Ralph Baer videos

Ralph Baer has now widely been acknowledged as the grandfather of video games, building the first machine, the Brown Box, that can most closely be considered the first proper video game system ever made.

Below is a fantastic video of early footage of Ralph giving a demonstration of his Brown Box system, playing Ping Pong with a fellow technician.

In addition, here are two other videos from the same archive. Clearly Ralph was doing this as part of some proposal to investors which Ralph referred to as Participatory Cable Access Television, or PCATV for short.

Ralph speculating on the concept of "Impulse Buying" using the PCATV system. This is an amazing video given that it was created in the late 1960's and yet forshadowed the notion of on-line shopping which would not be developed for another thirty years. Ralph Baer was truly a visionary.

Videos originally located at this site, the blog of Chris Melissinos.