched to a netbook (got an ASUS Linux model for pretty cheap), but while not as heavy as the MacBook, it was thicker - and kind of lumpy/misshapen in the bag, the seemingly postage stamp size screen was next to impossible to read when sitting on my lap and bouncing around on the bus, and I would make frequent typos/clicko-s when trying to type or use the mouse pad. While it had a better battery life (about 3.5 hours) than the MacBook - I still had to lug along the power adapter if I intended to use it significantly during the day.

With the iPad - I'm jazzed because it will replace not only my netbook (for what I was using it for), but also my MP3 player (which also gets lugged along with all the other stuff). Battery life is phenomenal if true, and as a result it would be something I would keep by my side and use the hell out of.

As if that weren't enough, I'll also use the thing to collect all the stuff I want immediate access to on a daily basis - books, images, documents etc... Like having a library in your hands. With powerful search indexing via Spotlight it will be better than a library or stacks of books - because it will go with me wherever I go and allow me to quickly access what I need at any given moment. A true digital asistant - what my old Casio and Palm machines attempted to be, but failed miserably.

On top of that, the entertainment possibilities are way better than what could be had using my netbook: fictional books, music, movies and video games using the unique interface that I can see bringing me back to portable gaming (I was one of the kids who had that Mattel LED football game back in the day, and that was the last time I really spent any significant time with portable games).

For Tweeners like myself, this thing could be the perfect niche device.

If we want to go with "anything with a microprocessor is a computer" then sure, but I think when most people think of a computer they imagine something that can run a web browser, play games with, and use a word processor.

It's like saying that my sister's little electric barbie car is an automobile... I mean, sure in the strictest sense it has four wheels and a motor -- but I don't think I'll be using it for the morning commute anytime soon.

I don't know about web browsers and word processors but games? We already have that for ages. So the point stands. Moreover, the wrist watch reference was only made due to wrist watches being mentioned specifically by Asus as some sort of "new revolutionary paradigm". If we look beyond wristwatches and also consider other gadgets such as cell phones and mp3 players then the reality of this, which is that we already have it for decades, will become clearer. In fact, I've stopped using a wrist watch since I've replaced it with my first cell phone, which was around a decade ago.

And regarding the "morning commute" scenario, I'm also very sceptic that people will use those proposed "wearable computers" for that. I mean, people bitch that a netbook is too impractical to type, which is the most basic task that word processing and similar tasks demand. So why would anyone use wrist watches for that if using netbooks for that same task is, somehow, seen as unthinkable?

You just don't notice that most consumer electronic devices would last for quite a long time on regular AA/AAA batteries now because they have also switched over to a rechargeable that will fail in 1.5 years so that you HAVE to replace it sooner rather than later.

Nice conspiracy theory, but the real reason so many consumer electronic devices have moved to rechargeable batteries is not planned obsolescence, but because modern rechargeable technologies are considerably smaller and/or lighter than standard-format AA/AAA batteries. Portability is pretty high on the list of consumer demands; yet at 10.5mm in diameter, AAA batteries will not fit inside the form factor of an iPod Classic, Apple's largest current model.

You're right its nothing but a conspiracy theory on my part. In reality I just wish this generation of electronic device manufactures had the same respect for the battery form factors the rest of the industry had after all these years.

I can still pick up my tiger handheld put fresh AA's in it and play till they die. Will you be able to take any device made today with one of these built in rechargeable non-standard batteries and use it after 20 years?

Would it really hurt apple, sony, microsoft, etc get together with energizer, duracell, etc to come up with a new standard similar to when Kodak's new internal flash design could make use of a smaller battery and had the AAA standard created?

Note: according to a seller on ebay the skeet shoot game is from 1987, I'd be willing to give up 5 years and rephrase the above question to after 15 years.

It's the lightsaber of consoles

Katana, maybe?

I had a similar game that I LOVED: http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Sears/Touchdown.htm

My first experience with video games was Pong. It was cocktail table version located at Spaghetti Warehouse in downtown Dallas. This was around 1973 or 1974. My first hand held video game was Football. http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Mattel/FB.htm

I still remember playing the old Tiger handhelds. They weren't 'console' systems, but they were among my first introduction into portable gaming. They sure were fun ways to pass the time. I still have several of them, like Castlevania, Paperboy, Double Dragon, and Star Trek. Then again, I also remember playing the old Baseball.

I think this is such a good point. My folks put no limits on what they thought I was capable of or what I "should" be interested in, although neither of them was into any kind of technology (except for my dad = photography as a hobby). My dad had a home office (in the pre-personal computer era) which was one of my playrooms. I learned to type on his electric typewriter when I was something like 7 years old. He also bought an Atari, which became almost exclusively my toy -- thank God my older brother had already moved out of the house, or that probably never would have happened. I also became proficient on a 10-key calculator at an early age and appreciated all of these things as things which I think is your point. No, I didn't take them apart, but I did get that they were functional objects, and that learning how to use them could be useful for work. I'm sure if I'd had exposure to computers at home, I would have gotten into programming earlier, but as it was I didn't do anything with a computer until I entered the workforce. (Unless you count the Coleco Football I carried with me everywhere in high school -- which made me a very geeky girl indeed, as this was in the 1970s!) I got into high tech in a sort of stereotypical way for a woman in the 1980s -- by being the only person in the office who wasn't afraid to fix the printer, and then following the database programmer around asking lots of questions about what he was doing and how everything worked. He ended up being my mentor and recommending me for my first techie job.

I had an electronic quiz book in the late 1970's where you read the question, pick an answer from the multiple choice, punch the corresponding button, and the device would tell you the correct answer with all the bells and whistles. You could replace the book with other books. I thought this was the coolest thing ever when I was a kid. Until I noticed that every book had the exact same answer for each question number (i.e., 1-A, 2-B, 3-C, 4-D, etc.). Then it wasn't so cool after you figure out the pattern. That was the problem with a lot of game "consoles" back then since each game relied on a predefined pattern.

Here's what I had that reminded me of this, the Selchow & Righter- Reader's Digest Q&A.

That would be the Coleco Quiz Wiz

You had to enter the question number then hit the appropriate answer.

I'd say that the Halcyon, even without adjusting financial numbers, would come out on the top.
Of course, it's probably just looking at systems which actually had more than a handful of games on it. Ah well.

I believe ASCII made a similar controller for the Super Famicon/Nintendo. Can't remember what it was called though.

And before that, was the original one handed videogame controller.

It's no exaggeration to say that Tetris single-handedly created the portable market...

I think handheld football deserves that honor.

I have a few bits of old hardware around - a Spectrum, a C64, a Mac Plus, an Astro Blaster handheld, an STe with mono monitor...a few bits. Nothing that uncommon, except perhaps the Astro Blaster.

There is something about using the old hardware which is not present when running an emulator. Take the C64 as the best example of this. Emulated you don't get the true sound of the SID (each one was different...), you get pixellated graphics if trying to play at a decent size on a monitor (versus just plugging in to a TV), you get a different keyboard layout...nope. Emulation is good, and I'm a great fan of it. But it isn't the same as using the real thing.

Cheers,
Ian