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Ralph Baer was widely known in the gaming industry. After all, it was he who created the first home game console Magnavox Odyssey in 1972.
Ralph Baer was born into a Jewish family in the German town of Rodalben in 1922. At the age of 11 he was expelled from school because of Jewish roots, after which he studied at a special school for Jews. Two months before the so-called "Kristallnacht", when the Nazis began their persecution of Jews throughout Germany, his family fled to the United States.
In New York, Ralph Baer was self-educated and in parallel worked in the factory for a salary of $ 20 per week. One day the guy saw an ad on the bus about recruitment of young people for courses in electronics studies and for that he quit his job. In 1940, he graduated from the National Radio Institute with the specialty "Radio Maintenance".
In 1943, Ralph was drafted into the US Army and spent some time at the headquarters of the US Army in London as a military intelligence officer. After the war, the Ministry of Defense paid him additional education, and in 1949 Ralph received a bachelor's degree in television engineering from the Chicago Institute of Technology.
In the same year, Ralph Baer settled down to work for a small company, Wappler Inc., which was engaged in the production of medical equipment. He developed surgical instruments, epilators and low-frequency pulse generators for muscle toning for two years. In 1951, Ralph settled in as a senior engineer at Loral Electronics, where he developed electronics for IBM. From 1952 to 1956 he worked for Transitron Inc. and even rose to the vice-president of this company for some four years. But this was not enough for him.
After leaving the last job, Ralph decided to establish his own company, in which he worked until retirement. A little later, Baer enlisted the support of the defense corporation Sanders Associates Inc., which allowed him to deal with any projects in the field of electronics and not worry about funding.
For the first time, Ralph Baer decided to play video games in 1966. Ralph was waiting for the bus at his stop, and then it suddenly dawned on him: what if I created a game console that would join any TV? After a couple of months, he already designed the algorithm for the operation of such a prefix and was developing accessories for it, for example - the first light gun.
In January 1968, Baer received the first patent for a video game, and in October of the same year he had already assembled a fully functional game console, with which it was possible to play ping-pong, volleyball and football. In January 1969, Ralph Baer introduced the prototype of the future console, codenamed "Brown Box", to the manufacturing companies. At that time it was very fashionable to decorate everything "under the tree" and the first prototype of the prefix was no exception.
After lengthy negotiations, Magnavox took on the production of the first batch of Magnavox Odyssey video game consoles, which appeared on store shelves in 1972 at a price of 99 dollars and 95 cents. It was the first home game console in the history of mankind. In the period from 1972 to 1975, 330,000 such consoles were sold, which can be considered a fairly successful launch for a fundamentally new device.
All subsequent years, Ralph Baer continued to receive royalties for his inventions and patents. But he did not stop playing games and ideas for video games until his death on December 6, 2014. He quietly and peacefully died in his home in the American city of Manchester, surrounded by his family and close friends.
Ralph Baer is not in vain is the title of "father of video games", because it is largely thanks to him today at our home appeared prefixes Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. In February 2006, Baer received the honorable award "National Medal for Contribution to Technology" from President George W. Bush for his outstanding contribution to the development and development of interactive video games.
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