Watching this ad and hearing the announcer speak so glowingly about the ability, with the flick of a button, be presented with the most popular video game, really takes me back to that simple time. Computers and game consuls didn’t need millions of horse power and scads of free ram to entertain us. I can so very well remember sitting down with that first ‘Pong’ machine, sprawled out in front of the consul TV, little paddle wheel in hand and having hours of fun whacking that glowing dot from one side to the other; the joy of perfecting the art of the spin. Of course, it wasn’t all that long until we’d also gotten one of the newer games systems that let you plug in cartridges! Trust me when I say this, we, yes event the parents, thought that was so very cool and remember, this all was happening at a time when the last of the Apollo missions to the Moon had only just ended (“The end of the beginning”, they used to call it), and we were deep into SkyLab. Growing up with Apollo, you came to think of computers as these machines that could do and solve any problem; and here we were, one of our own and it was taking us to new places.

On a final note, I remember at the time thinking, “if I took apart this cartridge, I’l see how programing works”. Yeah, I was wrong. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that Apollo had taken all of us and our imaginations to the Moon with programs on it’s own kind of cartridge.

Yeah, we played that ‘Pong’ game a lot, for years after, you could still see traces of the border lines and score fields burned into the phosphors of the TV tube.