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Ralph Baer, a division engineer at a New Hampshire defense contractor, wrote a short proposal for games played on ordinary television receivers. His management funded the work quietly, and the first home console followed.
The home console begins as a memo. Its premise, that the screen most people already owned was the platform, separated Baer's approach from every laboratory game before it and from arcade machines, which brought their own hardware. That premise governed console design for the next forty years.
A small team at Sanders Associates worked through a series of television game prototypes, ending with a box covered in brown vinyl that played chase games, a ball-and-paddle game and a target game with a converted toy rifle.
This is the direct ancestor of every home console. It proved that acceptable interactive graphics could be produced by cheap analog circuits with no computer involved, which is why a console could be priced for a household in 1972, and its patents became the legal foundation of the early industry.
