Did you know that the “Magnavox Odyssey,” the first video game console ever, was conceived and created by a Jew? Meet Ralph Baer, born in 1922 in the south-west of Germany.
At the age of 14, Baer had to leave school in Nazi Germany. Two years later, in 1938, the family fled to the US, where Ralph joined the army. After his service, he received a degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
By 1951, Baer was making television sets at the Loral Corporation, a defense contractor. In 1955, he started working on transistors and integrated circuits for military projects. It was around this time that Baer got the idea of playing games on television screens, but Loral wasn’t interested in such an idea. In 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, Baer began experimenting with a mechanism that would allow one to control the graphical output on a television screen. Together with colleague Bill...
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