The anatomy of the first video game

The article, at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...">http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27328345/]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...[/url], starts off with:

Quote:Fifty years ago, before "Pong" and "Space Invaders," a nuclear physicist created "Tennis for Two," a 2-D tennis game that some say was the first video game ever.

The game was never meant for commercial use. "Tennis for Two" was a science experiment, created by William Higinbotham for the annual visitoraEU(tm)s day at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. ...

It later says that:

Quote:... Hundreds of people lined up to play "Tennis for Two" on Oct. 18, 1958. Players saw a side view of a tennis court on an oscilloscope screen and used an aluminum controller to serve and volley the "ball," a bright dot that left trails as it bounced from one side of the "net" to the other. "Tennis for Two" was, as the name suggests, a two-person game. ...

and

Quote:The gynormous "Tennis for Two" makes the Atari 2600 look like an iPod shuffle. In addition to the oscilloscope screen and the controller, the guts of the original game were contained in an analog computer, which is "about as big as a microwave oven," says Peter Takacs, who re-created "Tennis for Two" over a decade ago.

I found this article interesting for several reasons. First, I recall playing Pong on the T.V. set many years ago and once thought that it was the first video game. Second, I did not know that the 50th anniversary of video games passed by just 6 days ago. Due to my gaming addiction problem, it is not something that I, at least, will be celebrating. Also, I find it amazing how far video games have come in the last half-century. The picture at the top of the article of this game machine shows what it looked like, with it of course having relatively little resemblance to game machines of today.