Last weekend Manchester celebrated Ralph Baer, a local boy led the team that created the first home video game, Magnavox Odyssey, while working for Sanders Associates (now BAE) in Nashua.
Part of the celebration was playing a giant ping-pong game in honor of his first commercial video game “TV Tennis” (don’t call it Pong – that was Atari). Many events happened at Jupiter Hall, an event space on Hanover Street.
I wrote about Ralph many times before he died in 2014 at age 92. This photo from 2005 (check out my hair!) shows us playing on the Brown Box, the prototype device that became the Odyssey, in his basement. His basement workshop is now in the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, which made it the landmark object for its Innovation Wing.
Return to the Concord Monitor