Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 33)

Trigger Happy
35
2
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
Beginnings
It all started at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, one night in 1962. The first Soviet Sputnik
spacecraft had been launched five years previously, and
John F. Kennedy had just promised that America would
get to the moon within the decade. Six months earlier,
Digital Equipment Corporation had delivered a hulking
new mainframe computer, a model PDP-1, to MIT’s
electrical engineering lab—an innovative, massively
expensive tool for serious scientific research. And by
happy chance, there was a revolutionary achievement
with that machine: the invention of the world’s first
videogame.