tymshft

How the home game Pong started in a bar

Retroist recently ran a photo showing two boys sitting on a living room floor, staring at a large screen in front of them. The black and white screen showed a dotted vertical line separating the screen into two halves. Numbers (in this case “3” and “2”) appeared on each side of the screen, and if you looked very closely, you could see a short vertical line on each edge of the screen.

The two boys are staring at this boring black and white screen, acting like it was showing something riveting.

Actually, the screen WAS riveting.

If you haven’t looked at the picture – or even if you have – you might not realize that the television screen in the picture is showing the game of Pong. All revolutions have to start somewhere, and the move from traditional pinball games to video games was accelerated by Pong.

But before Pong became a home game, it was an arcade game. And the whole idea of bringing an arcade game into the home was a terrifying thought in the early 1970s. This article (which I’ve cited before) describes the seedy reputation of arcades, pre-Pong.

The invention of the flipper by Gottlieb in 1947 helped to launch pinball more firmly into the “game of skill” category, and manufacturers began to aggressively pursue a family-friendly image. Of course, that didn’t matter to much of the country where pinball was illegal, forcing machines into even seedier locations like porn shops and dive bars. New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood became a haven for backroom pinball machines. Like so many things which are illicit, though, the attraction of pinball only increased in the prohibition years following World War II, and, by the 1950s, the quickest route to proving your rebel status in America was to be seen within a few feet of a pinball machine.

But these smoky pinball machine havens were about to see a new type of video game. Video games themselves had been around in some form or another for a decade, but they weren’t the types of things that you’d bring into a bar.

Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, wasn’t the kind of place where fights would break out every night. But the hole, named for the surly British comic-strip slacker, was shadowy and dark. Cigarette smoke swirled so thick that it rivaled the fog that rolled in over the Santa Cruz Mountains. You might bring your girlfriend to Andy Capp’s, but not on a first date.

But three former Ampex employees, Nolan Bushnell, Allan Alcorn, and Ted Dabney chose this Sunnyvale bar to test their company Atari’s new game Pong. While the initial success of the game at the bar may have been exaggerated (did the bar patrons fill the game with too many quarters, or did Bushnell?), the game did become successful at bars throughout the country and eventually around the world.

By Bumm13 [2] (Originally upload at en.wikipedia.org [1]) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

And why not? Compared to pinball machines of the day, Pong WAS revolutionary and mesmerizing. No moving parts on the play board, a deceptively simple – and addicting – game. As competitors improved on Atari’s game – and as Magnavox took Atari to court alleging the Pong infringed on an earlier Magnavox game – the entire industry worked at creating games better than Pong, ushering in a golden era for video games.

Much has happened since then – you can now play Pong on your iPhone, and Andy Capp’s Tavern is now a comedy club – but Pong has undeniably changed the entire gaming industry.

Before that pendulum shifts away from the cloud, check the full story

The secret to writing success, political success, or whatever is to make an outlandish statement which gets people so angry that they can’t help but read it. I haven’t quite gotten to that stage yet, but my 2014 post The pendulum is shifting away from the cloud. Told you so. was admittedly a bit of a contrarian attention-getter. Not that I’m negating my basic point – that we switch between distributed vs. centralized computing in a pendulum-like fashion – but back in 2014, you could clearly get more attention by saying that the cloud is out.

Well, cloud is still hot – in fact, my employer deployed a cloud-based solution last year – but people are beginning to question whether the cloud is totally wonderful.

And so we have this Geektime article:

With a steady increase in concerns for our cyber security, people will begin to move away from the cloud to secure their data and provide their own solutions.

Why? Because Yahoo, apparently. At the time that I write this, Yahoo (and its acquirer Verizon) are dealing with the fallout from a revelation of a second attack on Yahoo’s accounts – this one netting information from a billion accounts. Because of this and other threats, people are looking at non-cloud solutions.

Last month, CNET reviewed home storage solutions that cost less than $100, making it affordable to store data locally in one’s own “Cloud in your Attic.”

And who would know better than the man who got us all online?

However, before you jump ahead and spend $99.99 to get your own server, ask yourself – are you a better cybersecurity professional than Yahoo’s cybersecurity professionals? Because if you’re not, then your system will be LESS safe than Yahoo’s system, which was breached at least twice.

Because one thing is constant whether you’re dealing with public cloud, private cloud, or your own box – someone is going to have to secure the thing. While I’ll admit that Yahoo is a much more tempting hacker target than, say, Joe’s Server in the Hall Closet, both need to be secured.

In my case, I am not a cybersecurity expert, so if I were to implement a home server, I’d need to get someone to secure the thing for me. And even people who are cybersecurity experts are not necessarily going to know all of the threats that could affect a home server.

I’m not saying that there aren’t valid reasons to move off the cloud in some instances. But before you move off the cloud because it’s “not secure,” think through the ramifications of selecting an alternative.