Sex, Bombs and Burgers (16 page)

There were electronic games before Tennis for Two, but none of them were proper video games. A 1947 game invented by American physicists Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann simulated missile shooting, but required a plastic overlay to be placed on the screen, because the computers of the time were incapable of drawing graphics. Similarly, in 1951 British firm Ferrant designed the Nimrod digital computer to play a game called “Nim,” but the display consisted only of a bank of lights that blinked on and off. OXO, also known as Noughts and Crosses, designed in 1952 for the EDSAC military computer at the University of Cambridge, was perhaps the closest thing to a video game as it displayed graphics for tic-tac-toe on a cathode ray tube, but the X’s and O’s didn’t move. Higinbotham’s design was the first to feature moving graphics and incorporate what would become the three essentials of a video game: a computer, a graphical display and a controller apparatus.

When Tennis for Two made its debut at Brookhaven’s visitor day on October 18, 1958, it was one of the first real, practical displays of what computers could do. While Art Linkletter had used the massive UNIVAC computer to match couples on his television show during the mid-fifties, Tennis for Two was the first opportunity for the general public to get their hands on one. Hordes of awestruck people lined up that Saturday afternoon to try out the game. Other lab departments looked on in envy as virtual tumbleweeds rolled by their deserted displays. The game was rolled out again the following year with some improvements, including a bigger screen and variable gravity settings to simulate
what playing tennis on other planets might be like. After that, Tennis for Two was dismantled, its component parts put to other uses. Despite the game’s popularity with visitors, Higinbotham never patented it or sought to commercialize it.

Robert Dvorak Jr., whose father built the game from Higinbotham’s designs, doesn’t believe the physicist knew what forces he had set in motion. “The whole idea was to show the public what a computer was, what it could do,” he told me. “From the perspective of society, he had no idea what he was doing.” Moreover, the cost of the equipment involved—about $20,000 by today’s standards—precluded any thoughts of creating a commercial product. “The concept that this was something that could be within reach of Joe Consumer would never have occurred to anybody,” Dvorak said.
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Higinbotham himself later admitted that he never thought to patent Tennis for Two, and even if he had, the rights to the game would have belonged to the United States government. “We knew it was fun and saw some potential in it at the time, but it wasn’t something the government was interested in,” he recalled in 1983. “It’s a good thing, too. Today all video game designers would have to licence their games from the federal government.”
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Dots, Blips and Blobs

The first landmark video game patent eventually went to Ralph Baer, a German-born Jewish inventor who escaped his native country just weeks before the Nazis launched the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938. Only sixteen years old when he arrived in New York with his parents and sister, Baer got a job repairing radios. When the war started, he was drafted and assigned to Military Intelligence, where he became an expert
on small arms and won the army’s Marksmen’s Medal. While serving in England, he caught pneumonia and spent the latter part of the war in a military hospital. When he returned to the United States in 1946, the young veteran had difficulty getting into colleges because he hadn’t finished high school in Germany. He finally caught a break with the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago, which accepted him on the basis of strong entrance exams. Baer graduated with a Bachelor of Science in television engineering, a rare degree at the time. He then worked for a number of smaller firms, including satellite equipment manufacturer Loral Electronics, where he built his first television set.

Baer found his destiny in 1956 when he accepted a job at Sanders Associates, a defence contractor founded by former Raytheon employees in Nashua, New Hampshire, a tiny town an hour north of Boston. He was hired to manage the electronics design department and was soon promoted to oversee the entire equipment design division, a role that gave him a budget of several million dollars and more than five hundred staffers. While his day job required him to work on airborne radar components and other defence electronics, Baer couldn’t help but use some of his newfound resources to dabble in his real passion: television. While at Loral, he had become convinced that television sets could be used for more than just airing broadcasts. Indeed, he had managed to project test patterns onto the set he had built for the company in 1951, and found he could actually move the images around on the screen. That rudimentary concept—controlling images on a television screen—was the theoretical basis for video games.

At Sanders, Baer experimented with the idea further. In 1966 he created what he called the first-ever “television game.” It was
a simple demonstration that allowed two players to each control a dot of light on a blank screen with a handheld controller. The fun came from chasing each other’s dot around—a concept that seems laughable by today’s standards. Baer got semi-official backing from Sanders when he showed the game to his superior, who granted him $5,000 to further develop the idea. Two years and six designs later, Baer had his masterpiece: the Brown Box, a console that displayed a variety of rudimentary sports, maze and quiz games on a television screen. The system ran on batteries and the games were black and white. Most consisted of blobs of light moving around the screen; the controllers were big blocks with moving knobs. The console was hard-wired with all the games, and players switched between them by removing and inserting circuit cards, which connected different series of jumpers inside the machine. In homage to its creator’s skill as a marksman, the Box also supported a plastic gun peripheral that shot at dots of light on the screen. As basic as it was, the Brown Box was the world’s first video game console.

Selling it to Sanders’s board of directors, however, was not easy. “Talk about long faces,” Baer recalls. Only a few board members saw any future in the Brown Box, while the rest wanted to know how it would make money. “What the hell did I know about making money on commercial products?” Baer laughs. “I’d been in military electronics for ten years.”

He finally convinced the board to support the console by spelling out the sheer potential market size—more than forty million households in the United States had television sets, and there were least that many in other countries. Surely some of those homes were interested in doing something more with their TVs.
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Satisfied with his logic, the board gave Baer the go-ahead
to shop around for a licensee to manufacture and market the console. Baer’s first choice was the cable television industry, but he failed to find any takers. After showing the console to a host of television manufacturers, including RCA, Sylvania, GE and Motorola, he finally got a bite from Magnavox. The two sides signed a licensing deal and the Brown Box was rebranded as the Magnavox Odyssey. It hit stores in August 1972 with a $100 price tag, effectively launching the home video-game market, but it didn’t meet with the success anyone was hoping for. Magnavox sold only a hundred thousand in its first year, mainly because of poor marketing; many consumers were turned off by the mistaken belief that the Odyssey worked only with Magnavox televisions.

The real money for Sanders and Magnavox didn’t end up coming from console sales, but from patent infringement. In 1973 Baer got a patent for a “Television Gaming and Training Apparatus,” which covered “the generation, display, manipulation and use of symbols or geometric figures upon the screen of the television receivers for the purpose of training simulation, for playing games, and for engaging in other activities by one or more participants.”
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Atari was the first violator when it launched its Pong home console in 1975. Pong was more successful than the Odyssey, primarily because of better marketing; the boxes were clearly marked “Works with any television set.” Atari’s success prompted a wave of Pong knock-offs from a host of companies, including pinball maker Bally Midway, which ultimately resulted in Sanders and Magnavox bringing a lawsuit to bear in 1976.

Sanders and Magnavox argued that Atari president Nolan Bushnell had ripped off their technology. And they had the
smoking gun to prove it: Bushnell had attended a Brown Box demonstration in California in May 1972, three months before the Odyssey launched, as evidenced by his signature in the event’s guest book. Bushnell settled with Sanders, becoming the company’s first licensee outside of Magnavox. Baer, Sanders and Magnavox went on to sue virtually every company that attempted to get into the market, including Mattel, Coleco, Seeburg, Activision and Sega. They won or favourably settled every case after a slew of lengthy disputes. “They ran longer than any Broadway play ever did,” Baer jokes.

The Brown Box inventor eventually went toe to toe with Higinbotham when Nintendo tried to invalidate Sanders’s patent in the mid-eighties. Higinbotham was called as a witness by Nintendo to establish “prior art”—that Tennis for Two was in fact the first video game. The courts, however, again sided with Baer, who maintained that Tennis for Two was a simple oscilloscope-based ballistics demonstration and not a viable video-game system. The victory over Nintendo underscored once and for all that Sanders had first legal rights to video games, and that all companies dealing in the market going forward would have to pay the military contractor licensing fees until its patent expired in 1990.

Who knew that when I was playing Asteroids as a kid, I was helping to design weapons?

Miniaturization Goes Massive

While many inventors turned from working on weapons to creating playthings for children, some got into an entirely different line of toys. One particularly key invention, the transistor, appeared right after the Second World War to lay
the foundations of the technology industry, not to mention just about all the electronic toys we see around us today.

Leading the way was William Shockley, an American born in England and raised in Palo Alto, a small town south of San Francisco. Shockley was by many accounts a terrible child, “ill-tempered, spoiled, almost uncontrollable, who made his doting parents’ lives miserable.”
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Although he continued to be a difficult person into adulthood, Shockley proved to be a very smart and adept inventor. In the thirties, he got his degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology and his doctorate from MIT. Shortly before the war began he went to work for Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, where he was tasked with improving the vacuum tube, a device resembling a light bulb that could amplify, switch or otherwise modify electrons flowing through it. Vacuum tubes were the “brains” of many early electronic devices such as radios and huge, room-sized analogue computers, but they were clumsy processors at best. To relay the binary language of ones and zeros that electronics relied on, vacuum tubes had to be turned on and off—when they were on, they transmitted a one, when they were off, a zero. The process was slow and the tubes burned out frequently from the constant switching (or if an insect landed on a bulb, hence the term “bug,” used today to mean “glitch”).

Improving the tubes would have to wait, though. When the Second World War broke out, Shockley took an interest in radar development and toured the front lines to train pilots to use their new electronic targeting systems. Shockley was so respected for his mathematical prowess that, near the end of the war, he was asked to predict the casualties American forces could expect in a full-out invasion of Japan. His report ended up influencing one of the biggest decisions in human history: his calculation that a
staggering 400,000 to 800,000 American soldiers would be killed in such an attack made the decision to drop the atomic bomb an easy one.

When the war ended, Shockley returned to Bell Labs and the vacuum tube. With his team, he experimented with different semiconducting materials to see which moved electricity most efficiently. The group eventually settled on germanium and gold, and in 1947 they unveiled the transistor, a chip made from these semiconductor materials which, after some improvements, worked far more efficiently and was much less fragile than the glass vacuum tube. No sooner was it invented, though, than a fight broke out over ownership. Bell Labs patented the device with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, two of Shockley’s team members, but left his name off the paperwork. There were also questions about whether the team had improperly referenced an earlier patent filed in Canada on a similar device, which was never built. A disgruntled Shockley, described by
Time
magazine as “a very competitive and sometimes infuriating man,” wanted his proper due and set to work on an improved transistor, which he patented himself and unveiled in 1951.
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Two years later, after being passed up for promotion at Bell Labs because of his difficult personality, he returned to his roots as a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. One of his friends there, Arnold Beckman, convinced Shockley to set up his own company as a division of his firm, Beckman Instruments. In 1955 Shockley Semiconductor opened its doors for business in Mountain View, only a few kilometres from Palo Alto, where Shockley had grown up.

Ironically, Shockley gave rise to a new epoch, not with something he did but with something he
didn’t
do. After conducting
some experiments with silicon as a semiconductor, he decided against using the material, much to the dismay of several of his researchers, who believed it to be superior to other substances. Eight of his scientists, whom Shockley dubbed the “traitorous eight,” split from his company over the decision and formed their own firm, Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1958 the new firm succeeded in building the first integrated circuit, which packed a number of transistors onto one miniaturized chip. (Texas Instruments, based in Dallas, coincidentally made the same breakthrough at about the same time.) This was the beginning of microelectronics and the official cornerstone of what would come to be known as Silicon Valley. Two of the “traitors,” Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, left Fairchild in 1968 to form their own company, Intel, in nearby Santa Clara. Today, of course, Intel is the dominant maker of microprocessors while Moore’s famous 1965 prediction that the number of transistors that could be packed onto an integrated circuit roughly doubles every two years has become a “law” that still holds true.