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The Golden Age of Television
The decade of 1950s is known as "the Golden Age of Television". Every family member tried their best to get hold of a TV set, as it was one of the sources of cheaper, simpler entertaining media. Programmes such as I love Lucy, Father knows Best, Our Miss Brooks and Burns & Allen were some popular shows in the fifties.
Towards the mid-fifties, live performances of reality TV shows were broadcast for the first time that created a different form of television entertainment. -
NIMROD
The Nimrod was a special purpose computer that played the game of Nim, designed and built by Ferranti and displayed at the Exhibition of Science during the 1951 Festival of Britain. It was the first digital computer exclusively designed to play a game, though its true intention was to illustrate the principles of the (then novel) digital computer for the public. A smaller replica of Nimrod has been built for the Computerspielemuseum Berlin. -
OXO Noughts and Crosses
In 1952, Alexander S. Douglas made the first computer game to use a digital graphical display. OXO, also known as Noughts and Crosses, is a version of tic-tac-toe for the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge. It was designed for the world's first stored-programme computer, and used a rotary telephone controller for game control. -
Matchbox Cars
Matchbox cars are miniature toy cars that have been loved by boys for decades. They are played with, collected and admired, by people all over the world.
When first released in 1954 they were a huge hit and many people bought them. They have stayed with us for generations and will most likely for generations to come. -
The Hula Hoop
The Hula Hoop is an extremely simple design that has been played with for decades. It is a highly addictive activity and was a hugely popular in the 1950's. Everybody loves the Hula Hoop. -
Tennis for two
Tennis for two was a very simple electronic tennis game created by William A. Higinbotham in the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York in 1958. He only created it for visitors in his laboratory, but it was still a huge landmark in video game history. -
Barbie dolls
In February 1959, Barbie was first introduced at the American International Toy Fair in New York. The doll soon became an extreme hit with young girls all around the world. Barbie is still a must-have for many young girls today and has been an international icon for decades. -
Mouse in the Maze, Tic-Tac-Toe
From 1959–1961, a collection of interactive graphical programmes were created on the TX-0 experimental computer at MIT. These included Mouse in the Maze and Tic-Tac-Toe. Mouse in the Maze allowed users to use a light pen to place maze walls with dots that represented bits of cheese. A virtual mouse represented by a dot was then released and would traverse the maze to find the objects. Tic-Tac-Toe used the light pen as well to play a simple game of Noughts and Crosses against the computer.
