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Father of Pong Honored At White House

Posted by Zonk on from the regret-that-I-have-but-one-pong-to-give-to-my-country dept.

Gamasutra reports that Ralph Baer, the man whose work inspired the game Pong, will be honored in a White House ceremony on February 14th. He is to receive the 2004 National Medal of Technology. From the article: "The award, which is America's highest honor for science and technology, goes to those who 'have helped commercialize new technologies, create jobs, improve American productivity, and stimulate the Nation's economic growth and development', and was established by Congress in 1980."

4 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. What? by fm6 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Pong is not exactly a great technological accomplishment. Actually something of an accident. If I remember the story correctly, Atari was working on implementation of spacewar that could run on reasonably priced hardware. They built Pong just to test a particular circuit. Then they discovered how addictive it was....

    1. Re:What? by IntlHarvester · · Score: 2, Informative

      Ralph Baer invented Pong in his basement years before Atari even started.

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      Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
    2. Re:What? by iocat · · Score: 3, Informative
      No, in fact, you don't remember the story correctly (maybe you should check before you post next time).

      Ralph Baer created, documented, and patented the process for a Pong-like game well before Atari created and released Pong. Nolan Bushnell's Atari lost a court case that established the primacy of Magnavox's initial invention, gave Atari full rights to Pong-line games, and actually required Atari (not Magnavox) to go after other rip-offs. Oh, and Atari had to kick Magnavox some dough, of course.

      According to Nolan, he had Al Alcorn create Pong as essentially a programming exercise, which may or may not be true, but it's immaterial to Ralph Baer's legitimate claim to have invented Pong (Nolan popularized videogames, and that's a fine legacy too). It is clear that Nolan had previously seen the Magnavox Pong, so he may have remembered the concept.

      In any case, it wasn't trivial to build Pong, whether your were Ralph Baer, Nolan Bushnell, or Al Alcorn. Pong doesn't even have a CPU, it's just a state machine, and it's not something that was obvious or easy to do with the available (non-military) hardware of the early 70s.

      So, frankly, STFU, before you start dissing on Ralph Baer, who is one of the most unsung, yet most important, contributers to the videogame age ever.

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      Dude, I think I can see my house from here.

  2. G4TV by Detritus · · Score: 2, Informative
    G4TV showed an excellent documentary on the life of Ralph Baer as part of their series Icons. He really does deserve the medal and the recognition.

    See http://www.g4tv.com/icons/episodes/4174/Ralph_Baer .html.

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    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat