Ralph H. Baer, a Father of Video Gaming, Dies At 92 47
A reader 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."'"
He said not to worry (Score:1)
He's still being emulated on the new video game programmers.
Farewell, Ralph (Score:2)
Ralph Baer
There I was back in the wild again.
I felt right at home, where I be-long.
I had the feeling, coming over me again.
Just like it happened so many times be-fore. eh.
The Spirit of the Codes is like an old good friend.
Makes me feel warm and good in-side.
I knew his name and it was good to see him again.
Cause in the wind he's still a-live.
Oh Ralph Baer
Walk with me down the codetrails again.
Take me back, back where I be-long.
Ralph Baer
I'm glad to have you at my side my friend
And I'll join you in the bug hu
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Ted Nugent, as a matter of fact.
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The Magnavox Odyssey (Score:1)
Wow, my family owned a Magnavox Odyssey. It was so awesome yet primitive. The controllers had trim pots so that you used to fine tune the actual gaming/control potentiometers, and the graphics were so minimal that the system came with plastic overlays that you would tape to your TV screen to provide the actual play environment.
RIP you brilliant guy!
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What TFA and Wikipedia don't say are what game his original prototype actually was. Presumably it was similar to one of the early Odyssey games.
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He invented the Brown Box, which later became the Magnavox Odyssey. The Odyssey is unlike what we'd call a console today in that it didn't run a stored program - instead it was a collection of analog circuits and the "cartridges" really were plugboards that connected the circuits in various ways.
Basically it ended up being games like tennis, table tennis (a bit more
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Can't recall gameplay, but most major sports had games (football, baseball, basketball, hockey). I also remember the color overlays for the TV. My age was in the single digits when I played this console, so I don't remember much (and certainly don't remember when it came out - played it maybe mid-to-late 1970s).
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Sigh the regular reaction. (Score:3)
We wonder why a lot of the pioneers in technology, are often (they are exceptions) are very aggressive and cut throat.
Because the rest of the population is so reluctant to change that new ideas are often thrown out the window, to get such change going you need people who have enough skin and perseverance to get it threw.
That is why often the better designed product fails in the market while the inferior one make it. It is often from the idea the technology will sell itself... While in our imperfect world, you need people to sell it.
Thank you Mr. Baer for sticking to your guns and help move us into the future.
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Game Over (Score:2, Interesting)
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,
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Producing what, exactly? I keep hearing this word, but what does it mean? "Productive" just seems to mean shifting bits around in a computer these days?
" What if we instead put more of our time into meaningful aspects of life and building a better future?"
We already are awash in excess capacity and production. We choose to throw it away to maintain the illusion that is the "economy".
You'll have to change human nature itself if you want a better future.
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And yet if you don't pay your mortgage or pay for your groceries you'll be homeless and starving within months, in a society that has managed to automate and improve productivity by orders of magnitude.
None of the items you list doing help with the basic problem that the "economy" is a consensual human-built system, and has nothing to do with the physical reality that even if you're starving grocery stores still throw out "bad" food by the container, daily.
My house was built in 6 months using engineered mat
A life well lived. (Score:2)
RIP Ralph (Score:2)
Odyssey 2 was awesome- (Score:2)
I never saw the Odyssey, but the Odyssey 2 was a thing of beauty. When we were playing with our crappy Atari 2600, my buddy with a O2 had great graphics, analog joysticks, and a keyboard built in.
Too much golden age nostalgia!
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Nonsense. The Odyssey 2 if anything demonstrates how other people should be free to improve upon the "inventions" of others. It was a poorly executed system with horrible games. I had one and didn't even want it. I would have much preferred a 2600 or pretty much anything else. The Intellivision in particular was rather sophisticated for it's time.
Baer's designs have the signs of being a little too ambitious and sometimes incomplete.
If Bushnell and others shamelessly copied him, then sure he should be held u
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The Intellivision in particular was rather sophisticated for it's time.
16 bits and snazzy graphics, too bad they didn't offer a meaningful memory upgrade and computer interface for it. I'd probably still have mine.
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The O2 had a built-in keyboard which allowed for general text inputting (e.g., high scores), and the eventual purchase of a cheap "learn programming" cartridge for me. I was coding in assembly and machine language before I was a teenager. It is probably the reason I am a software developer today.
How did it work without a CPU? (Score:2)
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Apparently the Magnavox Odyssey was a pure analog console. How can you achieve such a thing?
http://www.pong-story.com/2455992.pdf [pong-story.com]
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OK, so I don't know much about logic gates and stuff but I still can't understand how can you create a video game console without a CPU.
A CPU is nothing but a ton of logic gates wired mostly to each other inside of a tiny package, and logic gates are made from multiple transistors.
Here is a page showing how each type of logic gate is made from transistors:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g... [gsu.edu]
Within a logic gate chip, all gates have their ground and power lines wired together and out to two pins on the chip, while the inputs/outputs typically also end up at pins on the chip, with everything else being internal to the IC.
Scaling up a level you ca
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Similar to Joe Weisbecker (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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You know all this presumably off the top of your head, but you don't know that it's means it is?
today there are millions of consoles... (Score:1)
Hitchhiking does have it's downsides (Score:1)
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Requiescat In Pace (Score:1)
Requiescat In Pace: Ralph Henry Baer, March 8, 1922 ~ December 6, 2014
From the creation of the Magnavox Odyssey to the co-creation of Simon...
You will be missed, Good Sir.
--Dave Romig, Jr.
Hardly the father...! (Score:1)
Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device (1947), Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann.
Chess (1947–1958), Alan Turing and Dietrich Prinz.
Bertie the Brain (1950), Dr. Josef Kates.
Nim (1951), Ferranti.
Strachey's Draughts Program (1951), Christopher Strachey.
OXO / Noughts and Crosses (1952), Alexander S. Douglas.
Tennis for Two (1958), William Higinbotham.
Mouse in the Maze, Tic-Tac-Toe (1959)
Spacewar! (1961), Martin Graetz, Steve R