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Edward U. Condon designs a computer for the Westinghouse display at the World’s Fair. Tens of thousands of people played it.
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Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann file a patent for a cathode ray tube amusement device.
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Claude Shannon lays out the basic guidelines for programming a chess-playing computer
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A. S. Douglass creates OXO on Cambridge's EDSAC computer as part of his research on human-computer interactions.
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Programmers at New Mexico's Los Alamos laboratories develop the first blackjack program on an IBM-701 computer.
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The long tradition of military wargaming enters the computer age when the U.S. military designs Hutspiel, in which Red and Blue players wage war.
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Willy Higinbotham creates a tennis game on an oscilloscope and analog computer for public demonstration at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
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Students at MIT create Mouse in the Maze on MIT's TX-0 computer. Users first draw a maze with a light pen, then a mouse navigates the labyrinth searching for cheese.
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MIT student Steve Russell invents Spacewar!, the first computer-based video game.
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Dartmouth's John Kemeny who creates the computer time-share system and BASIC programming language at Dartmouth.
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Ralph Baer conceives the idea of playing a video game on television. On September 1, he writes down his ideas that become the basis of his development of television video games.
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Ralph Baer develops his "Brown Box," the video game prototype that lets users play tennis and other games.
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