Atari (PRNewsFoto/Atari)
June 27, 1846
The first telegraph link is established between New York City and Boston. From the AP Archives:
In the spring of 1846, Moses Yale Beach (1800-68), publisher of The New York Sun, establishes a pony express to deliver news of the Mexican War. His pony express speeds dispatches ahead of the Great Southern Mail from Mobile to Montgomery, Alabama, where the mail coaches carry them 700 miles to the nearest telegraph point near Richmond, Virginia. In offering an equal interest in the express venture to the major New York City daily papers (four of whom accept), Beach effectively organizes what soon became known as The Associated Press. The papers that joined Beach’s venture were: The Journal of Commerce, The Courier and Enquirer, The New York Herald, and The Express. The first dispatches from the Mexican War are carried by the Sun on May 29, 1846.
Telegraphic communications between Washington and New York are established on June 5; the New York-Boston line goes into operation on June 27; and by summer’s end, the telegraph extends from New York to Albany and Buffalo, and from Philadelphia west to Harrisburg, creating a telegraph network. Editors now actively collect news as it breaks, rather than gather already published news.
As Richard John points out in Network Nation, the establishment in 1846 of the New York Associated Press (not the Associated Press, which descended from the Western Associated Press, a Chicago-based rival of the NYAP), was a reaction to the New York and Offing Telegraph Association (Offing was the furthest point on the Atlantic horizon that was visible by telescope), a corporation with a special telegraph charter from the New York state legislature, owned and managed by Samuel Colt (of later small arms fame) and William Robinson. Richard John: “By publicizing the news gathering potential of the electric telegraph, [Colt and Robinson] challenged two powerful institutions: the Post Office Department and the New York City newspaper press.” And he quotes from a promotional pamphlet published by Colt and Robinson: “It is evident that the system of telegraphing news is destined to supersede, in a great degree, the publication of commercial newspapers in this and other northern cities.”
Newspapers survived the telegraph and the telephone, partly because of successful monopolistic business practices (as exemplified, among many other examples, by the NYAP in the 1880s), and mostly because of the invention of mass advertising. Will they survive the Internet?
June 27, 1972
Atari, Inc. a pioneer in arcade games, home video game consoles, and home computers, is founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney.
Harry McCracken in “Atari at 40: Catching Up with Founder Nolan Bushnell,” TIME, June 27, 2012:
At first, when Bushnell and Dabney were trying to turn Spacewar! into a commercial product, their plans involved trying to use Data General’s Nova, a minicomputer which started at a remarkably low $3,995. “The epiphany moment in the quest,” he explains, “was when I discovered that I could do these games without using a minicomputer.”
“I’ll bet I can do this whole game in hardware,” he remembers telling himself. He could, and did. It’s inaccurate to call Computer Space, Pong, Breakout and other early Atari arcade machines “computer games”–no computer was involved. Instead, they used dedicated chips and discrete logic. (Midway’s 1975 Gun Fight was the first arcade game to use a microprocessor.)
Videogames have gotten far more grandiose since the early days of Atari, but it’s not entirely clear whether they’ve gotten any more entertaining. Decades later, the industry is still milking the same concepts, except with fancier graphics and more levels…
During Atari’s peak years, it wasn’t just synonymous with videogames. It was the archetypal Silicon Valley success story, period. An entire category of tech-savvy politicians, such as vice-president-to-be Al Gore, were known as Atari Democrats. The company basked in Apple-like fame before Apple was famous.
And if it weren’t for Atari, there might not have been an Apple, at least in the form we know. Steve Jobs’ first real job after he dropped out of Reed College was at Atari; he worked there off and on from 1974 until he and Steve Wozniak started Apple in 1976. His time there was the closest thing he had to a business education, and Bushnell–an idea machine and a showman as much as a technologist–was a role model…
Atari was also a prototype for Apple and other Silicon Valley startups in another way: It boomed despite Bushnell’s youth, inexperience and lack of resources. He was 29 when he and Dabney started it, and his background consisted of his engineering degree, a stint as a journeyman employee at legendary Silicon Valley firm Ampex and the ill-fated Computer Space adventure. Legend has it that the founders’ initial investment was $500. (Dabney left Atari one year after its founding.)
“Atari showed that young people could start big companies,” Bushnell argues. “Without that example it would have been harder for Jobs and Bill Gates, and people who came after them, to do what they did.”
June 29, 1888
Edison’s foreign sales agent, Colonel George Gouraud, makes a wax cylinder recording in the Crystal Palace, London, of a 3016-person choir performing Handel’s Israel in Egypt at a distance of more than one hundred yards from the phonograph. It was the first “field” recording outside of a studio.
