Hacker Culture A to Z

Chapter 2. B

Babbage, Charles

See “Lovelace, Ada”

Baer, Ralph

Ralph Baer (1922–2014) is considered the “Father of Video Games,” even more than Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, Atari’s Nolan Bushnell, or even Fairchild’s Jerry Lawson. I survey my home with its multiple video game consoles and gaming PC, and I thank the late Mr. Baer for making it all possible.

Baer was born Jewish in Pirmasens, Germany, in 1922. He fled Nazi Germany as a teenager, making his way to the United States via the Netherlands. In 1940, he graduated from the National Radio Institute with a radio service technician diploma. Between 1943 and 1946, he served in the US Army, spending most of his deployment in France working in military intelligence.

After the war, Baer enrolled in Chicago’s American Television Institute of Technology and earned his bachelor’s degree in television engineering in 1949, at a time when most Americans didn’t know what TV was. Early televisions existed by World War II, where they were expensive toys for the very rich; radio broadcasters CBS and NBC had just begun television broadcasting around 1947.

Throughout the 1960s, Baer worked as an engineer for military contractors. During that time, he got the idea to use electronics technology to use televisions for interactive gaming. He made several prototypes from 1966 to 1968 that are now considered the very first video game consoles (at least conceptually) and are displayed at the National Museum of American History.

Many of us who ...