10 Rules to Reverse the Email Spiral
1. Respect Recipients' Time
This is the fundamental rule. As the message sender, the onus is on YOU to minimize the time your email will take to process. Even if it means taking more time at your end before sending.

2. Short or Slow is not Rude
Let's mutually agree to cut each other some slack. Given the email load we're all facing, it's OK if replies take a while coming and if they don't give detailed responses to all your questions. No one wants to come over as brusque, so please don't take it personally. We just want our lives back!

3. Celebrate Clarity
Start with a subject line that clearly labels the topic, and maybe includes a status category [Info], [Action], [Time Sens] [Low Priority]. Use crisp, muddle-free sentences. If the email has to be longer than five sentences, make sure the first provides the basic reason for writing. Avoid strange fonts and colors.

4. Quash Open-Ended Questions
It is asking a lot to send someone an email with four long paragraphs of turgid text followed by "Thoughts?". Even well-intended-but-open questions like "How can I help?" may not be that helpful. Email generosity requires simplifying, easy-to-answer questions. "Can I help best by a) calling b) visiting or c) staying right out of it?!"

5. Slash Surplus cc's
cc's are like mating bunnies. For every recipient you add, you are dramatically multiplying total response time. Not to be done lightly! When there are multiple recipients, please don't default to 'Reply All'. Maybe you only need to cc a couple of people on the original thread. Or none.
6. Tighten the Thread
Some emails depend for their meaning on context. Which means it's usually right to include the thread being responded to. But it's rare that a thread should extend to more than 3 emails. Before sending, cut what's not relevant. Or consider making a phone call instead.

7. Attack Attachments
Don't use graphics files as logos or signatures that appear as attachments. Time is wasted trying to see if there's something to open. Even worse is sending text as an attachment when it could have been included in the body of the email.

8. Give these Gifts: EOM NNTR
If your email message can be expressed in half a dozen words, just put it in the subject line, followed by EOM (= End of Message). This saves the recipient having to actually open the message. Ending a note with "No need to respond" or NNTR, is a wonderful act of generosity. Many acronyms confuse as much as help, but these two are golden and deserve wide adoption.

9. Cut Contentless Responses
You don't need to reply to every email, especially not those that are themselves clear responses. An email saying "Thanks for your note. I'm in." does not need you to reply "Great." That just cost someone another 30 seconds.

10. Disconnect!
If we all agreed to spend less time doing email, we'd all get less email! Consider calendaring half-days at work where you can't go online. Or a commitment to email-free weekends. Or an 'auto-response' that references this charter. And don't forget to smell the roses.

http://emailcharter.org/

Site to join their mailing list The : Join Our Mailing List >>> is a must click

In recent times there has been discussion galore about breaches of data loss of large corporations to hackers. Countless millions of dollars lost to hackers obtaining personal information. It is certainly a sad situation in the history of computing.

Is the worry and discussion of security anew phenomena? Not by a long shot. Below are some extracts of an article printed in Creative Computing Magazine in 1976. Thirty five years ago.

Creative Computing Magazine 1976

The issue of data privacy ... an individual's rights to control personal data... is a highly complex and controversial topic. lt affects not only the individual, but also the agencies of government and the activities of business and other organizations which require such information to meet social and economic needs. And it also affects the design and operation of the tool most used for information processing and storage ... the computer.

Legislation concerning data privacy is in various stages of development atstate, county and even city levels. Since passage of the Federal Privacy Act of 1974 there has been an outpouring of rhetoric and written materials concerning individual rights versus information technology. Legislators, educators, civil rights groups and computer manufacturers have produced volumes of statistics,
opinions and studies about the subject.

Paramount to any discussion of data privacy is "the computer," often considered the culprit because of its
ability to rapidly store, retrieve, process and transmit information. Consequently, computer manufacturers as well as computer users are concerned about legislation that could drastically change administrative techniques and computer architecture. The key issue appears not whether to discontinue computer technology, but how to keep and extend its benefits while preserving the rights of citizens to privacy and confidentiality without negative impact to the manufacturers and users of computer systems.

For the computer manufacturer, data privacy automatically means providing "data security" in the computer system. This means safe guarding confidential information... protecting it from unauthorized disclosure,
modification or destruction, either accidental or intentional, through the use of special hardware and software. In extreme situations, this can mean additional expenditures by the manufacturer for research, development and production, as well as installation, and maintenance to meet customer specifications. On the user side, it can increase operating costs through increased equipment Costs and additional computer time and generally add to the cost of doing business.

Computerized and centralized information systems can take us in two directions. One would lead us to a rigid, automated bureaucracy with great knowledge and power but little regard for the human consequences of its program. The other would enlist the power of computers in the service of individuals, enabling them to cope more successfully with the complexities of modern life and increasing the opportunities for successful fulfillment of their talents. Society has no choice but to use computer aids in solving the problems of our age, but it now must learn how to use these products to serve the people. lf the time ever comes when the misuse of computerized record keeping leads man to fear being curious, daring, and willing to deviate from
the norm in order to experiment, it would not be a case of the machine triumphing over man, as some people fear. lt would be a case of man becoming the machine.

As stated in the National Academy of Sciences study: "Man cannot escape his social or moral responsibilities by murmuring feebly that 'the machine made me do it'."
End of quotes from 1976.

Conclusion;

Hackers, virus, spyware , trojans have been around almost since the beginning of computing. Some of these have actually been good for the computing industry. But by and largely it has been a nasty aspect of computing.

The recent hacks of companies such as Sony, Microsoft , and Citi I am unsympathetic to. Their customers affected by these attacks I do sympathize with. I feel that these corporations that have had breaches to their security are at fault for these breaches. Surely, with the resources available to them, they simply could have been better at their security matters.To my way of thinking it was their own negligence and lack of concern for their customers data safety. My reasoning for this thinking is, that with the recent rash of publicity about security breaches , all corporations should be automatically doing audits of their security, if they handle customer data.

We as computer users, joe average, also have a responsibility for the security of our personal data. my advice, simple as it may be, never submit any information whatsoever on the internet, that you would not want someone to access that who it was not intended for may gain access to that information. It restricts a lot of the convenience that we have come to expect with computing, but it may save your savings to enjoy, rather than that nasty who has just hacked and gained access to your bank account.

Extreme, yes, but until security in computing is attacked vigorously and with determination I personally do not wish to share sensitive information on the net.

I do not know a solution to the security in computing problems, To those companies making the money on security issues which are just patches of the moment for the most recent breach, just maybe if you are serious about security a contribution by you and those corporations that handle sensitive data, to a central think tank , may solve the security problems once and for all. Maybe it is time to think outside the box and try to deal with the issue.

The highly anticipated 2011 E3 conference has come and gone. Often times, up to the minute gaming conferences mean nothing to retro gamers. Sometimes, the best hope is a remake or sequel to games gone by. This year, however, Hyperkin threw out the SupaBoy. It is a handheld Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

The SupaBoy is slated to be THE solution to Super Nintendo gaming on the go. Touted as more of a portable SNES than a handheld game, this little gem displayed a nearly perfect emulation of F-Zero at the conference.

It features a 3.5 inch screen display and is set up like the old gaming controllers of the original SNES, making it an easy pick-up for retro gamers. Battery life is over five hours in testing and it has stereo sound with adjustable volume control. Projected price is guessed at near USD $80.

There is no release date yet for the SupaBoy, but you can check out more and follow its progress here.

Source: http://www.oldgamesnews.com/?p=5115

WHO REALLY INVENTED
THE VIDEO GAME?

There was Bell, there was Edison, there was Fermi.
And then there was Higinbotham.

By John Anderson


The Space Age had just been birthed. Sputnik was a new and somewhat ominous presence in the evening sky--my father tells me he carried me to the roof of our apartment building to see it. I don't remember. The year was 1958, and I was two years old.

Dave Ahl, my boss, was a high school student. He had won a scholarship, one benefit of which was a tour of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY. Something he saw on an oscilloscope there remained fixed in his mind for many years, and caused, among other things, a recent pilgrimage of my own.

Nearly 25 years after the fact, I found myself on the Long Island Expressway. I was trying to pass an eighteen-wheeler spewing gravel off its trailer, while I looked for the Brookhaven exit. It occurred to me that the Lab was hardly a stone's throw from Shoreham Nuclear Power Station, that controversial patch of multi-billion-dollar poured concrete. I wondered if the proximity was mere coincidence.

Brookhaven is a government installation, and I get nervous at checkpoints. The guard at the gate had a familiar kind of hypertensive bearing. I wished then I had shaved that morning. I proffered my press card with clammy claw. He told me to pull my car off to the side; I knew the jig was up. I was a spy, an agent, a saboteur, and it was all over.

He handed me a piece of paper and said those chilling words: "Have a nice day." Upon inspection, the paper seemed to be a visitor's map. My adrenalin level began to subside.

It's really very simple to get to the Department of Nuclear Energy. You make a right near the linear accelerator, and pull into the lot next to the alternating gradient synchotron. If you see the tandem Van de Graff, you've gone too far.

From there, only one flight of stairs separates you from one of the great, unsung heroes of our time, Willy Higinbotham.

There was Bell, there was Edison, there was Fermi. And then there was Higinbotham.

Willy was responsible for the display Dave saw on that fateful day in 1958. Willy, you see, invented the video game.

We've received several manuscripts which attempt to set the record straight on the history of the video game. If you claim and can document a video game predating 1958, let us know.

Otherwise, give Willy Higinbotham his profound and historic due. Much to the chagrin of large corporations involved in current litigation, he did it first, and he has proved it.

Though he stands about five feet four inches tall, Mr. Higinbotham commands quite a stature. He very nearly chainsmokes unfiltered cigarettes, which he wolfs down with great voracity for a man of 72 years. His eyeglasses magnify to the point where his corneas seem as large as quarters. He laughs easily and likes to play the accordion, though he admits it's been a while since he's played at a party.

And, as a physicist in the Manhattan Project, he witnessed the detonation of the first atomic bomb.

Before we sat down to speak in earnest, Willy called an old friend, Dave Potter, and asked him to join us. Dave had worked with Willy on the original game designs. We adjourned to a conference room. As Willy got started, other scientists would wander into the room, find a perch, and listen along. "Isn't he something?" one of the scientists whispered. He sure is.

Back in the 1950's, when tours of the Laboratory were first instituted, they were rather static affairs, usually consisting of a group of photographs to depict some facet of research at the facility. Willy, who discovered his penchant for physics at Cornell and electronics at MIT, explained that he wanted to make his display more dynamic. Give it a little punch. Wouldn't it fill the bill, he thought, if we got some sort of little game going on a CRT, so visitors could have some "hands-on" interaction with the hardware? He and his associates fashioned a tennis game played on the five-inch screen of an oscilloscope.

Digital computers were coming into their own in 1958; in fact, Willy's own Instrumentation Division was building one at the time. However his game contraption made use of an analog computer, one that used variable voltages rather than on-off pulses to represent information. To this was hardwired a nonprogrammable assemblage of electro-mechanical relays, potentiometers, resistors, capacitors, and "op-amps," short for operational amplifiers.

Willy himself is the first to admit that the arrangement was rather inelegant. But he also points out that it worked. He did make use of some recently invented transistors as flip-flop switches--a harbinger of things to come. Willy simply did the job in the shortest time with whatever parts were handy. The result was a video game, something no computer, digital or analog, had been harnessed to do before.

The screen display was a side view of a tennis court. It looked like an upside-down " T, " with a shortened stem. This was the "net. " Each player held a prototypical paddle, a small box with a knob and button on it. The knob controlled the angle of the player's return, and the button chose the moment of the hit. A player could hit the ball at any time, providing it was on his side of the net. Gravity, windspeed, and bounce were all portrayed. For example, if you hit a ball into the net, it would bounce lower than a bounce off the "ground," and would eventually die.

The game was simple, but fun to play, and its charm was infectious. Potter remembers the popularity of the game: "The high schoolers liked it best. You couldn't pull them away from it." He's probably remembering young Dave Ahl, staring at the screen with a little voice inside him saying "this could be something important."

The ball and court lines were drawn and redrawn sequentially, at a rate that made for a flicker-free view of ground, net, and ball. This is an approach still used in game playfield display. However the method of ball manipulation was and remains unique.

Without becoming too bogged down in explanation, consider the following. An oscilloscope is capable of generating cartesian coordinate displays. That is to say, a dynamic "graph" can be drawn, plotting the deflection of x or y proportionally to the voltages input as x or y.

Higinbotham rigged up a circuit wherein the plot of these functions simulated the trajectory of a bouncing ball. Op-amps from a Donner Labs analog computer were used to generate this trajectory and to sense when the ball had struck the ground. When this occurred, a relay would be thrown, reversing the polarity of another op-amp, so that the ball would reflect its path and "take a bounce." Primitive, but effective.

Other op-amps and relays were used to determine whether or not the ball had hit the net. As mentioned earlier, rebound velocity from the net was lower than from the ground, providing an extra bit of realism.

Velocity, slowed continually by wind-speed, was simulated straightforwardly with a 10 meg. resistor.

A toggle switch allowed players to choose which side to serve from, and net height, as well as court length, were adjustable. There was no way a player could "miss" the ball, as a push of the paddle button would always result in a hit when the ball was on that player's side of the net. Unless the player chose the correct angle and timing for a return, however, the shot would not make it back to the opponent's side.

The implementation was very much more sophisticated than the first "Pong" games. It was the hit of the Brookhaven "visitors' days" for two years running. Eventually, however, it was dismantled.

I asked Willy why he hadn't patented the thing at the time. He is responsible for over 20 patents, each of which reverted to the U.S. Government.

"We knew it was fun, and saw some potential in it at the time, but it wasn't something the government was interested in. It's a good thing, too. Today all video game designers would have to license their games from the federal government!" The idea somehow pleased Willy, and his laughter signalled it.

To Magnavox, however, the rights to video games are no laughing matter; they could mean millions. The corporation seeks a patent on video games using bouncing balls, and has taken sworn depositions from Higinbotham concerning his own invention. Though Willy stands to make no monetary gain whatsoever, he has a personal stake in the contest.

One must take a broader view of Willy's career to see the game from the perspective that he himself does.

Higinbotham was a graduate student in Physics at Cornell University at the outbreak of World War II. He was invited to join research at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he worked on an advanced and important technique known as radio detecting and ranging, later shortened to RADAR.

From there he joined the Manhattan District Project, working as a physicist on another exotic and potentially important technology. He became head of the Electronics Division there in 1945. Higinbotham devised the timing circuits that took the first atomic bomb through the last few milliseconds preceding detonation.

He worked with and knew J. Robert Oppenheimer quite well. "He was a charismatic man," says Willy. "People tended either to worship or detest him. I did neither. He was brilliant, though. There's no doubt of that."

At the time of the blast at Los Alamos, Willy was 24 miles from ground zero, able to watch the entire detonation through welder's glass so thick, he couldn't see an illuminated headlight through it.

I asked him what it had been like. He grew quiet. He said that he and the other observers got into the trucks and made the long trip back to the compound in utter silence. No one had anything to say.

Willy spent the next two years as executive secretary of the Federation of American Scientists, in Washington, D. C. He acted as a liaison between Congress and scientists, lobbying for the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.

"It's taken over thirty years," Willy observes," but the message is finally beginning to get through." His face brightens. Today, as a senior scientist at Brookhaven Laboratory, he and his colleagues have amassed the largest and most comprehensive library in the world concerning nuclear safeguards.

I was warming up the car for the long trip home, staring across a field at the building housing the cyclotron. He's not only something, I thought to myself. He's a walking bit of history. He also invented the video game!

Source:CCVAG Vol. 1 No. 1 - Spring 1983

William (Willy) A. Higinbotham (October 25, 1910 – November 10, 1994)

So now that we’ve all got touchscreen smartphones, what’s the future hold for handheld interfaces? If the Hasso-Plattner Institute has anything to say, it’s probably something along the lines of use-your-palm-as-an-imaginary-phone.

No, they’re not joking. Thanks to a wearable depth camera, you could interact with your palm the way you would use a touchscreen; all the touch inputs would be sent to the phone via Wi-Fi. The entire system has no physical or visual feedback, so it relies entirely on your muscle memory to remember what it’s like to use your smartphone without, you know, actually using it.



The researchers imagine that this technology could be used to answer a call with wet hands, which sounds a lot more practical compared to using a device completely blind.

So far the technology has proven to be pretty usable by participants who could accurately select about two-thirds of their apps using just their palms. Currently the Imaginary Phone uses a large depth camera mounted to an extending arm, but miniaturizing is in the plan. So we all will have to wait a little while before we can stare at are palms while talking to, seemingly, no one on a Bluetooth headset

<object width="640" height="390"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/aCARtauIS50&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/aCARtauIS50&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="390"></embed></object>

[Hasso-Plattner Institute via Engadget]

There's a new Thor movie. It's not bad! And neither is this promotional flash game, featuring old-school 2D platforming and some adorable sprite art.

A separate being from the "proper" games based on the new flick, this is a promo game, and being a flash title playable in your browser, it's free! It's even got multiple game modes and a rad name (Thor: Bring The Thunder).

You can play it at the link below.

http://marvel.com/games/play/56/thor_bring_the_thunder
Source: http://kotaku.com/#!5798809/the-thor-game-you-can-play-for-free-and-which-is-pretty-great

Genesis: How the Home Video Games Industry Began
by Ralph Baer

Where do novel ideas come from? Sometimes they come from left field, when you least expect them.

In 1966, I was the manager of the Equipment Design Division at Sanders Associates Inc., a Defense Industry company and at the time the largest employer in the State of New Hampshire. At the time, my division had grown to nearly five hundred engineers, technicians and support people and I was a busy man. While we were involved in some display programs, none of the work in my division, or in the rest of the Company for that matter, involved development of broadcast television technology. As for me, ever since my early days of television broadcast studio equipment and TV receiver design work at Loral back in 1951, my TV-engineering training and experience had occasionally surfaced to think about ways of using a TV set for something other than watching standard broadcasts.

There were about 40 million TV sets in the US homes alone in 1966, to say nothing of many more millions of TV sets in the rest of the world. They were literally begging to be used for something other than watching commercial television broadcasts!

In 1966, thoughts about playing games using an ordinary TV set began to percolate in my mind. When I designed and built a TV set at Loral in 1955, I had proposed doing just that: Build in a game to differentiate our TV set from the competition. Management said No and that was that. During a business trip to New York City on the last day of August in 1966, while waiting at a bus terminal for another Sanders engineer to come into town for a meeting with a client, I jotted down some notes on the subject of using ordinary home TV set to play games. I distinctly recall sitting there on a sunny day and writing on a small spiral note book perched on one knee...those notes have disappeared. Not so the pages of the Disclosure Document that I wrote the following morning. They survived to this day and are at the Smithsonian along with all of the game hardware we built off and on over the next three years.

It was a Eureka moment.

When I got back to my office in New Hampshire on September 1, 1966, I transcribed those notes into a 4-page paper, a Disclosure Document which dscribed the idea of playing television games on a home TV set. It lists various types of games that might be playable using the TV set as a display, such as Action Games, Board Games, Sports Games, Chase Games and many others. What I had in mind at the time was to develop a small “game box” that would do neat things and cost, perhaps, twenty-five dollars at retail. (Note that the term "video games" did not appear until the mid-seventies).

I asked one of the engineers in my Division to read, date and sign the document - standard procedure to establish a legal record. He did that. Some of the phraseology of that 4-page paper reflects the fact that I was working in a military electronics company. But it’s clear enough what it proposed: “Let’s Play Television Games!”

Little did I know that I had started the ball rolling on something much bigger and more significant than anyone could have imagined at the time: The start of what was to become a very large Home Video Game industry within 10 years! I also could not possibly have visualized that the pages of the Disclosure Document would surface again after 1974 in Federal Courts in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Ottowa and many other places in pursuit of patent infringers. …and that a lot of money would change hands as a result of the process started by the concepts described that papr, a hundred million dollars, roughly.

Even thinking about Video Games had absolutely nothing to do with the normal business of developing complex military electronic systems in my Division at Sanders Associates. But I was running a pretty large operation then, so I could afford to put a technician on the bench and have him do some experimental work without even rippling my division’s overhead. So I just did it! It wasn’t long before the project became official; a few convincing demonstrations to our Corporate Director of R&D put the project on a legitimate track that would eventually pay off handsomely.

TV game development activity continued thorough 1968 and 1969. Most of the work was done by Bill Harrison, then an Engineering Associate; and by Bill Rusch, an engineer who both made important contributions to game concepts. I supervised the activity, stopping by a few times during the day in the special room where we were doing the actual hardware development work. That room was tucked away in a remote place of Sanders Canal Street building in Nashua, New Hampshire, far from anyplace where the “real” work was going at Sanders Associates; the farther, the better management liked it. It was a lot more than once over the next couple of years that management asked me whether I was still “screwing around with this stuff”. That attitude changed rapidly years later when money from patent licenses and from successful litigation started pouring in.
Several progressively more complex game systems were developed during 1967 and in 1968. We could now play all manner of sports games: Ping-pong, volleyball, handball, soccer, hockey and several others. We also had a light-gun with which we could “shoot” at “targets” on the screen of the TV set.

By 1968 we had finished building our final demonstration game system, the “Brown Box”. It was switch-programmable and played a large number of sports, maze and quiz-type games.

In addition, we had several games based on the light gun so we could shoot at stationary or moving “targets”. It all worked very well and it was obvious to one and all that playing “TV Games” was fun.
As far as neat games and producible technology was concerned, we were done! The marketing effort was another story. It remained a major problem for two years. We tried to introduce video games into the Cable TV industry in 1968 without lasting success.

Finally we turned to US television set manufacturers for possible interest in this brand new product category. Throughout 1979 we demonstrated the Brown Box to representatives of various TV set producers. At our invitation, representatives of RCA, Sylvania, GE, Motorola, Magnavox came to Nashua; we demonstrated the Brown Box to all of them and the reactions were overwhelmingly favorable...but did anyone move off a dime? No such luck!

Magnavox finally took a license in 1971 and their 1972 Odyssey Home Video Game, a production-engineered version of our Brown Box, was the result. It started the Home TV Game market.
NOTE: 12 games - CAME WITH !!
Early Lawsuits

According to the Agreement between us, Magnavox had the responsibility, as our sole licensee, to handle all sublicensing activities for video games. It took three more years of cajoling and pressure from our Director of Patents and from me to effect a sea-change of attitude at Magnavox. They finally committed to dropping notices of infringement on a group of arcade game manufacturers. Sanders and Magnavox went after the first set of infringers, the lawsuits began and would go on for the better part of fifteen years.

In the beginning, it was Atari which was joined with Chicago Dynamics and Bally-Midway in a suit laid on them by Sanders/Magnavox. Court proceedings started in June of 1976 at the Federal District Court in Chicago, Judge John Grady presiding. I had the dubious pleasure of being on the stand from the second to the tenth of June, day after day, acting as a fact witness. Spread out before me were all of the game hardware units we had built at Sanders between 1966 and 1969. Also in the courtroom was a 5-foot stack of documents: Mostly Harrison’s, Rusch’s and my daily logs and assorted technical loose notes. Our Brown Box, the 1968 game unit, was there, hooked up to a TV set and used to demonstrate technical particulars to Judge Grady.

That lawsuit and others that followed it were largely about the interaction between manually-controlled and machine-controlled symbols on screen, like the paddles and the ball in a ping-pong game. Atari’s PONG game – which in any event came about because Atari’s President, Nolan Bushnell, had played an Odyssey ping-pong game at a Magnavox dealership demo in May of 1972 - infringed that technology and so did all of Atari’s competitors who copied the Pong game within months of it first appearance.

Judge Grady was very interested in the subject. He was very sharp and amazed all of us with the amount technical detail he absorbed and digested during the trial. He was friendly and often turned to me from the bench while I was on the witness stand, asking for explanations of some technical detail that had escaped him. I was impressed.

One day the opposition brought an arcade PONG-type game into the courtroom. When the judge asked that the back be removed so that he could see what’s inside, there was a modified Admiral TV set. Its r.f. front-end (the tuner and video IF amplifiers) had been bypassed to make it effectively into a TV monitor. I had described the use of monitors in my ‘480 patent. Judge Grady took one look at what he saw inside the arcade game and what he saw on the screen and drew the proper conclusions: Namely, that this arcade game had all the elements described in our patents - which had long since issued, having been filed many years earlier.

After weeks of intensive proceedings in Judge Grady’s Chicago courtroom, the trial ended with his decision in favor of Sanders/Magnavox on all counts. The judge read this decision from the bench on January 10th of 1977. If we had written the decision ourselves, it could not have been more supportive of our position. We had won a clear-cut victory. Naturally, I was pleased to hear Judge Grady state unequivocally that my ‘480 patent was the “pioneer patent” of the nascent video game industry. The public, printed record of the decision in 201 USPQ, page 26 also contains that statement. US Patent 3,728,480 entitled “Television Gaming and Training Apparatus” is the pioneering patent of the video game art.

Atari, the pioneer arcade video game manufacturer of the period was joined in that first lawsuit with Seeburg and some others. Once the trial began, Nolan Bushnell, Atari’s president, was having second thoughts and settled with us out-of-court.... our first licensee! Atari got a relatively low-cost paid-up license which acovered past infringement for US-sold products, but not foreign rights. Those were negotiated five years later. That initial Agreement was dated June 6, 1976. It was the first of two Agreements with Atari. The second one was signed in 1981. By then, Atari dominated the video game world.

That Chicago lawsuit was just the first one in a series of legal actions against infringers of our patents. We later litigated against Mattel, Activision, Nintendo and Sega and won all of those lawsuits over the period of the next ten-plus years. They ran longer than any Broadway play ever did. Much money changed hands as a result and went into the coffers of Sanders (now a Lockheed company) and Magnavox’; of course the lawyers colleted their share.

The Magnavox Odyssey TV Game system jump-started the industry which we now know as the video game industry and did so in fair style. Close to 100,000 Odyssey games were sold in 1972. By the time newer models made their appearance in 1974, Odyssey had racked total sales of about 350,000. This happened despite the fact that the Odyssey system was a mid-1960's design using discrete components, like those of the TV sets of that era. By the mid-nineteen-seventies, integrated circuits and single-chip game designs were coming into use, reducing the cost and increasing the performance of games so that the industry took off like a big bird. By some calculations, its gross receipts now exceed that of the movie industry.

Not too shabby for an idea that took off from a few notes scribbled in New York in August of 1966.

http://www.ralphbaer.com/how_video_games.htm

Unreleased handheld from 2005 found.



The story: Back in 2005 Shanda, a Chinese electronics firm ( not as shady as it sounds: for what it's worth, they're traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange) decided the time was right for china to enter the videogame market in a serious and legitimate way. It was announced that they were going to challenge Nintendo and Sony, and develop a home console and a handheld.

They apparently test marketed the home console, the EZ Station ($800 retail?), and claimed to have had a very positive response. Then with much fanfare Shanda's handheld, known as the EZ Mini, was shown at a electronics expo in late 2005. And then.....nothing. Well almost nothing. Records seem to indicate that Shanda was forced to pull the plug on their entire video game venture due to a conflict of interest with one of their corporate partners.

So recently I friend of mine in China actually found a pair of production samples for the EZ Mini, and I bought them. They arrived today and here are my impressions:

Each unit appears brand new. They are both white, with removable plastic film still covering the screen. They each have a custom wall charger. No box was ever produced, so they came in plastic bags and soft pink foam. A small barcode sticker is on the back of the system. These appear to be enabled with both BlueTooth and WiFi, but I have not yet tested these features. There is a slot on the top, between the speakers, that accepts SD and MMC cards. The unit has a touch screen, and a small retractable stylus is included. The EZ Mini takes a second for the load screen to activate. The main menu offers games, Music, video, ebooks, and downloads. These menus appear in a combination of Chinese and English. As you can see, the EZ Mini is about the same length and thickness as a DS Lite, in it's closed position.

*note: screen protector-film has not been removed in some pics.


Shanda planned to develop 1500 (!) games which would have been downloadable from an online store, through the EZ Mini's USB port. Since the "store" never materialized, and I have no technical "hacking" experience, I assumed that actually using a Production sample of a canceled handheld to play games was out of the question. Yet much to my surprise, I quickly discovered that mine had a small amount of pre-loaded software included.

Some of the text is Chinese, but I've found a Kirby/Zelda hybrid, a beautiful medieval hack-n-slash (koei-esque), and a fun space shooter, which prompts you to hold the unit vertically, wonderswan style Also is a much appreciated pack a Taito classics including Bubble Bobble, Space Invaders, and many others. (the Taito games all contain the proper copy-write credentials and seem like fully authorized ports).

Everything looks surprisingly professional and it seems a real shame that Shanda didn’t get the opportunity to push things past the test phase. Some of the load screens seem incomplete and during boot-up some raw code-gibberish can be seen briefly, but otherwise things are very polished. I'm optimistic that with a bit of translation help from my friend, I can unlock more of the EZ Mini's potential. In fact I just made the menu background flip to green instead of default red.


Here's some links:
http://ultimateconsoledatabase.com/p...da_ez_mini.htm

http://www.digitalworldtokyo.com/ind...t_outta_china/

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/artic...s-retreat.html
Last edited by 3rdman; 3 Days Ago at 10:12 PM.