While it is as far from the eventual commercial video game systems that come after as a walk in the park is from a walk on the moon, a physicist trying to make the public tour of his laboratory a little ' most exciting for bored visitors designs what some consider a precursor video game system in 1958. Working at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a US nuclear research laboratory in Upton, New York, William A. Higinbotham notices that people attending the annual autumn open houses, held to show the public how safe the work being done there is, become boring with the display of simple photographs and static equipment. Educated at Cornell University as a physics major, Higinbotham had come to BNL from Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, and had actually witnessed the first detonation of the atomic bomb. An avid smoker, fun-loving and avowed pinball player, he wants to develop an open-door exhibit at BNL that will entertain people while they learn. His idea is to use a small analog computer in the lab to graph and display the trajectory of a moving ball on an oscilloscope, which users can interact with. Tracking the trajectory of missiles is one of the specialties of today's computers, the other being cryptography. In fact, the first electronic computer was developed to track the trajectory of thousands of bombs dropped during World War II. As head of Brookhaven's Instrumentation Division, and being accustomed to building complicated electronic devices such as radiation detectors, it is no problem for Higinbotham, along with technical specialist Robert V. Dvorak who actually assembles the device, to create in three weeks the game system they call Tennis for Two, and debuts with other exhibits in the Brookhaven gym at the next open house in October 1958. In the rudimentary side-view tennis game, the ball bounces on a long horizontal line at the bottom of the oscilloscope, and there is a small vertical line in the center to represent the network. Two boxes each with a dial and a button are the controllers... the dials affect the angle of the ball's trajectory and the buttons "hit" the ball towards the other side of the screen. If the player does not curve the ball to the right, it ends up in the net. There is also a reset button to reappear the ball on either side of the screen, ready to be put back into play.