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In 1972 Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari and their first release Pong spawned a whole new industry. The simple and addictive game-play sparked a craze that saw videogame arcades springing up in malls, cinemas and restaurants across the United States and beyond.

 

Pong was based on the tennis game for the Magnavox Odyssey which was the world’s first video game console. Bushnell hired Allan Alcorn to engineer the game and he played the Magnavox version before starting work. Alcorn made several improvements to the basic concept, he introduced the idea of the ball accelerating as the match wore on and also cut the paddle into sections so that only the centre section would return the ball at a 90 degree angle, the outer sections returned it at 45 degrees. Magnavox later took Bushnell and Atari to court but they avoided a lengthy case and agreed to pay royalties so that they could continue to manufacture and sell Pong legally.

 

Pong was a simple game, the player took control of a paddle on the left of the screen and could move it up and down, they played against the computer or another opponent who had a paddle on the right and a ball bounced between them. The object was to hit the ball and if your opponent fails to return it then you score. The simple instruction on the very first machine was “Avoid missing ball for high score.”

 

The game was named Pong after the sound Bushnell wanted it to make; he imagined it to be a hollow ringing sound. Alcorn was out of time and money during the development and so he utilised sound from the sync generator and found a way to output it.

 

Alcorn’s first cabinet version of Pong used a black and white television and was built into a 4 foot wooden cabinet. He intended it as a prototype but Bushnell and Dabney thought it would work as it was and they placed it in a local bar called Andy Capp’s Tavern to see what the response would be like. The response was excellent and the game proved extremely popular until it broke. On closer inspection they realised the machine had stopped working because it was so full of coins and when they removed the money it started to work again.

 

Realising the potential Bushnell decided Atari should manufacture the system themselves and he acquired an old Roller Rink and converted it into a manufacturing plant for the Pong cabinet. In the first six months they sold over 10,000 coin-operated Pong videogames however they failed to patent it and so the market was soon awash with clones.

 

Magnavox successfully sued the cloners as well but the games were so successful that there was plenty of money to go around. Atari released a number of variations on the original Pong including four player versions called Pong Doubles and Quadra Pong and twists on the original called Doctor Pong and Pin Pong. They also moved onto new titles and developed a home console which saw the company undergo a meteoric rise to become a much loved household name.

Sunday, December 7th 11:55pm Dear Diary, I went to family get-together early this evening. It was lots of fun, and definitely a lot of fun to see everyone. Feels like I’ve been hanging out around Washington D.C. a lot lately, trying to stick around in case there’s anything I need to do. So it’s nice to get away and have some family time every once and again. This party was a big to-do, and the kids even ended up blasting some of their own tunes in the other room. I never was much of a fan of this new rap called “hip hop.” Sounds like an inappropriate bunny-hop genre, but I pretend to like it so that I can please the kids and hopefully identify with the younger demographic of voters. Well, I was standing outside the room making sure everything was ok when I heard, “I want Joe Biden, need Joe Biden” as part of the song. I thought the kids were just playing some kind of a promotional campaign video, but when I heard other lyrics saying, “You can have whatever you like,” I realized this was part of the song. I went in and asked the kids what it was called (“Whatever U Like” – title makes sense) and why it had my name in it. Well, the kids at first thought I was crazy and just hard of hearing. But when they played it again, they to heard, “I want Joe Biden, need Joe Biden.” Apparently, the lyrics are actually “I want your body, need your body,” but it sure sounds a lot like Joe Biden. They even thought so too, after listening to it a second time. After hearing this, I’m considering talking to some music artist to see if I can’t get my name actually put in a song. It would be a great deal of publicity, and I’m sure it would boost my popularity among the youngest demographic significantly. Until next time, Joe the Veep

Originally posted in The Secret Diary of Joe Biden

As just about anyone who's taken art history 101 has probably learned, Andrea Mantegna's Renaissance-era painting "The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ" (c. 1490) is famous for being one of the first paintings to use foreshortening to create the illusion of depth. (I'm sure you're wondering what this has to do with cats, but stick with me here.) In the painting, Christ's legs appear shorter than they would if he were vertical, and this adds to the illusion that the corpse is lying flat. I always thought that in the interest of correct perspective his feet should appear somewhat larger because they are at the foreground of the painting, but I think Mantegna preferred to emphasize other features, such as the chest area and genitals, for dramatic reasons. Call it artistic license, if you will. The excellent 2004 Russian film "The Return" ("Vozvrashcheniye") includes a scene that's an homage to this painting. This luminous movie is about two teenage boys and their estranged father. The boys haven't seen their father since they were little, and suddenly one day he reappears in their life. There's some question as to whether he's really even their father at all. At one point in the movie the father is portrayed lying down, and the scene is shot from the foot of the bed similar to the positioning of Christ in the Mantegna painting. The father is lying in the same position, and the chiaroscuro lighting mimics the painting as well. Well, and I know this is an absurd segue, but hey, this article is intended to be rather absurd (cats have a weird sense of humor).... Cats, the ultimate art teachers, have been trying to teach us about foreshortening since the dawn of time. See what I mean? The back paws appear dramatically enlarged – that's the cat's way of emphasizing to humans the importance of foreshortening in art. The supine cat in the photo, posed on a flat surface just like in Mantegna's famous Renaissance painting, has stretched out his legs to further dramatize the pose for art students' benefit. He seems to be saying , "Make the feet BIGGER to show foreshortening." Here's another example of cats teaching us foreshortening. In this shot, another cat, on another bed, demonstrates that when the head is in the foreground, the HEAD is bigger. In the following image, the cat is trying to tell us that the head and feet are equally important, and hence they appear much larger than the body, which shrinks into the background. What lesson do you suppose this cat is trying to impart? Perhaps something to the effect that humans who shave cats in an effort to make them look like lions or poodles should be forced to eat dog poop? The image below is obviously intended to show humans the subtly ironic nature of cat humor. The cat art teacher depicts the dog as much, much larger in relation to the cat, and thus more important in the overall scheme of the photo. However, the lesson the cat is trying to impart is really just the opposite – that the cat, naturally, is the most important thing in the picture. This is doubly reinforced by the fact that the dog is paying homage to his superior by licking the cat’s face. Notice the disappearing perspective lines in the pattern of the carpet - a subtle homage to our Renaissance artist forebears. And the picture below, of course, shows a cat whose legs really ARE foreshortened - well, at least they're shortened, anyway. It’s a wiener cat! All in all, it’s pretty clear that when it comes to art, we have much to learn from cats!

Does anyone know how I can get the sheet music of Yolanda Adams' "Open My Heart?" I am doing a song for a graduation for one of our church programs. Places have them but is charging too much for express shipping and handling. can someone help me out, PLEASE!!