Browse Items (509 total)

"The rewards are great, but without the burden of conscience resulting from having done someone in. If you win, it is because you have parlayed the hours spent in the attic by finding a world full of prototypes of yourself who keep you in gilded…

Though Doom, released in 1993 and created by John Romero and John Carmack, was not the first FPS (first-person shooter) game to come out, it was certainly one of the most important. Coming in between two other big FPS games—Wolfenstein and Quake—Doom…

The first modern American comic book, Famous Funnies, demonstrates that there is a widespread consumer market for text and fixed image media. Marketing of comic books begins in earnest, and is primarily directed at young men and boys. In the 1940s…

Mail-order catalogs containing magic lanterns, stereograph sets, and stereopticons such as the above increased in number and popularity shortly before the turn of the 20th century. Organizing content according to subject matter—with main audiences…

Oregon Trail played a monumental role in the development of the educational software market. Originally developed by a group of Minnesota public school teachers as a teletype game, the 1985 version with added graphics—rudimentary by 21st-century…

OXO was created in 1952 by British professor of computer science A. S. Douglas. It was a simulation of the popular game of tic-tac-toe (or noughts and crosses), and done as part of his thesis on human-computer interaction at the University of…

Essentially an updated and more successful version of Tennis for Two, the arcade version of Pong, created by Allan Alcorn and manufactured and released in 1972 by Atari Inc., truly kick-started the video game industry. It played with simple 2d…

Designed by Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda and published by Capcom in 1991, Street Fighter II was easily the most influential game of its genre: fighting games. It wasn’t the first fighting game, but it was the first to provide more than one-two…

Created in 1958 by American physicist William Higinbotham, Tennis for Two was the first simulation of tennis on a (two-dimensional) digital screen via an oscilloscope. Though this game was received quite well locally, at Brookhaven National…

The first version of Tetris dropped in 1984 by Russian computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov. Its concept was extremely simple, making it easy to pick up by children and adults alike (a feat in itself at this point in time). It was also a “simple to…

While there were plenty of earlier illustrations and editorial cartoons published in newspapers, The Yellow Kid is widely recognized as the first American comic strip. It is particularly noted for its early use of text bubbles and recurring…

Published in 2002 by Blizzard Entertainment, the hit high-fantasy RTS (real-time strategy) game Warcraft III might have been one of the most influential games in the history of the industry. It found the most successful MMORPG (massively multiplayer…

One of the first, and probably the most influential, early video games, Spacewar! landed in 1962 to be played on the mini-computer, PDP-1. It was created by a group of MIT students, including Steve Russel, Martin Graetez, Wayne Wiitanen, to name a…

Perhaps the most famous educational film of all time, the Cold War civil defense film Duck and Cover leans into the most pressing fears within 1950s American society. Specifically engineered for use in elementary schools, the wide reach of this…

English art rock band 10cc released what would become one of their most famous singles in May of 1975: “I’m Not in Love.” The track is known for its vast and ominous choral section. 10cc utilized an early form of sampling by having each of the three…

Educational films would not have gained their place as a significant pedagogical tool in elementary and secondary schools without Kodak’s development of 16mm reversal film in 1923 (Pope, 2016, 58). Prior to the introduction of 16mm films, teachers…

In October of 1839, the Dutch-born chemist Robert Cornelius made Photo Self-Portrait (1839) while standing in the yard behind his family's Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lamp store (Eckel, Ruchatz, and Wirth 2018). Setting up his camera at the back of…

The Kodak simplified #1 box camera, created in 1888 by George Eastman, an American innovator and entrepreneur, was the first "box" camera to gain widespread public acceptance. Its design became the archetype for box camera designs. George Eastman…

In January 1920, the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the sale and distribution of alcohol, went into effect. During this period of Prohibition, businessmen, mobsters and opportunists alike established speakeasies so that any savvy American might find a…

In 1900, Eastman Kodak released the new Brownie dollar box camera. It was a rudimentary cardboard box camera with a simple meniscus lens that took 2 1/4-inch square photographs on 117 rolls of film (Wikipedia 2019). It was sold for one dollar. One…