This morning it dawned on me: The iPad keyboard feels a lot like the one on the first computer I ever bought with my own money, the Atari 400.

The Atari’s famously bad keyboard just barely counted as a physical one: In one of the cheesiest cost-cutting decisions ever made by a PC manufacturer, there were no individual keys. Instead, the whole thing was molded out of one piece of flat plastic, so the “keys” had no travel. The only real evidence of physicality were the ridges around each key, which didn’t do much to make the typing experience better.

I got my Atari 400 in 1982 and used it a lot–especially to write programs in BASIC, which involves plenty of typing. I haven’t used it since the mid-1980s. But the tactile experience of  smacking my fingertips down on a surface with no give to it was stuck somewhere in the back of my brain, and using the iPod unlocked it in a strangely Proustian fashion.

At the time I owned the Atari, I was defensive about that keyboard. I don’t think I maintained that it was good, but I did get pretty proficient on it. I could see myself getting similarly proficient on the iPad keyboard. And the iPad’s version has one gigantic advantage: built-in autocorrecting that should fix a sizable percentage of typing errors on the fly.

Doing a little typing on the iPad was enough to convince me that it might not be as lousy an experience as I’d anticipated. But I want to do real writing on it. Safe bet: When I get my hands on an iPad  for real-world testing, I’m going to blog on it and see what it’s like to type 300 or 600 or 2000 words on the thing. If it’s no worse than writing 16KB of BASIC on an Atari 400, I’ll be relieved…

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This list is by no means exhaustive, nor are all of these consoles bad overall (see The Worst Video Game Systems of All Time for that list). And though some of these problems keep popping up in one form or another–like the bad call of feeding power to the console via the RF switch shared by RCA’s Studio II and Atari’s 5200–other errors in judgments were unique to one console. Thank heavens for that.

In chronological order…

RCA Studio II (1977)

Problem #1: Poor Controllers

The RCA Studio II shipped with no external controllers, just a pair of built-in ten-button keypads. These keypads were awkward and uncomfortable to use. It made games difficult to control and limited the potential of software for the system.

What Were They Thinking?

My best guess is general cluelessness as to what constituted a decent game controller on RCA’s part. To some extent it’s excusable, since home video games were in their infancy in 1977. And there’s no doubt that omitting detachable controllers reduced the system’s overall complexity and thus manufacturing costs overall — but it also greatly reduced the consumer’s desire to buy and play the system.

Problem #2: Power Through RF Switch

Similar to the Atari 5200–see below–the RCA Studio II received main system power through the video output cable. An AC adapter plugged into a special RF switch that provided power to the console, but unlike the 5200’s switch, the Studio II’s did not include any special functionality. Studio II owners with lost of damaged RF switches found themselves regretting their purchase.

What Were They Thinking?

RCA’s engineers probably felt that it was simpler to have one cable going in and out of the system. It was simpler — in the short term–until someone lost their switch box. Today, the special Studio II RF switch is extremely difficult to find (and for an already difficult-to-find system, that’s bad).

Mattel Intellivision (1979)

Problem #3: Ergonomically Hellish Controllers

Like most keyboards on early personal computers, the hand controllers and joysticks included with early video game systems were typically pretty bad. It took a long time before one innovator clearly came along (in this case, Nintendo with its NES pads) and provided a truly easy-to-use, accurate, sensitive, and comfortable solution.

Mattel’s Intellivision controller is no exception to the early-but-awkward rule. It includes a digital 16-direction disc that players pushed inward to control an onscreen character, similar to operation of +-shaped Nintendo control pads, but nowhere near as precise. If you were tempted to rotate the disc while depressing it for quicker maneuvers, you’d quickly be disappointed by the controller’s erratic performance.

The controller also included two buttons on each side of the unit (each set with the same function) that were hard to push and provided poor tactile feedback. Even worse, the controller was an odd shape that didn’t fit well in any human’s hands.

What Were They Thinking?

The designers at Mattel responsible for the Intellivision controller probably thought they were being clever and innovative. Sadly, they were wrong. Many players suffered through the controllers anyway, as the Intellivision hosted a large share of great games. Like proponents of other bad-but-classic technologies, those who defend the Intellivision’s knucklebusters primarily do so out of nostalgia (i.e. we walked uphill both ways on nails and we liked it).

Interestingly enough, the Intellivision wasn’t the only “-vision” game console to ship with bad controllers — the ColecoVision also came with a pair of its own stumpy, keypad-laden ergonomic nightmares. But that’s for another article.

Atari 5200 (1982)

Problem #4: Unreliable Analog Joystick

The Atari 5200 shipped with a pair of analog, non-centering joysticks whose rubbery buttons provided little tactile feedback and would wear out or break easily.

What Were They Thinking?

Atari engineers likely wanted to try something new with the Atari 5200’s analog controller, which unfortunately didn’t translate well to the arcade ganes of the day. The controller’s absolute worst application was Pac-Man–a game that demands precise, 4-way digital control–that ironically shipped as a pack-in game for the console during its later years.

Had Atari put forth any sort of effort to develop new, original games that specifically took advantage of the 5200’s analog stick, the system might have fared much better than it did.

Regarding the buttons, they were unreliable due to the thin plastic flex circuits beneath them, which were prone to tearing from repeated pressure — the kind commonly seen in any button application. Oops. It’s likely Atari used flex circuits due to space concerns (the unit was pretty cramped) and because they were less expensive than rigid PC boards.

On the bright side, the 5200 joysticks included the world’s first on-controller pause button.

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Lunar Lander games abound on every platform. Along with Tetris and Pac-Man, the game–in which your mission is to safely maneuver your lunar module onto the moon’s surface–is one of the most widely cloned computer games of all time. But did you know that game players began touching down on the moon in Lunar Lander just months after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did so on July 20th, 1969?

Today’s versions of Lunar Lander are easily taken for granted; they’re generally regarded as dinky games you can get for free–”Who would pay for that?”

But the mother of all realistic space simulations wasn’t always perceived that way. In 1969, it was, in its own way, a sophisticated, ambitious piece of digital entertainment. And during the BASIC era of the 1970s and 80s, many programmers cut their teeth by attempting to program their own version of Lunar Lander. David Ahl, founder of Creative Computing magazine, called it “by far and away the single most popular computer game” in 1978 (and he was only talking about the text version!). Indeed, Lunar Lander was one of the early computer games that helped define computer games.

The Eagle Lands

YOU ARE LANDING ON THE MOON AND HAVE TAKEN OVER MANUAL
CONTROL 500 FEET ABOVE A GOOD LANDING SPOT. YOU HAVE A
DOWNWARD VELOCITY OF 50 FT/SEC. 120 UNITS OF FUEL REMAIN.

Among the millions who watched the Apollo 11 landing was a 17 year old Massachusetts high school student named Jim Storer. In the fall of 1969, around the time of the Apollo 12 launch, Storer took his inspiration to class with him. There, he programmed a simple text-based simulation of humanity’s greatest technological achievement on his school’s Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-8 minicomputer system.

“Lexington High School had a PDP-8,” Storer recalls. “It had 8 Teletypes, a small hard drive, and 12KB of main memory, where 8KB was used by the system and 4KB time shared by the users.”

Storer wrote his new program, “Lunar Landing Game,” in FOCAL, a programming language for the PDP-8 that was similar in some ways to BASIC (both were introductory languages known for their ease of use). His simulation was simple, yet powerful: underneath lay a realistic set of equations Storer believes his father may have taught him.

Lunar Landing Game’s gameplay consisted of a turn-based question and answer session, asking the user for the rocket fuel burn rate at each turn, which the user would then enter as a number from 0 to 200. The constraints against you were simple:

HERE ARE THE RULES THAT GOVERN YOUR SPACE VEHICLE:
(1) AFTER EACH SECOND, THE HEIGHT, VELOCITY, AND REMAINING FUEL WILL BE REPORTED.

(2) AFTER THE REPORT, A ‘?’ WILL BE TYPED. ENTER THE
NUMBER OF UNITS OF FUEL YOU WISH TO BURN DURING THE
NEXT SECOND. EACH UNIT OF FUEL WILL SLOW YOUR DESCENT
BY 1 FT/SEC.

(3) THE MAXIMUM THRUST OF YOUR ENGINE IS 30 FT/SEC/SEC OR
30 UNITS OF FUEL PER SECOND.

(4) WHEN YOU CONTACT THE LUNAR SURFACE, YOUR DESCENT ENGINE
WILL AUTOMATICALLY CUT OFF AND YOU WILL BE GIVEN A
REPORT OF YOUR LANDING SPEED AND REMAINING FUEL.

(5) IF YOU RUN OUT OF FUEL, THE ‘?’ WILL NO LONGER APPEAR,
BUT YOUR SECOND BY SECOND REPORT WILL CONTINUE UNTIL
YOU CONTACT THE LUNAR SURFACE.

Along the way, Jim Storer created one of the earliest computer games–one of a handful of text-based PDP-8 games of the 1960s, and one of the first computer simulation games ever. In less than 50 lines of code, Storer captured the imaginations of an entire generation of programmers with a gripping space drama composed of nothing more than simple text statements.

Storer submitted his game to PDP-8 maker DEC, which was always looking for innovative and interesting uses of its computers. The programs were usually distributed for free or used as demonstrations to potential clients, serving as a powerful marketing tool. At DEC, an employee named David H. Ahl translated Storer’s Lunar Lander into the BASIC language, which soon overtook FOCAL as the most popular introduction to programming. From there, both the FOCAL and BASIC versions of Storer’s simulation spread to other PDP-8 users through DEC’s EDU newsletter and through distribution by DEC’s Education Product Group.

After that, Storer forgot about the game. Life went on. He never sold it, and never followed the progress or influence of its imitators as they echoed down through the years. “After leaving high school I never thought about the game again,” says Storer. “Until about a couple of months ago when someone e-mailed me about this, I was completely unaware of any Lunar Lander game other than the one I wrote in high school.”

But Storer’s computer experiences in high school shaped the rest of his career: “I became interested in computer science as a result of taking that computer class and doing programming on the PDP-8.” Storer later studied computer science as an undergraduate at Cornell University and then received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Princeton University. He is now a professor of computer science at Brandeis University.

In 1973, DEC published a book edited by Ahl called “101 BASIC Computer Games” that included both Storer’s version of Lunar Lander and two others that had been inspired by Storer’s program. In 1978, Ahl revamped the book with a focus on home microcomputers that were common at the time, and it sold over a million copies. Thanks to Ahl’s book, Lunar Lander’s status as one of the classics of early computer gaming was assured.

Lunar Lander Gets Graphical

DEC consultant Jack Burness had long been a fan of America’s race to the moon. He recalls with great clarity the excitement of the period: “The space program was an incredibly big project then. More than a project, it was a national embracing of the future.”

Inspired by a co-worker who attended the launch of Apollo 16, Burness pestered his local senator for passes to see the launch of the final Apollo mission, Apollo 17, in December 1972. “A bunch of my friends went with me to see it,” recalls Burness. “It was the last launch and was at night–an overwhelming powerfully experience.”

That experience simmered in the back of his mind for the next few months, and it proved influential when DEC needed a software demo for its new GT40 terminal.

The DEC GT40 was a graphical computer terminal–unusual for its time, since it used a vector CRT display. One electron gun directly drew geometric shapes on the screen, providing a potent way to generate sharp, high-resolution computer graphics with the limited computing power available at the time. Conventional bitmapped raster displays (like those on conventional TV video games) draw the screen progressively from top to bottom, one row at a time, and required vastly more memory to compose a detailed on-screen image.

“I actually had quit Digital the previous spring and moved to Cambridge to consult for Draper Labs,” says Burness. “For some now long-forgotten reason I was back consulting to DEC that winter.”

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No joke, Universal has picked up the film rights, prevailing in a bidding war against three other studios. Matthew Lopez, whose writing credits include Race to Witch Mountain and Bedtime Stories, will pen the script. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who produced both Transformers movies and, fittingly, Doom, will be the producer.

Now, I tend to be skeptical when it comes to nostalgia acts — I skipped the 2007 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie on principle — but this idea is truly wacky. We’re of course talking about a video game that had no plot, no characters and really, no reason to be reincarnated in any form. Asteroids is a game whose most interesting development is the occasional appearance of a flying saucer that fires bullets at random angles (so you can bet this movie will have aliens!).

One could argue that Asteroids’ complete lack of substance opens the door to limitless possibilities, but then isn’t this movie just a cheap use of name recognition to cover for generic space opera? Unless Asteroids the movie features an endless battle against free-floating rocks, complete with ruminations on the inevitability of death, I won’t be moved.

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View Atari Touch Tablet unboxing slideshow

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The next time you use your shiny new Wacom tablet and Adobe Photoshop CS4, think back to a time before time–a time before blends, morphs, heal brushes, and 10-megapixel images.  A time like 1984, which, for computer graphics, was darker than the Dark Ages. It was a time when you could buy an $89.95 Atari CX77 Touch Tablet for your Atari 8-bit home computer.  Luckily, I bought mine for considerably less last year, although it was still in new, unopened condition.  Safely sequestered in the official Vintage Computing and Gaming computer lab, I recently began the task of unpacking the antique peripheral and documenting the process.  Here’s an account of the experience.

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The first three decades of digital gaming saw a flurry of concepts, technologies, and products that were groundbreaking in their era and still matter today. And the drawings their inventors used to document them in patent filings are a nostalgic, charming blast. Here are thirty-two of those sketches–including ones for some the most successful games ever and a few which I’m not sure ever made it to market at all.

As with my earlier patent galleries, I couldn’t have done this one without the wondrous research tool known as Google Patents. The filing dates that follow link to the full patent documents there.

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1. Mattel Electronics, early 1980s. Hal “Otis the Town Drunk” Smith plays a Santa who shills for an offer involving $2-$12 in cash back if you bought “qualifying” Mattel Electronics games and Pepsi. Never trust a Santa who wears a hat shaped like a football and tries to convince you that rebates are worth it.

After the jump, lots more of this stuff–don’t say I didn’t warn you…

2. Sears, 1977: Watching this one, I feel retroactive pity for the folks who opted for the 8-track option over cassette. I also wonder why “Bonnie’s” Christmas gift was left unwrapped and plugged in.

3. Future Shop, 1997. This uncommonly cheesy Canadian Santa ignores the kid’s request for CDs and uses his “magic television” to try and sell him other products on credit. I’m not so sure that the “Thanks a lot, Santa!” at the end isn’t sarcastic.

4. Circuit City, 1991. There’s something oddly clinical and emotionless about this ad, with its Circuit City shoppers milling around like lab rats. But maybe that’s preferable to another Huckster Santa spot.

5. Kodak, 1977. Santa and his troupe of kid dancers in multicolor PJs sell the Kodak “Handle” instant camera, a product which was ruled illegal in 1985.

6. Radio Shack, 1984. Cordless phone? Who needs one when you can get a phone with a 16-foot cord?

7. Radio Shack, mid-to-late 1980s. Only in a commercial would a father describe the $129.95 computer he bought his kid as selling for “less than $130.” The fact that this ad dates from the Reagan era is given away by “Jimmy’s” Gipper-like hairdo.

8. Nobody Beats the Wiz, 1986. In 1986, you–or, in this case, Tiny Tim (?)–still had to explain to consumers that VCRs can be programmed.

9. Atari, 1982. Kids hated the E.T. game for the 2600 console so much that it helped bring about Atari’s downfall. The commercial’s not so hot, either–explain to me why is E.T. is wearing a Santa suit here?

10. Crazy Eddie, early 1980s. There’s something sort of honest and refreshing about dispensing with a fake-Santa pitchman and simply putting Jerry Carroll, the Crazy Eddie guy, in a Santa suit. If I ever knew about Emerson’s Arcadia 2001 console, I’d forgotten about it.

11. Crazy Eddie, mid 1980s. The only thing better than the Crazy Eddie guy in a Santa suit is the Crazy Eddit guy in a Santa suit…in August.

12. Apple, mid-1990s. Is it just me, or is there something mean-spirited about attacking Windows in a Christmas ad? Also, why is the dude wearing a Santa suit?

BONUS NON-VINTAGE AD: Apple, 2008. Interestingly enough, in this year’s Apple commercial, it’s the Windows computer (in the guise of “PC”) that’s mean-spirited.

Merry Christmas!

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