The Magnavox Odyssey on What's My Line?

Soupy Sales, Melba Tolliver, Jim Backus, and Arlene Francis try to figure out what the heck Larry Blyden and Product Manager Bob Fritsche are doing behind the desk. To quote Wikipedia - The Magnavox Odyssey is the world's first home video game console. It was first demonstrated on May 24, 1972 and released in August of that year, predating the Atari Pong home consoles by three years. The Odyssey was designed by Ralph Baer, who began around 1966 and had a working prototype finished by 1968. This prototype, known as the Brown Box,[2] is now at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC While many collectors consider the Odyssey analog rather than digital (because of the addition of analog circuitry for the output, game control, and the use of discrete components), Baer has said he considers the console to be digital. The electronic signals exchanged between the various parts (ball and players generators, sync generators, diode matrix, etc.) are binary.[3] The games and logic itself are implemented in DTL, a common pre-TTL digital design component using discrete transistors and diodes. The system was powered by batteries. The Odyssey lacks sound capability, something that was corrected with the "Pong systems" of several years later, including Magnavox's own Odyssey-labeled Pong consoles. Ralph Baer proposed a sound extension to Magnavox in 1973, but the idea was rejected. The Odyssey uses a type of removable printed circuit board card ...



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F522GBtZPk&hl=en

My Links : circuit board