Anecdotes: Magnavox and Intel: An Odyssey and The Early Days of the Arpanet

This paper discussed about a brief history of the world´s first home video game console Magnavox integrated with Intel´s chip. Magnavox enjoyed considerable success with its Odyssey analog home TV Pong game (1973), but they wanted to build a more versatile and programmable console. Intel 8244 chip is a video IC contained counters synchronized with the TV´s raster scan to determine what video information to send to the TV. It had four variable objects (sprites) defined in on-chip RAM plus eight group objects. These grouped outputs provided background, titles, and scores using predefined fixed characters from an on-chip ROM. The chip also had a programmable sound generator enabling various sounds and an interface for joysticks.