I had planned to write up a post about the new wallpaper, and what it actually is, however I learned yesterday of the terribly sad news that industry veteran Ralph Baer, inventor of the very first videogame console, colloquially known as the ‘Brown Box,’ has passed away at 92.

His importance to the field of technology in general, not just the game industry, can’t be overstated. An electrical engineer whose family fled to Holland from Germany to escape the Nazis – something my own grandfather had to do – then relocated to the United States, he developed a prototype console that could control a “ball,” really nothing more than a square of light, on a television set.

He, or rather Sanders, the defense contractor he then worked for, licensed the technology to Magnavox, they marketed the resulting console as the Odyssey, and the videogame industry was born; it remains a powerhouse even today. If you want to see how we played TV games back in the 70s, you can play all the Odyssey2 (the Odyssey’s follow-up console) games that were ever made over at the Internet Archive.