History
See also: History of video game consoles (first generation)Most of the earliest home video game systems were dedicated consoles, most popularly Pong and its many imitators. Unlike almost all later consoles, these systems were typically not computers (in which a CPU is running a piece of software), but contained a hardwired game logic.
By the end of the 1970s, cartridge-based systems, beginning with the Fairchild Channel F, had risen to prominence during the second generation of consoles due to the success of the Atari 2600, though stand-alone systems such as Coleco's Mini-Arcade series continued to have a smaller presence in the home market up until the North American video game crash of 1983. Since the Nintendo Entertainment System, cartridge-based consoles have dominated the home market up until CD-based consoles such as the PlayStation gained prominence in the mid-to-late 1990s.
Read more about this topic: Dedicated Console
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)