Slashdot Mirror
Anatomy of the First Video Game, Born 1958
afabbro writes "Fifty years ago, before 'Pong' and 'Space Invaders,' a nuclear physicist created 'Tennis for Two,' a 2-D tennis game that some say was the first video game ever. Built in 1958, it was 'gynormous.' 'In addition to the oscilloscope screen and the controller, the guts of the original game were contained in an analog computer, which is "about as big as a microwave oven."' 'We have to load it into the back of a station wagon to move it. It's not a Game Boy that you put in your pocket.'"
The prefix "gyn" means female. Maybe you meant "ginormous", but even so...
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Like in GYGANTIC VAGINA....
pretty good... pretty pretty... good
Sounds like a great game!
And I don't want to play pong tennis. I want the whole analog computer emulated in some way and the oscilloscope's vector graphics too.
"Built in 1958, it was 'gynormous.' 'In addition to the oscilloscope screen and the controller, the guts of the original game were contained in an analog computer, which is "about as big as a microwave oven."' 'We have to load it into the back of a station wagon to move it. It's not a Game Boy that you put in your pocket.'"
Guess no one had the foresight to invent baggy pants. Youngsters have it easy now.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I have to wonder why this project was so forgotten if "hundreds of people lined up to play". I'd never heard of it before now.
It's not a Game Boy that you put in your pocket.
You know how sometimes, something in TFS sounds so stupid that reading TFA becomes unthinkable?
This shows video of the game and other's, along with the History of each.
I know it's not what the article is about, but I thought it was a cool hack nonetheless... remember how the invaders changed colour as they moved down the screen? Well it wasn't because they had a full colour screen. Instead different coloured strips of plastic were placed over different areas to give the illusion of a colour display. But I guess most of you knew that...
I've seen this story bouncing around the media all week. It's wrong. The first video game was Sandy Douglas' Noughts and Crosses, which took advantage of a 35×16 pixel CRT connected to the EDSAC mainframe at the University of Cambridge in 1952. Unlike Tennis For Two, the computer was digital and you played against the computer - a far more sophisticated effort, actually.
"It wasn't the first video game" post in 3.. 2.. 1..
You just got troll'd!
"Back when the original âoeTennis for Twoâ was built, Higinbotham used a vacuum tube analog computer"
So it's not a game boy you put in your pocket, or a big truck?
It must be a series of tubes!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Born in 1958 and still living in its mothers basement..
It depends what the definition of a "video game" is.
If it is anything that can produce visuals that can be manipulated by humans, then yes, Tennis for 2 was the first video game. However, it was not programmed; it is a serious of electrical hard-hacks and an oscilloscope.
It is something that is programmed with software, than Space Wars was the first video game created.
One time I bought this handheld game for 50 cents at a garage sale - it had the same oscilloscope screen, and for some reason i think it was a soccer game - I was 9 at the time. Anyways, I tried it out and of course didn't like it, so I returned it and said it was broken. I am always curious if that thing was worth any money as an antique.
well even it is not the first ever video game , its a great work, and it introduces a real pioneer, of course its not like the pinball but still its a real hard and creative effort.
Good to see where US tax money spent in past.
Could someone explain where the players are? Whenever I'd see pics of the game, I always noticed there doesn't appear to be any player/paddles on the screen. At best I figured maybe some kind of quirky limitation between the oscilloscope and camera taking the photo (unlikely, but I couldn't think of anything else.)
Now that I get to see video of it in action, I still see nothing resembling players on the oscilloscope. But the people are clearly controlling something other than the return, there's a knob on the controls marked up/down. Are they free to return the ball at any time? Only thing I can think of to keep this from turning into a button mashfest is the player gets one chance to hit the button until the other player returns the ball (and the ball crosses back to their side of the net. So if you hit the button while the ball is on the other side, you lose your chance.)
Isn't this a dupe with the recent story about the user interface of oscilloscopes? :-)
The CDC 6600 had a version of Pong. Only $5,000,000 and 14 people to run and maintain it.
I don't understand why the article implies that the computer was somehow grossly unwieldy. Microwave ovens aren't big, they're more or less the same size as an ATX case, in terms of volume, which everybody still uses today. I get the feeling that this was a failed attempt to conjure up images of ENIAC and truly ancient computers.
If you happen to own a station wagon, the back is logically where you would put stuff. If you didn't own a station wagon, you'd have put the computer in the trunk or back seat. What exactly is the purpose of telling us this?
The article contains the word "gynormous" and not in a quote from someone. Is that an acceptable word in a published article? I'm usually pretty lenient on grammar and word choice but that word just seems like something a junior high kid would use.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
And how analog
Come on, /. editors, I'm pretty sure the proper English word is "ginormous" (as in gigantic), not "gynormous" (as in a big thing that spins really fast). Look it up.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
"These trials defined a video game as an apparatus that displays games by manipulating the video display signal of the raster equipment: a television set, a monitor, etc. The previous computer games did not use a video display, so did not qualify as such in the courts."
sorry folks you'll have to wait until the middle of Hilary's second term in order to celebrate 50 years of video games.
I remember the first computer I ever saw, on display in a mall, circa 1975-76. Some homebrew thing, probably about as beefy as a VIC-20. It was playing the old "guess the card" game: think of a card? Is it red? Is it a spade? Is it higher than 8? And so forth, guessing your card fairly quickly (basic binary search).
At 9 years old, I thought that was pretty cool. My dad bought me a few computer mags of the day (Creative Computing and the like), and I got the gist of basic. I remember writing out my first "program" in a Hilroy scribbler, trying to clone what that computer did. Basically 52 or so IF/ELSE statements for every case. Brute force, but hey, I was 9. When I learned that I could use variables to reduce it to a few lines of code, I was hooked; there was no going back.
Got my first computer, an Exidy Sorcerer (Z-80, 1Mhz or so), and had a great time learning the ins and out, writing and selling a few games, pimping it out, and pushing it to the limits. Even got a job (at 11) working on an APL Interpreter for the Z-80. (I was basically paid in hardware :).
On through the PC generation, university, 286, 386, a career in programming, emergence of the Internet, founding a .COM (worth $100M on paper at one time, whoo hoo, damn paper :), and two more subsequent companies.
But it all really started seeing that 8080 play a simple game of "guess the card." If it weren't for seeing that, and getting inspired, who knows where the career might have led.
I'm not sure if today's games could inspire kids in the simple way that old game did for me. The skills and techniques involved in a modern rendered game are so far beyond the grasp of the average kid, the inspiration might be lost, requiring too great a leap to "get it."
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
In the future, consoles may weigh no more than 1.5 tonnes.
Noone. Nothing. Nowhere.
because an oscilloscope screen is not the same as a video screen. It is the first oscilloscope game, but not the first video game.
A video screen is like a TV set or Monitor, an oscilloscope screen is something quite different. It shows waves not pixels. Video games have pixels. Even vector video games still use pixels and not waves. It is like saying that a curved line is the same thing as a square or dot, or that a screwdriver is the same thing as a hammer. While they may have things in common, they are not quite the same thing.
Sorry to nitpick.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I broke the slashdot rule and decided to RTFA. I even watched the movie of the game in action. However, I still couldn't figure out one thing.
How does a player know where they are standing on the tennis court? If you watch the movie you can see that they can volley the ball back from multiple positions on the court, but I couldn't see where the player was standing on the court.
Anyone know? I have some colleagues that are out at Brookhaven the next few days, but I doubt they'll have time to stop by and see it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Anyone out there remember a CRT based display at the Hitachi exhibit that modeled a ride into Space? I suspect it was a very simple analogue circuit or computer.
If so, any references to it on the web?
Look, I have no idea how it happened - I'm just really sleepy and can barely keep my eyes open - but when I first read the story title, I thought it said it was a "Vice President Game". Which I assume would consist of starting up the game and waiting upwards of four years for a dialog box to pop up letting you choose between "Yea" and "Nay".
Property is theft.
It'S not a video game, it has nothing to do with video. It's just an analog computer game, that's all. No video involved. And computer games are in fact probably even older, even digital ones.
I'm really fuckin' glad I started gaming in 1985 instead.
MTW
Browse at 1. You'll thank me later.
Before Tennis for Two at MIT back in 56 a game was created on the huge machine, operated with a bunch of switches, was an asteroid-like game but multiplayer against each other, not asteroids.
I need to re-read Stephen Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" again, that's where I read about it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
In 1985, Nintendo sued Magnavox and tried to invalidate Baer's patents by saying that the first video game was Higinbotham's Tennis For Two game built in 1958. The court ruled that this game did not use video signals and could not qualify as a video game. As a result, Nintendo lost the suit and continued paying royalties to Sanders Associates.
"Tennis for Two... did not use video signals" - wtf? TV vs CRT? I'm surprised that made a difference.
"Device to allow one or more persons use a computer for recreational activity"
Claiming to be pedantic on Slashdot is asking for trouble
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I remember playing tic-tac-toe on a big honkin mainframe in the 60s. The bastard machine beat me too.
Salut,
Jacques
When I read "anatomy", I was expecting to see schematics of the thing. After all, they should be really simple. Googled for it, here they are: http://www.computerspacefan.com/TennisForTwo.htm.
Go build. I'mnot sure what the numbered triangles are, but they look like inverting opamps.
But can it run Linux???
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
I dont want to read anything from that liberal-socialist rag.
In 1958, a computer that could fit into the back of a station wagon wasn't enormous. Hell, if two people could lift the entire thing, including the display, that was practically a microcomputer.
Obnostalgia:
My first computer was a Tektronix 4051, from around 1975ish. The marketing brochure billed it as a "portable graphics computer" and had a picture of two people putting it in the trunk of a buick. It could actually be lifted and carried by one, weighing only about 40 pounds or so...
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Hi -
Pong first came out around 1975, so this game was 50 years before today, but only about 20 years before Pong.
- Right in Redondo Beach
Its the fourth. Look up First_Video_Game on Wikipedia. 1947 - Missile simulator on CRT 1951 - NIM - first digital computer specific game 1952 - OXO on an EDSAC computer 1958 - Tennis for two. Do the research before posting guys.
Welcome to the world of judges and courts. They rarely understand the technical cases they rule on, so most of the time it never makes any common sense to the people who understand the technology that is involved in these cases. Just chalk it up to more clueless judges who don't bother to spend the time to learn about the technology.