An engineer proposes making ordinary television sets interactive

What happened

Baer's employer built military electronics and had no interest whatsoever in toys, but he was responsible for equipment design and had noticed that millions of television receivers sat idle most of the day. The document he produced ran a few pages and sketched games a viewer could play through a small box attached to a set. He later recalled writing it while waiting at a bus terminal in New York. A corporate research director gave him a modest budget and a technician, on the understanding that the project stayed inconspicuous.

Two things make the proposal worth marking apart from the hardware that followed. It identified the target correctly, which was the installed base of televisions rather than any new display, and it set the constraint that shaped every later decision: whatever the box did, it had to work with a set the customer already owned and could not depend on a broadcast signal. Baer also said in later years that he had thought about television games much earlier in his career, an account resting on his own recollection.

The world at the time

By the mid-1960s American households owned television sets in enormous numbers and color receivers were spreading. Computers remained institutional, and no consumer product used a television as an interactive display. Defense contractors were flush with government work, which meant a senior engineer could occasionally get an odd idea funded internally if he framed it as exploratory.

What it changed

Prototypes started within months and produced a working system the following year. Patents filed on that work became the basis of licensing demands and lawsuits that shaped the industry's first decade, and Baer spent the rest of his life being introduced as the man who put games on television. He received a national technology medal for the work in 2006.