Devoir d'anglais

BIOGRAPHIE

Baer was born in 1922 in a Jewish family, who left Germany in 1938 to settle in the United States. In New York, Baer worked in a factory before taking correspondence courses from the National Radio Institute. After obtaining a Radio Technician Maintenance Diploma in 1940, he was employed by a New York repairman until the outbreak of the Second World War. Enlisted in 1943, Baer is sent to London, assigned to the US Army headquarters.

He returned to the United States in 1946 and financed his studies with G.I. Bill. In 1949 he earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago, which provided his students with the first engineering course in a new field, television

Carrière d'ingénieur

From September 1966, he worked his idea of ​​game on television. Baer imagines an electronic box attached to the television, sketch of a video game console. With his colleague Bob Tremblay, he designed a first prototype to display a white rectangle on the screen and move it3,7. At this point, no game is designed. Very quickly, a second prototype is developed using two squares generated by circuits similar to those of the first prototype. The first video game was born: Chase Game, where one player chases the other7, which disappears in a collision (a little in the same genre as Pac-Man). Amused by the game, the management does not oppose the project and asks the team to improve the prototype7.

This project, which is totally outside the military defense area of ​​Sanders Associates, remains known to the people concerned. Ralph Baer improves the prototype by adding a photosensitive gun to shoot at the opponent, the premise of a re-used video game accessory on many consoles7. Other games are being developed. The prototype is already very advanced: it generates color gaming, uses a cassette recorder to give instructions via the loudspeaker of the TV, and even uses joysticks. Only, the prototype costs 75 dollars to manufacture: the team was forced to make it a (very) lighter version: the third prototype. The third prototype is only for Chase Game and shooting games7.

First in black and white, it is quickly restored in colors. But something is missing. Bill Rusch, a creative engineer, joined the project. He then proposes a third square, not controlled by a player, but by the machine. The concept of the Tennis game was immediately proposed by Bill Rusch at the end of 1967 and a fourth prototype was then built7. At the same time, Ralph Baer offers a revolutionary concept: playing games via the cable television network to benefit from camera-filmed decorations, electronically generated virtual players, and even obstacles. Ralph Baer studied the idea with a camera, but the technology employed by Bill Rusch is not stable. Meanwhile, the team is working on a fifth prototype, which is in fact an extension of the fourth aimed at transforming the game of Tennis into a Hockey game with a simulation of the sliding of the square representing the ball and the puck. This extension will never work (Ralph Baer will study the thing again in 2006 and find the error).