Oscilloscope Tennis, Anyone?

The first video game I ever played was “Pong,” which already makes me seem ancient, but did you know true gaming aficionados date the first video game to 1958? Yes, the same year that brought us the Edsel also birthed an industry that generated $20 billion dollars last year in the U.S. alone.

Willy Higinbotham, a nuclear physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, created “Tennis for Two,” a sort of proto-Pong, with an analog computer, an oscilloscope screen, and controllers that look a lot like what you’d expect game controllers from 1958 to look like.

And since gamers are a nostalgic bunch, the folks at Brookhaven are working on recreating “Tennis for Two” (which was dismantled shortly after its debut in the 50s). They’ve pieced together a working version of the original Donner Model 3400 vacuum tube analog computer, and are now working on restoring the original circuitry. Why? Because programmers are awesome, that’s why.