1958 electronic tennis game gets refurbished

Pong
Pong wasn't the first videogame, no matter how many times that guy in the pub says it is

Though many people think Pong was the first videogame, a team of US engineers have revamped a game that preceded it by 14 years.

The 1958 Tennis for Two oscilloscope-based game, has been upgraded with some new vacuum tubes, allowing modern day gamers to see what the early days of videogames were like over 50 years ago.

Visitors to NYC's Brookhaven Lab will be able to play the game as it was originally conceived by the designers back in the mid-fifties.

It seems that we have come a long way in the last 52 years from a rudimentary oscilloscope tennis game to Sega's forthcoming Virtua Tennis 4 in 3D using PlayStation Move controllers!

Pong was not the first

Brookhaven engineer Willy Higinbotham is originally credited with designing created Tennis for Two, which was a fairly basic bouncing-ball demonstration which worked using a combination of an oscilloscope and a Donner Model 30 vacuum tube analogue computer.

Brookhaven restored the game originally back in 1997 for the title's 40th birthday, but was forced to use a solid-state computer at the time, which didn't accurately recreate the original experience of Tennis for Two.

This year the team has made use of a later-model Donner computer, which will allow New Yorkers to experience the true Tennis for Two experience.

Physicist Peter Takacs says the game will be made available to play very soon, once Brookhaven's electrical safety inspector gives them the green light.

Via Scienceblogs.com

Adam Hartley
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