The Magnavox Odyssey 2, also known as Philips Odyssey 2, is a home video game console of the second generation that was released in 1978. It was sold in Europe as the Philips Videopac G7000, in Brazil and Peru as the Philips Odyssey and in Japan as Odyssey2. The Odyssey 2 was one of the five major home consoles prior to the 1983 video game market crash, along with Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Intellivision and ColecoVision.
Pong is a 1972 sports video game developed and published by Atari for arcades. It is one of the earliest arcade video games; it was created by Allan Alcorn as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, but Bushnell and Atari co-founder Ted Dabney were surprised by the quality of Alcorn's work and decided to manufacture the game. Bushnell based the game's concept on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console. In response, Magnavox later sued Atari for patent infringement.
Magnavox is an American electronics company. It was purchased by North American Philips in 1974, which was absorbed into Dutch electronics company Philips in 1991. The predecessor to Magnavox was founded in 1911 by Edwin Pridham and Peter L. Jensen, co-inventors of the moving-coil loudspeaker at their lab in Napa, California, under United States Patent number 1,105,924 for telephone receivers. Six decades later, Magnavox produced the Odyssey, the world's first home video game console.
The Magnavox Odyssey is the first commercial home video game console. The hardware was designed by a small team led by Ralph H. Baer at Sanders Associates, while Magnavox completed development and released it in the United States in September 1972 and overseas the following year. The Odyssey consists of a white, black, and brown box that connects to a television set, and two rectangular controllers attached by wires. It is capable of displaying three square dots and one line of varying height on the screen in monochrome black and white, with differing behavior for the dots depending on the game played. Players place plastic overlays on the screen to display additional visual elements for each game, and one or two players for each game control their dots with the knobs and buttons on the controller by the rules given for the game. The console cannot generate audio or track scores. The Odyssey console came packaged with dice, paper money, and other board game paraphernalia to accompany the games, while a peripheral controller—the first video game light gun—was sold separately.
Ralph Henry Baer was an American inventor, game developer, and engineer.
1971 is the first year of the commercial video game industry with the release of Computer Space by Nutting Associates and Galaxy Game by Mini-Computer Applications. The majority of digital games remained on mainframe computers and time-sharing networks, while an increasing number were demonstrated outside of traditional computing audiences. Several developments of games later commercialized – including Oregon Trail and the Magnavox Odyssey console – are first publicly tested in this period.
1972 marked an important landmark in the history of the video game industry with the releases of Pong and the Odyssey home console. The profile of electronic games rose substantially and companies began exploring the distribution of video games on a larger scale. Important mainframe computer games were created in this period which became the basis for early microcomputer games.
A home video game console is a video game console that is designed to be connected to a display device, such as a television, and an external power source as to play video games. While initial consoles were dedicated units with only a few games fixed into the electronic circuits of the system, most consoles since support the use of swappable game media, either through game cartridges, optical discs, or through digital distribution to internal storage.
The history of video game consoles, both home and handheld, began in the 1970s. The first console that played games on a television set was the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, first conceived by Ralph H. Baer in 1966. Handheld consoles originated from electro-mechanical games that used mechanical controls and light-emitting diodes (LED) as visual indicators. Handheld electronic games had replaced the mechanical controls with electronic and digital components, and with the introduction of Liquid-crystal display (LCD) to create video-like screens with programmable pixels, systems like the Microvision and the Game & Watch became the first handheld video game consoles.
1975 saw several critical influences in the history of video games, including the first commercial games utilizing large-scale integrated circuits and microprocessors, as well as the first role-playing video games.
1974 saw the expansion of technology and public awareness of video games. A proliferation of companies creating commercial video games in the coin-operated market attracted attention from the mainstream press. Coin-operated games began to diversify in content beyond Pong derivatives. The first three-dimensional games were developed for linked graphical terminals which would not be widely commercialized. Some of the first efforts to create video game consoles after the release of Magnavox's Odyssey became available in the United States and Europe.
The year 1973 saw a substantial increase in the number of video games created and distributed. In coin-operated games, a craze for Pong-style games ignited the first fad for video games both in the United States and other countries such as Japan and the United Kingdom. Time-sharing networks saw greater proliferation of popular programs through type-in listings. The PLATO computer located at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign played host to some of the earliest massively multiplayer games.
BAE Systems Inc. is an American subsidiary of British multinational defense, security, and aerospace company BAE Systems plc. The American subsidiary operates under a Special Security Agreement which allows it to work on some of the most sensitive United States defense programs despite its foreign ownership. It is incorporated in Delaware. It employs approximately 35,000 workers within U.S. borders and several thousand more in Israel, South Africa, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Major business lines of BAE Systems Inc. include electronic warfare, sensing and communications equipment; armored vehicles, artillery systems; naval guns and naval ship repair; and cybersecurity and intelligence services.
BAE Systems Electronic Systems (ES) is one of three operating groups of BAE Systems Inc., the North American subsidiary of the British global defence contractor BAE Systems PLC.
In the history of video games, the first generation era refers to the video games, video game consoles, and handheld video game consoles available from 1972 to 1983. Notable consoles of the first generation include the Odyssey series, the Atari Home Pong, the Coleco Telstar series and the Color TV-Game series. The generation ended with the Computer TV-Game in 1980 and its following discontinuation in 1983, but many manufacturers had left the market prior due to the market decline in the year of 1978 and the start of the second generation of video game consoles.
Qwak! is a single-player duck hunting light gun shooter arcade video game developed by Atari subsidiary Cyan Engineering and released in November 1974. In the game, ducks fly one at a time across the screen, and the player shoots at them using a light gun attached to the game cabinet. The player gets three shots per duck; ducks change direction away from missed shots and fall to the bottom of the screen when hit. A screen overlay adds images of reeds and a tree branch, and an image of a duck is added to a row at the top of the screen whenever a duck is hit. Games continue until a time limit, set by the machine operator, is reached.
Fairchild Systems was a United States defense contractor which is now part of BAE Systems Electronics, Intelligence & Support. A descendant of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, the San Francisco Chronicle described Fairchild Systems as "one of the legendary names of Silicon Valley" and that in "the late 1960s, [its] Bay Area operations were the training ground for the engineers who went on to found Intel and other top semiconductor companies."
Magnavox Odyssey is the general brand name of Magnavox's complete line of home video game consoles released from 1972 through 1978. The line includes the original Magnavox Odyssey console, the Magnavox Odyssey series of dedicated home video game consoles, and the Magnavox Odyssey 2, a ROM cartridge-based video game console released in 1978. Philips Odyssey is the brand name that includes the Philips Odyssey series of dedicated home video game consoles.
The Philips/Magnavox VideoWriter is a standalone, fixed-application, electronic typewriter / dedicated word processor produced by Philips Home Interactive Systems (PHIS), a division of the Dutch electronics company Philips. It includes a 10" CRT amber screen with a wide aspect ratio, a black and white thermal transfer printer, a 3.5" floppy drive for saving documents, and dedicated computing hardware, all enclosed in a single case. The keyboard is separate and a custom design whose unusual features include a STYLE key and not just an UNDO key but also a DO key. The VideoWriter is not a freely programmable computer but a typewriter replacement appliance. It is not a laptop machine but was designed to be transportable in either a cloth or hard plastic carry case accessory.
AN/ALQ-221 Advanced Defensive System is a radar warning receiver and electronic countermeasures system manufactured by BAE Systems in Nashua, New Hampshire, for use on the U.S. Air Force U-2 Dragonlady reconnaissance aircraft. It provides U-2 pilots with situational awareness and protection against threats that might reach the aircraft at mission altitudes of 70,000 feet plus. The system is part of the Block 20 modernization program of the U-2 aircraft integrated with upgraded avionics and multifunction cockpit displays.
