http://www.ralphbaer.com/how_video_games.htm
How the Home Video Games Industry Began
by Ralph Baer
Where do novel ideas come from? Sometimes they come from left field, when you least expect them.
In 1966, I was the manager of the Equipment Design Division at Sanders Associates Inc., a Defense Industry company and at the time the largest employer in the State of New Hampshire. At the time, my division had grown to nearly five hundred engineers, technicians and support people and I was a busy man. While we were involved in some display programs, none of the work in my division, or in the rest of the Company for that matter, involved development of broadcast television technology. As for me, ever since my early days of television broadcast studio equipment and TV receiver design work at Loral back in 1951, my TV-engineering training and experience had occasionally surfaced to think about ways of using a TV set for something other than watching standard broadcasts.
There were about 40 million TV sets in the US homes alone in 1966, to say nothing of many more millions of TV sets in the rest of the world. They were literally begging to be used for something other than watching commercial television broadcasts!
In 1966, thoughts about playing games using an ordinary TV set began to percolate in my mind. When I designed and built a TV set at Loral in 1955, I had proposed doing just that: Build in a game to differentiate our TV set from the competition. Management said No and that was that. During a business trip to New York City on the last day of August in 1966, while waiting at a bus terminal for another Sanders engineer to come into town for a meeting with a client, I jotted down some notes on the subject of using ordinary home TV set to play games. I distinctly recall sitting there on a sunny day and writing on a small spiral note book perched on one knee...those notes have disappeared. Not so the pages of the Disclosure Document that I wrote the following morning. They survived to this day and are at the Smithsonian along with all of the game hardware we built off and on over the next three years.
It was a Eureka moment.
[...]
After weeks of intensive proceedings in Judge Grady’s Chicago courtroom, the trial ended with his decision in favor of Sanders/Magnavox on all counts. The judge read this decision from the bench on January 10th of 1977. If we had written the decision ourselves, it could not have been more supportive of our position. We had won a clear-cut victory. Naturally, I was pleased to hear Judge Grady state unequivocally that my ‘480 patent was the “pioneer patent” of the nascent video game industry. The public, printed record of the decision in 201 USPQ, page 26 also contains that statement. US Patent 3,728,480 entitled “Television Gaming and Training Apparatus” is the pioneering patent of the video game art.
[...]
Finally: For anyone really interested in the details of this story, please get a copy of my book “Videogames: In the Beginning” . See the Home page for details.
http://www.ralphbaer.com/rhbc.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vBZmzLXBK8
http://www.ralphbaer.com/inventions.htm
ET il y a sans doute d'autres parties prenantes.
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