setting up stuff

Definitions

Hand held table

Comparrison Table

Assaingment

console design

Timeline

Timeline

1960s

PC

In 1961 students in MIT including steve russel programmed a game called spacewar on the DEC PD1-1 a new computer at the time. The game was a competitv one with 2 players against eac other wit a spacshikp wit missiles whilst the was a sar in te middle that would cause problems for both plaers. The game was distributed with DEC computers and traded through the new "Internet" space war was one of the first infulential game. In the mid to late 1980s 

Interactive tv

Ralph Baer, who has frequently been called the "Thomas Edison of

the Video Game" was working for a small electronics company in the Bronx called Loral back in 1951, and while discussing designs for a new premium TV set with other colleagues, Baer suggested a new feature that might be included in the set to distinguish it from the competition by adding some sort of "interactive game" to the TV. 

Fifteen years later Ralph Baer was working for a small electronis company he remembered his idea for an interactivewhile discussing designs for a new premium TV set with other colleagues, Baer suggested a new feature that might be included in the set to distinguish it from the competition by adding some sort of "interactive game" to the TV.

Refining his ideas into a four-page document, Baer wrote down various types of games that he thought would be feasible, such as action games, board games, sports games, chase games and others. The games would appear on either Channel 3 or 4, which he called Channel LP for "Let's Play!" Later that year, he drew an elementary schematic of a two-player game that he called a Chase Game. The game consisted of two squares (spots) that could be moved on the screen in both directions by two players.  


Console Games


In 1967 he was working for a military electronic  contractor Sanders Associaes in New Hampshire , he enged hisco worker Bill Harrison in pursuit of his new project.  And he started an and was team leader  in the development of "Brown Box", the first home video game console and video game system, as well as creating a simple video game named Corndog,the first video game ever to display on a standard television set. 

Later in 1967, with the assistance of Baer, Bill Harrison created the first light gun and developed several video games with Bill Rusch. Baer went

on in 1967 to demo the world's first playable video game on a TV set:

The Chase Game, consisting of two squares chasing each other, while continuing his game development, and in 1968 the first video console game prototype was completed that was able to actually run several different games such as table tennis and target shooting, all combined into one unit.

Baer eventually signed with Magnavox in 1969 with the prototype being released as the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972, some 21 years after the concept was imagined.

1970s
Handheld 

Mattel

The idea of of of portable game devices wouldn't take force for about another decade but in 1977 Mattel founded by Harold Mason and Elliot Handler started making the first LED portable gaming device, they made some games for it that many people remember today titled Baseball and Basketball, as well as the non-sports titles Missile Attack, Armor Battle, and Sub Chase. Sadly the handheld device stopped production in 1972 but Mattel did the retro-chic bandwagon, re-releasing Football and Baseball in 2000.

Milton Bradley Micro vision.

Milton Bradley was a company that was better known Hungry Hungry Hippos then making video games. It was the first to introduce a handheld video game console with the interchangeable cartridges with its microvision. The system only had a few games  witch had problems at the beginning  Which included the 16x16 pixel LCD screen that was prone to rotting and cartridges could be permanently damaged by relatively small static charge.


CONSOLE

First generation game consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey used removable cartridges, which were nothing but jumpers to activate the games already wired in to the console.

This method was soon replaced during the move to PONG consoles, where the logic for one or more games was hard coded into microchips using discreet logic, and no additional games could ever be added.

The 2nd generation of computer and video games which is sometimes refereed to as the early 8 bit era) began in 1976 which was the year Fairchild Channel F advanced programmable Video system was released.  The early priord of this generation oversaw the release of several consoles as varius companies decided to enter the market, later the releases were in response to the earlier consoles. The dominate console for this era was the Atari 2600 with other consoles such as Inetllivision, the odyssey 2 and Colecovision also had a piece of the market.

1980s 


the intial succes of Mattel and Parker Brothers entries made a black hole where loads of similar devices were released throughot the early 1980s. The most poluar of the these were a series of popular head to head games from Coleco. Other games were copied from well known arcade gamer and put on the small screen. 

In 1979, Gunpei Yokoi, traveling on a bullet train, saw a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculator by pressing the buttons. Yokoi then thought of an idea for a watch that doubled as a miniature game machine for killing time. Starting in 1980, Nintendo began to release a series of electronic games designed by Yokoi called the Game & Watch games. Taking advantage of the technology used in the credit-card-sized calculators that had appeared on the market, Yokoi designed the series of LCD-based games to include a digital time display in the corner of the screen. For later, more complicated Game & Watch games, Yokoi invented a cross shaped directional pad or "D-pad" for control of on-screen characters. Yokoi also included his directional pad on the Famicom game console's controllers, and the cross-shaped thumb controller soon became standard on game console controllers and ubiquitous across the video game industry as a replacement for the joystick.During the 1980s, LCD displays became inexpensive and largely replaced LED displays in handheld games. The use of custom images in LCD and VFD games allows them to have greater detail and avoid the blocky, pixellated look of console screens, but not without drawbacks. All graphics are fixed in place, so every possible location and state of game objects has to be preset(and are usually visible when resetting a game), with no overlap. Illusion of movement is created by sequentially flashing objects between their possible states. Backgrounds for these games are static drawings, layered behind the "moving" graphics which are transparent when not in use. Partly due to these limitations, the gameplay of early LCD games was often even more crude than for their LED antecedents.

Some of the more well-known handheld games of the LCD display era are the Game & Watch series by Nintendo and the games by Tiger Electronics, and many titles from other companies were also popular, especially conversions of arcade games. New games are still being made, but most are based on relatively simple card and board games.

In 1982, the Bandai LCD Solarpower series were the first solar-powered gaming devices. Some of its games, such as the horror-themed game Terror House, featured two LCD panels, one stacked on the other, for an early 3D effect. In 1983, Takara Tomy's Tomytronic 3D series simulated 3D by having two LED panels that were lit by external light through a window on top of the device, making it the first dedicated home video 3D hardware.Other handheld games were built as flipcases and had two or even three LCD displays with different foreground and background scenes, offering some variety in the gameplay.

PC

computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user. These computers were a distinct market segment that typically cost much less than business, scientific or engineering-oriented computers of the time such as the IBM PC,[1] and were generally less powerful in terms of memory and expandability. However, a home computer often had better graphics and sound than contemporary business computers. Their most common use was playing video games.

Advertisements for early home computers were rife with possibilities for their practical use in the home, from cataloging recipes to personal finance to home automation,but these were seldom realized in practice. For example, using a typical 1980s home computer as a home automation appliance would require the computer to be kept powered on at all times and dedicated to this task. Personal finance and database use required tedious data entry. By contrast, advertisements in the specialty computer press often simply listed specifications. If no packaged software was available for a particular application, the home computer user was required to learn computer programming; a significant time commitment many new computer owners weren't willing to make. Still, for others the home computer offered the first opportunity to learn to program.

Interactive tv

    During the  and 1980s, the use of televisions changed in  a significant way.  The TV set became a display monitor for VCR and videogame content as well as a way to watch regular television.  With this, multiple boxes were connected to TVs and multiple remotes occupied coffee tables, couches and floors.  One impact was the movement of family photos from atop the TV to the side in order to make way for various boxes that now sat on top of the TV.  Also, remote controls became a problem as well as a helpful tool for TV viewers.  Remotes were sometimes lost in the pile of gear associated with TVs and viewers encounted difficulties in telling what was for what


1990s

Hanheld

NEC Turbo Express - 1990

NEC managed to produce one of the most technically impressive handhelds with its Turbo Express, which was actually a portable version of its console system, the Turbgraphx 16 (a rival to the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo). The Turbo Express was about the size of a Game Boy but had a sharp active-matrix color display and could even be used as a portable TV with an optional tuner. The downside was, of course,the price which, at $299.99US, seemed to aim the device at a niche market that didn’t yet exist -- the (portable) gaming enthusiast.

Sega Game Gear  - 1990

The most successful of the various Game Boy challengers was Sega’s Game Gear which, like the Lynx and Turbo Express, had a color screen. But unlike those systems managed to keep the retail price down to a fairly reasonable $149. The Game Gear benefited from Sega’s advantage over Atari and NEC (the Genesis was then the leading console system) and a better selection of games, but it was still only a modest success in the face of Nintendo’s increasing dominance of the market.

Sega Nomad - 1995

For most of the 1990s, Nintendo had the handheld market effectively all to themselves, with other companies giving up after trying and failing to knock Nintendo down a few pegs. Sega was the first to re-enter the field with the Sega Nomad, a portable version of the Genesis console. It seemed like a good idea -- after all the Genesis had a huge library of titles just sitting around countless livingrooms -- but poor battery life and a somewhat bulky design helped to do it in. Even an eventual price drop to $79.99 failed to save the Nomad from being put out to pasture.

Tiger Electronics game.com - 1997

. Their game.com handheld, as the name suggests, attempted to bring Internet access and PDA functions to a gaming handheld. Unfortunately, it didn’t do any one thing particularly well: its disappointing games were made even worse by the unit’s outdated screen, and its "Internet access" only let you check email and browse the web in text -- nope, no online gameplay here. Still, as with many of these systems, communities of die-hard gamers have found refuge on the web with other like-minded individuals, devoted to breathing some new life into their late, lamented handhelds.

Neo-Geo Pocket / Pocket Color - 1998-99

Mention the name Neo-Geo to any gamer over the age of 25 or so and you’ll likely get a knowing smile. A lucky few may have owned the pricey home system that made the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis look like yesterdays news, but most will be familiar with Neo-Geo from their arcade games -- especially fighting games like the Samurai Showdown and King of Fighters series. Attempting to build on their reputation, Neo-Geo branched out into the handheld space in 1998 with the Neo-Geo Pocket, but got off to a rocky start, releasing a black-and-white unit first before correcting things just a year later with the Neo-Geo Pocket Color (or NGPC). Despite some solid games, the system never got much support from third-party developers and failed to attract enough gamers to legitimately challenge the still dominant Nintendo. 

Game Boy Color - 1998

Nintendo introduced its first major revision to the Game Boy in 1998 with the Game Boy Color, which, not surprisingly, offered a color screen, case, and better graphics capabilities while still being backward compatible with the enormous library of Game Boy titles. While the system was successful, it proved to mostly be a stopgap measure from Nintendo, who had bigger plans in store.

Bandai WonderSwan / WonderSwan Color / WonderSwan Crystal - 1999-2000

Bandai’s WonderSwan, replaced a year later by the WonderSwan Color, was most notable for having an exclusive license to port the original Final Fantasy games to the system. That earned the system a modest success in Japan but it never made it to North America. Unfortunately for Bandai, Squaresoft (makers of Final Fantasy) eventually made up with Nintendo and started releasing games for the GBA, which proved to be bad news for the still-unique WonderSwan.

 pc

VideoToaster Installed at Local Television Station

 Video Toaster is introduced by NewTek. The Video Toaster was a video editing and production system for the Amiga line of computers and included custom hardware and special software. Much more affordable than any other computer-based video editing system, the Video Toaster was not only for home use. It was popular with public access stations and was even good enough to be used for broadcast television shows like Home Improvement.

Networking

Berners-Lee proposal

 The World Wide Web was born when Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, the high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva, developed HyperText Markup Language. HTML, as it is commonly known, allowed the Internet to expand into the World Wide Web, using specifications he developed such as URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). A browser, such as Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer, follows links and sends a query to a server, allowing a user to view a site.

Berners-Lee based the World Wide Web on Enquire, a hypertext system he had developed for himself, with the aim of allowing people to work together by combining their knowledge in a global web of hypertext documents. With this idea in mind, Berners-Lee designed the first World Wide Web server and browser — available to the general public in 1991. Berners-Lee founded the W3 Consortium, which coordinates World Wide Web development.

Software & Language

 Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0 on May 22. Compatible with DOS programs, the first successful version of Windows finally offered good enough performance to satisfy PC users. For the new version, Microsoft revamped the interface and created a design that allowed PCs to support large graphical applications for the first time. It also allowed multiple programs to run simultaneously on its Intel 80386 microprocessor.

Microsoft released Windows amid a $10 million publicity blitz. In addition to making sure consumers knew about the product, Microsoft lined up a number of other applications ahead of time that ran under Windows 3.0, including versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. As a result, PCs moved toward the user-friendly concepts of the Macintosh, making IBM and IBM-compatible computers more popular.

Linus Torvalds, 1991 Designed by Finnish university student Linus Torvalds, Linux was released to several Usenet newsgroups on September 17th, 1991.  Almost immediately, enthusiasts began developing and improving Linux, such as adding support for peripherals and improving its stability.  In February 1992, Linux became free software or (as its developers preferred to say after 1998) open source.  Linux typically incorporated elements of the GNU operating system and became widely used.

 Pretty Good Privacy is introduced.  Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, is an e-mail encryption program.  Its inventor, software engineer Phil Zimmermann, created it as a tool for people to protect themselves from intrusive governments around the world.  Zimmermann posted PGP on the Internet in 1991 where it was available as a free download.  The United States government, concerned about the strength of PGP, which rivaled some of the best secret codes in use at the time, prosecuted Zimmermann but dropped its investigation in 1996.  PGP is now the most widely used encryption system for e-mail in the world.

Original Movie Poster for Terminator 2: Judgment Day “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” opens. Director James Cameron’s sequel to his 1984 hit “The Terminator,” featured ground-breaking special effects done by Industrial Light & Magic. Made for a record $100 million, it was the most expensive movie ever made at the time. Most of this cost was due to the expense of computer-generated special effects (such as image morphing) throughout the film. Terminator 2 is one of many films that critique civilization’s frequent blind trust in technology.

he Pentium microprocessor is released. The Pentium was the fifth generation of the ‘x86’ line of microprocessors from Intel, the basis for the IBM PC and its clones. The Pentium introduced several advances that made programs run faster such as the ability to execute several instructions at the same time and support for graphics and music.

Graphics & Games

Box Art for Doom“Doom” is released. id Software released Doom in late 1993. An immersive first-person shooter-style game, Doom became popular on many different platforms before losing popularity to games like Halo and Counter-Strike. Doom players were also among the first to customize the game’s levels and appearance. Doom would spawn several sequels and a 2005 film.

Networking

Screen Capture from Original Mosaic Browser The Mosaic web browser is released. Mosaic was the first commercial software that allowed graphical access to content on the internet. Designed by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputer Applications, Mosaic was originally designed for a Unix system running X-windows. By 1994, Mosaic was available for several other operating systems such as the Mac OS, Windows and AmigaOS.

Netscape Communications Corporation is founded. Netscape was originally founded as Mosaic Communications Corporation in April of 1994 by Marc Andreessen, Jim Clark and others. Its name was soon changed to Netscape and it delivered its first browser in October of 1994. On the day of Netscape's initial public offering in August of 1995, it’s share price went from $28 to $54 in the first few minutes of trading, valuing the company at $2 billion. Netscape hired many of Silicon Valley’s programmers to provide new features and products and began the Internet boom of the 1990s.

Storage

Early Zip Drive with Disks The Iomega Zip Disk is released.  The initial Zip system allowed 100MB to be stored on a cartridge roughly the size of a 3 ½ inch floppy disk. Later versions increased the capacity of a single disk from 100Mbytes to 2GB.

interactive tv

 The phenomenon took off in the 1990s as more and more viewers acquired Internet and became accustomed to interactive programming.

Some interactive TV requires people to use special television sets designed for interactive programming. In other cases, the set-top box unit can have programming for interactive television, often connected to the user's Internet connection. Special remotes may be provided, as well with extra controls for interactive activities. In addition to using the Internet, interactive TV can also rely on the phone line or on cell phones, with people interacting over the phone.

PC

2000-present day
2001: Apple unveils the Mac OS X operating system, which provides protected memory architecture and pre-emptive multi-tasking, among other benefits. Not to be outdone, Microsoft rolls out Windows XP, which has a significantly redesigned GUI.2003: The first 64-bit processor, AMD’s Athlon 64, becomes available to the consumer market.2004: Mozilla’s Firefox 1.0 challenges Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the dominant web browers.

 2006: Apple introduces the MacBook Pro, its first Intel-based, dual-core mobile computer, as well as an Intel-based iMac. Nintendo’s Wii hits the market.

 2009: Microsoft launches Windows 7, which offers the ability to pin applications to the taskbar and advances in touch and handwriting recognition, among other features.

consoles

In this era there have been a few companies that have made consoles but their is now only 3 nitendo xbox and ps3. Although Valve is now making their own console. You could argue that the ps3 if for gamers while Microsoft targets a family audience and Nintendo focuses on kids and family entertamrent. The Nintendo has sold more then Xbox and ps3 combined but they suffer from people not buying many games and big companies not making their games for the wII so the only games tend to be by Nintendo but that leaves little in variety




Interactive tv


In the modern day interactive tv isn't just from the tv. Most big tv companies now have their own websites where you can watch tv episodes from the last 7 days. This is also present on phones with companies making apps for phone so people can watch programes while traveling