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Ralph H. Baer, a Father of Video Gaming, Dies At 92
SternisheFan writes with news that Ralph H Baer, the father of video games and the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, has passed away at 92. "At the dawn of the television age in 1951, a young engineer named Ralph Baer approached executives at an electronics firm and suggested the radical idea of offering games on the bulky TV boxes. 'And of course,' he said, 'I got the regular reaction: "Who needs this?" And nothing happened.' It took another 15 years before Mr. Baer, who died Dec. 6 at 92, developed a prototype that would make him the widely acknowledged father of video games. His design helped lay the groundwork for an industry that transformed the role of the television set and generated tens of billions of dollars last year. Mr. Baer 'saw that there was this interesting device sitting in millions of American homes — but it was a one-way instrument,' said Arthur P. Molella, director of the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. 'He said, "Maybe there's some way we can interact with this thing."'"
Sorry - it seems appropriate and I think he would appreciate the joke.
I have a personal connection to this story. My Dad was a component engineer at Sander's Associates in Nashua, NH during that time. He helped acquire specialty transistors required for the design. We were also fortunate to get one of the original Magnovox game systems in our house. Fast forward 30 some odd years to find me playing quake 3 until 1am most nights. I have now passed to torch to my children who obsess over TF2, Minecraft, Civ V, etc.
A similar story was told to me about Joe Weisbecker when he was working in the RCA research laboratories. He came to management with an idea for a general purpose video game system. After rejection, he built it anyway in his garage and called it FRED (something like fun, recreational, education device).
When microprocessors just started taking off, management came back to Joe and made FRED into it's first microprocessor, the 1801 and RCA created it's first video game system called Studio. The 1800 family had a very intriguing architecture. It had 16 general purpose registers. And by general purpose, I mean that you had to specify which one would be the program pointer, which one would be the stack pointer, and so on. You could change them at will in your program so you could switch the program pointer register to make a subroutine call with virtually no overhead as long as the last subroutine instruction put it back to the calling procedure's pointer. Putting a value in the accumulator automatically set the status flags. It took me many hours make my first 8008 program work since I was expecting the "zero" flag to be set when I loaded the accumulator with a zero value, silly me. It also had an instruction pipe so almost every instruction (except for long ones) took exactly 8 clock cycles (long took 12). This made it trivial to figure out how long your program would take (just count the instructions) or write UART functionality. It was a perfect design for a micro controller. The big drawback was cost as it was fabricated in SOS CMOS so it could be radiation resistant in satellite applications.
Joe was an interesting character. I have a book he wrote that describes how computers work by using pennies.