First video game?

Visual displays were common in early telegraphs and railroad signaling systems. There’s nothing new about a visual GUI.

Wheatstone’s first system in 1832 was meant for home use, though it didn’t succeed commercially.

Here the bee is typing out a message:

In the 1850s the magnificent Foy system for the French railroads used a visual representation of the former semaphores. Foy was part of the French rebellion against the technocrat terrorists of 1793. France refused to force existing workers and skills into obsolescence.

Best of all was the Train Describer, common on US railroads around 1900.

In the 1890s the data web was the telegraph system, serving most of the same purposes now absorbed into NSA’s surveillance web. Specialized nets and hookups carried stock crime quotations and play-by-play action of horse races and baseball games. Radio announcers and betting parlors read the ticker tape from a game and made it sound like the real thing.

Here’s an 1895 attempt to show a baseball game in a visual display. The patent was intended for a local hookup with several parallel wires, but it could have been converted to serial telegraph sending with a sequencer or multiplexer.

The display had a little flap behind each base to show a color when a player was on that base. The at-bat player’s name was shown in the blank at lower right. A bell rang once for a one-base hit, up to 4 times for a homer. After the at-bat player hit the ball, color would appear in each of the bases until he stopped. Color would show in the Ball or Strike or Out indicators when those events happened.

This is the control board. The devices aren’t bats and balls; they’re two-position rotary switches.

Rotary switches were surface mounted until the 1930s, as on this early receiver.

The operator watching the game would turn each of the switches to indicate an event, and the display would respond accordingly.