What if?????

[Keatah]

Relays, tubes, transistors, mechanical, possible. Resistors, not a chance.

[Newsdee]

Unless you are Babbage.

But then you have no funds.to build it.

 

[carlsson]

We don't really have to go all the way back to Ralph Baer. Take the mouse controlled graphical user interface on Xerox Alto, released in March 1973. It took them to 1981 to commercialize it, unless you consider Apple's improvements in the Lisa in 1983 and Macintosh in 1984 as the first practical examples. That is almost a decade of graphics based operating systems lost, without getting into concepts never implemented.

 

So yes we could ask ourselves where desktop, tablet, smartphone computing would be today if the end user GUI had been developed and implemented in wide scale back in the mid 70's.

Edited September 2, 2019 by carlsson

[mbd30]

1 hour ago, carlsson said:

We don't really have to go all the way back to Ralph Baer. Take the mouse controlled graphical user interface on Xerox Alto, released in March 1973. It took them to 1981 to commercialize it, unless you consider Apple's improvements in the Lisa in 1983 and Macintosh in 1984 as the first practical examples. That is almost a decade of graphics based operating systems lost, without getting into concepts never implemented.

 

Retail computers weren't anywhere near powerful enough to handle GUI until the 80s. For one thing, RAM was still very expensive. The Commodore PET that came out in 1977 didn't even have a graphics mode let alone a GUI interface.

 

[Magmavision2000]

I don't think anything would be different that much, it probably would be considered an "overpriced toy" that no one would buy or it would be somewhat successful with games like "TV Tennis", " Space Crusader" and "Santa vs the Soviets" being popular games. I don't think technology would advance that much quicker though, we would probably get Atari 5200 graphics in the 70s and that would be it.

[pacman000]

I wonder if some sort of electro-mechanical game might've been possible...

[carlsson]

How are old pinball machines categorized? It is easy to think of only video games when we consider game machines but apparently there were other kinds of machines long before there was easy access to CRTs.

 

For that matter, Atari recently made a big sized Pong game which apparently is electro-mechanical. I'm not sure why, perhaps in order to ask a higher price.

[CatPix]

2 hours ago, pacman000 said:

I wonder if some sort of electro-mechanical game might've been possible...

I mentionned it on the previous page first relays made in the 1850, and in 1936 Konrad Zuse built the Z1, the first programmable electromechanical computer.

I suppose we could remove the electric part and we end up in the wound-up mechanical toys? But it's no longer video gaming by any stretch of imagination.

Edited September 9, 2019 by CatPix

[fiddlepaddle]

I'm absolutely sure you could have built a TV tennis type game in the 1950's (or before) using analogue components and a few vacuum tubes connected to an oscilloscope, maybe even as part of a regular black and white TV, possibly even within the cost that some consumers might pay, but I still doubt it would have changed todays game industry much, if at all. The real enabling technology was consumer digital computers (ie., microprocessors), which depended on so many other things coming together first.

[mbd30]

1 minute ago, fiddlepaddle said:

I'm absolutely sure you could have built a TV tennis type game in the 1950's (or before) using analogue components and a few vacuum tubes connected to an oscilloscope, maybe even as part of a regular black and white TV, possibly even within the cost that some consumers might pay, but I still doubt it would have changed todays game industry much, if at all. The real enabling technology was consumer digital computers (ie., microprocessors), which depended on so many other things coming together first.

Exactly. Magnavox Odyssey and Pong type games may have been possible, but no real advances until the technology became available.

[+stupus]

21 minutes ago, fiddlepaddle said:

I'm absolutely sure you could have built a TV tennis type game in the 1950's (or before) using analogue components and a few vacuum tubes connected to an oscilloscope, maybe even as part of a regular black and white TV, possibly even within the cost that some consumers might pay, but I still doubt it would have changed todays game industry much, if at all. The real enabling technology was consumer digital computers (ie., microprocessors), which depended on so many other things coming together first.

Well this did happen in 1958, so its not a what if...

[Video]

As yeah. Tennis for two, often considered the first "video game"

 

Don't know if it's true, and it's been 20+ years since I read it, but apparently when Ralph bear was trying to sell the odyssey, the prototype was supposedly just resisters. If like to see the blueprint for that. Apparently, going ic was more about cutting amount of work assembling them (a few soldered parts instead of hundreds, remember, this was before automated assembly. Course, odyssey is nearly 60 years old now, so he could be remembering wrong, but like I said, it had no hit detection or score keeping or whatever, so who knows.

[CatPix]

Resistors only drop current or limit it. If you say that was all transistors, yep, logic gates are merely a bunch of transistors, as CPU are. Electronic magazines in the 70' published schematics to build Pong games out of transistors.

But resistors alone can't do anything useful.

I read Baer's biography, and if I recall well, he tinkered with tubes then transistors, but I never read anything about "resistors only".

Edited September 13, 2019 by CatPix

[RetroAdvisoryBoard]

Going to leave the technology discussion to the rest of you as my knowledge there is more rudimentary.. but wouldn't the technology in the 1950s have more likely been vacuum tubes and an oscilloscope, rather than transistors?  Making integration into commercially-sold television sets more prohibitive?

 

Intrigued by how video games would have evolved had their genesis been in the 1950s rather than the late 60s/early 70s.  University students and young professionals of 1955 weren't nearly so guided by the space race - Computer Space, and space as a broader theme for so much of early video games probably doesn't emerge front-and-center.  Perhaps the first great theme in video games is Western-themed.  Perhaps early game designers are less eccentric, they're certainly not computer programmers who've spent years learning how to program and tinker with computers to perform tasks and address variables.  Instead they're electrical engineers learning how to best manipulate an object on monitor.  I look at the Fairchild library and the Magnavox Odyssey games library or the RCA Studio II library.  Those aren't video games developed by programmers to apply rules of play within the bounds of a defined game environment - they're emulating and applying known concepts.  Decidedly logical games - the creative aspect seems stunted and unexplored.  The mid 1950s are that much closer to Prohibition-era bans on gambling and pinball being a vice, so larger television manufacturers would probably refuse to put these "games of chance" on their sets, and development is stunted.  Perhaps video games as a concept dies a temporary death as a fad concerned with manipulating a pulsating blur on a low-resolution television; the integrated circuit and microprocessor still decades away.

 

Seldom is anything developed in a vacuum - video games emerged as costs to manufacture the components neared feasibility, as computer programs were increasing in complexity and affordability at universities, and - I think maybe a factor - as baby boomers were a little more willing to splurge on fancy gadgets aimed at the kids or the family.. I think in the 50s those parents (those returning from the war, the Greatest Generation) would've balked at a $200 or $400 blip-on-a-screen game.  "Now, now, Jimmy.  You go on outside and play with some fine sticks with the neighbor kids, and don't come back till dinner, you hear?".  It wasn't really in their DNA to get a super pricey toy.  The Baby Boomers and those raising their kids after Dr. Spock and the social changes of the late 50s, 60s and 70s?  They were a bit more willing to question how they were parenting, to get involved at school, take interest in the kids' activities, Little League and such.  Not attempting to critique one generation of parents over another - just different eras, and different reception.  The earlier era I really don't think would've been at all receptive to a pricey gadget that was geared toward children and families playing.  In that market Baer sells hundreds.  Maybe 1000s.  But not hundreds of thousands.  Maybe in that era the rather expensive video game tv console device would've been marketed to the hard-working dad who needed some leisure time in his study.  And games evolve as more of a gentleman's activity.  

[carlsson]

Actually the very first transistor was patented in 1926 but it wasn't until the point-contact transistor in 1947 (which awarded the physicists a Nobel Prize in 1956) that the invention became practical. As I mentioned, the first transistorized computers were made in the mid 50's but also those still were huge and expensive.

[Eltigro]

A great video from Ahoy (as usual) that I think is on topic here...

 

 

[carlsson]

So the first computer game that possibly could be categorized as a video game was Draughts, made 20 years before the term video game was coined.

 

Nice digging backwards into history, and gives another perspective on what kind of equipment (big computers) was available for making interactive games in the very early days, at least if you wanted programmable ones. While that isn't strictly required for playing, perhaps a larger window between the first video game - whether it'd be the CRT Amusement Device from 1947 as referenced by @RichardElric (here dismissed as the first video game due to it relies on non-video elements in order to be playable) or any design by Ralph Baer a few years later - had opened for more types of games implemented with discrete electronics before the advent of the affordable integrated circuits, ROMs etc. I'm not still sure it had made that much of a difference though.

 

[CatPix]

I'm pretty sure it would't have made a big difference.

Color television was experimented in the 1930's, standardised in the US in 1956 (I think?) Yet, due the the high costs of electronics, it was only around 1980 that the sales of color TV were superior to sales of black and white TVs.

I very doubt that in that context it would have changed much for video games. Maybe tve Odyssey would have been released in 1970 ot 1968 perhaps, but in the grand scheme of things, video games require too much elements for them to move technology forward so early.

[carlsson]

Wikipedia says that for the USA, sales of color TV's exceeded B&W in 1972 but in principle you are right, it took 16 years from that the Perry Como Show was broadcast in colour until colour TV's dominated. And that is for a technology that really existed even if it was expensive in the beginning ($1295 in 1954, eq. to $12000 in 2018). That was about 40% of a yearly income.

[CatPix]

1972? The I got figures mixed up with Europe I think - where color TV was introduced in 1967 so despite having a headstart by using existing tech(analog color circuitry are roughly identical regardless of the signal standard ), adoption of color was equally lenghty. Even a bit shorter but that's mostly because the price of electronics dropped during the 70's.