Looking around the labs, Higinbotham found an electronic testing device called an oscilloscope, which has a cathode ray tube display similar to a TV picture tube. He also found an old analog computer (modern computers are digital, not analog) that he could hook up to the oscilloscope in such a way that a "ball" of light would randomly bounce around the screen.
"We found," Higinbotham remembered, "that we could make a game which would have a ball bouncing back and forth, sort of like a tennis game viewed from its side." The game he came up with looked kind of like this:
Even if the game was created in 1958, it was pretty good for its time, I must say. The ball was affected by gravity much like in real life, and to make it even more realistic, players had to carefully launch it over the net into the adversary's court. The perspective was a 2 dimensional one obviously, and player's were playing it watching from the side (not looking at the court from above).
The game was invented with the purpose to cure the boredom of visitors to Brookhaven National Laboratory, in which Mr. Higinbotham worked. The game was only brought out twice, on "Visitor's Day" at the power plant. Tennis for Two was the predecessor of PONG, one of the most widely recognized video games as well as one of the first
It took Higinbotham two hours to draw up the schematic diagram for "Tennis for Two," as he called it, and two weeks of tinkering to get it to work. When Visitor's Day came around and Higinbotham put it on a table with a bunch of other electrical equipment, it only took the visitors about five minutes to find it. Soon hundreds of people were crowding around it, some standing in line for more than an hour to play the game for a minute or two. They didn't learn much about the peaceful applications of nuclear energy that Visitor's Day in 1958. But they sure had fun playing that game.
GAME OVER
So what happened to Higinbotham's video tennis game? He improved it for Visitor's Day 1959, letting people play Tennis for Two in Earth gravity, or low gravity like on the moon, or very high gravity like that found on Jupiter.
Then when Visitor's Day was over, he took the video game apart and put the pieces away. He never brought them out again, never built another video game, and never patented the idea.
Willy Higinbotham would probably be completely forgotten today were it not for a lawsuit. When video games began taking off in the early 1970s, Magnavox and some other early manufacturers began fighting in court of which one of them had invented the games. A patent lawyer for one of Magnavox's competitors eventually learned of Higinbotham's story and brought the Great Man into court to prove that he, not Magnavox, was the true founder of the video game.
More Pictures : click here
Even if the game was created in 1958, it was pretty good for its time, I must say. The ball was affected by gravity much like in real life, and to make it even more realistic, players had to carefully launch it over the net into the adversary's court. The perspective was a 2 dimensional one obviously, and player's were playing it watching from the side (not looking at the court from above).
It took Higinbotham two hours to draw up the schematic diagram for "Tennis for Two," as he called it, and two weeks of tinkering to get it to work. When Visitor's Day came around and Higinbotham put it on a table with a bunch of other electrical equipment, it only took the visitors about five minutes to find it. Soon hundreds of people were crowding around it, some standing in line for more than an hour to play the game for a minute or two. They didn't learn much about the peaceful applications of nuclear energy that Visitor's Day in 1958. But they sure had fun playing that game.
More Pictures : click here
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