A Half Century of Video Games
By James Grahame
According to the CBC, Bob Dvorak Jr. might have been the first kid to get his hands on a video game:
"In the 1950s, Dvorak Sr. was an engineer working in the instrumentation division of Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Using designs supplied by his colleague, physicist William Higinbotham, Dvorak put together Tennis for Two — a simple video game that allowed players to bounce a ball over a net — for an open house at the lab.
A horde of visitors swamped the Tennis for Two exhibit when it was unveiled on Oct. 18, 1958, but Bob Jr. got a sneak preview a few weeks in advance when he visited the lab with his father."
Tennis for Two was actually the second video game created, following on the heels of Sandy Douglas' Noughts and Crosses, which took advantage of a 35×16 pixel CRT connected to the EDSAC mainframe at the University of Cambridge in 1952.
Video games turn 50 [CBC]
Noughts And Crosses - The oldest graphical computer game [pong-story.com]
