12570

Other events and facts from 1958 start with this post:

* There are approximately 2550 computer systems in the United States.
* Approximately 47.1 million transistors are produced, compared to 397.4 million vacuum tubes.
* Under the U.S. Congressional 'Space Act', NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) is formed, taking over the role of the National Advisory Comittee on Aeronautics.
(if you really want to irritate someone who's been involved in astronomy and the space sciences since the 50s, call NASA's precursor NACA [NA-KA] out loud. Drives them crazy. Apparently it was always pronounced En-A-See-A)
* Alaska is brought into America as the 49th state of the union.
* EMI releases the first sterophonic record album.

12571

More factoids from 1958:

* Seymour Cray builds the first fully-transistorized super-computer, the CDC (Control Data Corporation) 1604.
* The first transatlantic jet flight is flown by PanAm, from New York City to Paris.
* The Canadian Broadcasting Company's microwave broadcasting system is the largest television network in the world.
* A federal investigation into the Twenty-One game show scandal begins.

The show and scandal were the subject of the 1994 movie Quiz Show (an excellent movie, IMHO). Lots of supervision of game shows were put into place, and there wasn't another scandal until the infamous Press Your Luck incident in 1984.

12572

Other factoids from 1958

* The Winnipeg Blue Bombers beat the Edmonton Eskimos in the first CFL game, 29 to 21.
* ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency - the agency that spawns the ARPANet, which subsequently becomes the Internet) is one year old.
* Elvis Presley's burgeoning music career is interrupted as he joins the U.S. army at a Memphis, Tennessee induction center.
* IBM announces computer models 7070 and 7090, among the first to be fully transistorized.

You'll notice mention of 'fully transistorized' computers in this and the previous post. Remember that before the transistor was invented at Bell Labs all computers ran on vacuum tubes, and were HUGE.

12573

And also in 1958:

* 111 people take part in the first U.S. domestic passenger jet trip, consisting of a National 707 flight from New York City to Miami.
* Johnny Hart's prehistoric comic strip "B.C." first sees print.
* Jack Tramiel moves his Commodore Portable Typewriter company from the Bronx to Toronto and renames it Commodore Business Machines. It is a typewriter sales and repair shop.
* Vladimir Nabokov's controversial book "Lolita" is published.
* The US Army launches the first American earth satellite Explorer I from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It contains Texas Instruments transistors, along with an experiement by James Van Allen which discovers Earth's radiation belt.
* Videotape is invented the previous year (1957) by Ampex in Sunnyvale, California.
* Arnold Palmer wins his first Masters tournament.
* Coach George "Punch" Imlach takes the helm of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
* The first public demonstration against nuclear weapons takes place in Aldermaston, England.

12574

The next computer/video game milestone was in 1962, the year Spacewar is invented on a PDP-1 computer at MIT.

Again, see
http://www.emuunlim.com/doteaters/play1sta1.htm
for details.

12575

Also in 1962:

* IBM U.S. reaches over $1 billion in computer sales, beating its other interests for the first time in the company's history.
* EDS (Electronic Data Systems) of Dallas Texas is founded by 32 year old Ross Perot with an initial outlay of $1000.
* The first U.S. Army troops move into Vietnam.
* The world teeters on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
* Hewlett-Packard, making electronic testing and measuring equipment, breaks into Fortune Magazine's top 500 US companies listing for the first time. It ranks #460.

12576

Other details from 1962:

* First use of Agent Orange defoliant in Vietnam.
* Barbara Striesand signs her first recording contract, with Columbia Records.
* John Glenn becomes first American to orbit the Earth.
* Bell Telephone introduces radio paging in the U.S.
* First communications satellite Telstar I is launched, allowing transcontinental audio and video transmissions.

12577

Continuing 1962:

* Bob Dylan's first album is released.
* Mariner 2 becomes the first interplanetary spacecraft launched from Earth, passing within 34,773 kilometers of the planet Venus and providing the first up-close view of this second planet from the Sun.
* Ringo Starr replaces Pete Best as Beatles drummer. The group releases its first record, called "Love Me Do".
* There are over 70 million TV sets installed in American homes. Over 90 percent of homes have at least one.
* Johnny Carson replaces Jack Parr as host of the "Tonight" show (and continues doing so for the next 30 years)

12578

And finally, from 1962:

* At the age of 36, Marilyn Monroe is found lying on her bed naked, dead from an apparent self-inflicted overdose of barbiturates. Due to missing evidence and conflicting testimony, the exact nature of her death is surrounded in controversy, and leads to many questions including her relationship with the Kennedy family and Bobby Kennedy in particular.
* "West Side Story" wins 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Direction, and two Supporting Actor Oscars.
* The Milwaukee Braves' "Hammering" Hank Aaron hits his 500th home run.
* Stanley Kubrick's controversial film "Lolita" opens (four years after the book was published).
* The James Bond series starts with "Dr. No" (and has gone on for 40 years and 20 films, to date)
* 18 year-old bricklayer's apprentice Peter Fechter is shot while trying to escape East Berlin over the Berlin Wall, erected almost exactly one year before. At the base of the wall in no-man's-land, he lay bleeding to death and crying for help for a full 50 minutes before dying. He becomes the 50th victim of the wall.

12579

A decade later, the arcade game and home video game, more or less as we know them now, were born.
Ralph Baer invents what becomes Magnavox's Odyssey home game system, and Nolan Bushnell uses Spacewar as the basis for "Computer Space" - the first standup arcade game. It was a dud. His second game, Pong, was a huge hit, and put Atari on the map. It also started a series of lawsuits between Atari and Magnavox.

Two legendary computer games also were created at this time: Hunt the Wumpus and Adventure.

12580

But going back a bit, I found some details on the early days of Nintendo:

Donkey Kong - Nintendo 1889 is a very important year in videogame history. Yes, that's 1889. It is this year when Fusajiro Yamauchi founds Nintendo Koppai in Kyoto, Japan. The name Nintendo roughly translates to "Work hard, but in the end it is in Heaven's Hands", and the company's products are lovingly handcrafted Hanafunda playing cards made from the bark of mulberry trees. The cards are decorated by various symbols, which change depending on the region they're sold in. Hanafunda games constitute a popular pastime in Japan, and Yamauchi's cards are adopted by the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia, as their cards of choice when gambling. Their penchant for fresh cards every hand keep demand high. After expanding into Western style playing cards in 1907, the company becomes the largest playing card manufacturer in Japan. In 1933 they become Yamauchi Nintendo & Company, and then under the auspices of third president Hiroshi Yamauchi becomes Nintendo Playing Cards in 1951. Their real breakthrough comes in 1959 with a contract with Walt Disney Co. to produce cards featuring Disney cartoon characters, with the series going on to sell 600,000 packs that year. With another name change to Nintendo Co. Ltd., they move into electronics in 1963, producing light-beam gun games, toy robotic arms, and even love-testers.

12581

For further details about how Nintendo got into video games (including Radarscope, a knock off of Galaxian, and Donkey Kong, their first success), see
http://www.emuunlim.com/doteaters/play2sta4.htm

12582

I'm going to try to do all the 1971/72 stuff in one mega post, as I'm getting tired. :P

12583

* Integrated Electronics (Intel) introduces the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. Selling for around $200USD, the 1/6" x 1/8" chip has the approximate computing power of an entire 1946 era ENIAC computer.
* "The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour" debuts on CBS as a mid-season replacement.
* The first digital watch is designed by Pulsar.
* Apollo 17 is the last manned mission to the moon for 30 years (longer than that!).
* "Duel" airs as a Saturday Night Movie on CBS. Telling the tale of harried driver Dennis Weaver's battle against an imposing tractor-trailer rig whose driver he never sees, it is director Steven Spielberg's first stint at long-form film-making (and is coming soon to DVD).
* The term 'Silicon Valley' is coined by Don Hoefler in a trade journal.
* The Coca-Cola company airs thier "Hilltop" TV ad, featuring a group of young people on a hillside in Italy singing the company's version of "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing", which becomes one of the most recognized corporate jingles of all time. 1971 also sees the "Crying Indian" anti-litter ad from environmental organization Keep America Beautiful, new slogans from McDonalds (You deserve a break today) and American Express (Don't leave home without it), and introduces Life cereal with the cry "Hey Mikey! He likes it!".
* CBS TV series "Hogan's Heroes" ends its six year run.
* Anik I, Canada's first telecommunications satellite, is launched. It can relay 12 channels simultaneously.
* IBM reaches over $2 billion in sales.
* Warner Bros. releases Stanley Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange", which earns an X rating in US theatres (these days it only carries an R rating, and is notable because it used the US version of the book, which only had 20 chapters. the full version has 21, and a very different ending).
* Kenback I, the first personal computer, is built by John Blankenbaker. Input is made by a series of switches, and output comes in the form of blinking lights above them.Priced at $750USD, only 40 are eventually sold.
* The Ford Pinto rolls off the assembly line and into automotive infamy when it is discovered later that its faulty design makes the fuel tank a veritable molotov cocktail in low-speed rear-end collisions. A recall is finally ordered in 1978.
* The first "memory disk", an 200K 8" flexible storage disk soon to be known as the "floppy", is invented by IBM engineer Alan Shugart. He later founds premiere media storage company Seagate (floppies eventually shrank to 3.5 inches with a capacity of 2.88 megabytes, but the 1.44 High Density format is the one still most widely used).
* "Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138: 4EB", an award-winning student film short made at USC in 1966, is redone to feature length size as simply "THX 1138" by its creator...George Lucas.
* While attending high school, Steve Jobs meets and befriends fellow co-worker Steve Wozniak at their part-time job at Hewlett-Packard.
* The moon rover is deployed on the lunar surface during the Apollo 15 mission.
* Mid-season replacement series "All in the Family" premieres on CBS. It runs for nine seasons, hitting #1 in the ratings for five of them.
* ARPAnet designers choose "@" to separate user names from domain names as they refine email (electronic mail) delivery. The net now includes 50 universities.
* Novel "Cyborg", by former Air Force pilot and NASA PR agent Martin Caidin, is published by Arbor House Publishing. It and three other subsequently published books by Caidin later become the inspiration for ABC's hit TV series "The Six Million Dollar Man".
* Programming language C is created by Dennis Ritchie (as based on B, and the original language of choice for UNIX).
* Having been sold by Colonel Sanders seven years earlier for US$ 2 million, KFC Corporation is bought by Heublein Inc. for US$ 285 million.
* The first hand-held scientific calculator HP-30 is debuted by Hewlett-Packard Company for $350 USD (personally I always used TI calculators, as do a bunch of people in schools around here still ).
* Phase One of Walt Disney World, situated inside a total of 43 square miles of swamplands in central Florida, opens to the public. Built by 9000 workers at a cost of 400 million dollars, it is the largest private construction project in the modern world (Carl Hiaasen's Team Rodent is a hilarious and at time scary account at what goes on in Disney World).
* The compact disc is invented by Klass Compaan of Philips Research.
* Gene Wilder trips out a generation of kids as Willy Wonka in the movie version of Roald Dahl's classic children's book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory".
* Steve Jobs begins classes at Reed College in Portland, Oregon as a Physics major. He drops out one semester later.
* Richard Adams' seminal fantasy tail "Watership Down" is released by London based book publisher Rex Collings.
* The first ever 8-bit processor, the 8008, is introduced by Intel (and now everybody's trying to move to 64-bit processors, though workstations have had them for years from SUN, Digital/Compaq and SGI).

12584

I'm calling it quits here for the night.

All yours Cheyanne