"Pong" turns 35

Happy birthday to the classic video game. Here's the article from Wired, which cites Wikipedia as a source.

In that Wikipedia entry, we learn the following. Pong wasn't really the first game.

The earliest electronic ping-pong game was played on an oscilloscope, and was developed by William A. Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958. His game was called Tennis for Two.

That had to be fun. If you can visualize playing ping-pong on an oscilloscope, you do qualify for official geek status. (Welcome to the club.)

And of course everyone knows this part of the story (if you are a computer history buff)...

The makers of the Magnavox Odyssey insisted that they held a patent on the concept of a tennis video game, and in 1974 Sanders/Magnavox filed a lawsuit against Atari. This was the first lawsuit relating to intellectual property rights in the video game industry. Lawyers for Magnavox found witnesses who recalled seeing Nolan Bushnell playing the Odyssey's table tennis game at the trade show in Burlingame, California in 1972, and obtained a guestbook from the event that he had signed. Atari settled out of court by agreeing to pay $700,000 to license the patents that Magnavox held on the Odyssey. On January 10, 1977, Judge John Grady of the Federal District Court in Chicago ruled in favor of Sanders/Magnavox on all counts relating to the lawsuit. The ruling upheld the claim that US patent #3,728,480 entitled Television Gaming and Training Apparatus was the pioneering design for a video game. (See original for footnotes)

So like just about everything, the actual date the idea was conceived is lost in the mists of history. But today, we raise a glass to that little white ball of pixels that started a revolution.