If you have teenage children, you probably have, tucked by the TV, a gleaming games console that would once have been considered a supercomputer. This owes its origins to one man and his brown box.
The Brown Box would not have existed to begin with were it not for a lucky escape. Aged 14, Rudolph Baer was expelled from school for being Jewish. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, the Baer family decided to leave Nazi Germany for New York, arriving in 1938 just in time to escape the Nazi Kristallnacht pogrom. In America, Rudolph became Ralph and a new life began.
Ralph’s great interest was the then burgeoning subject of radio communication. Having qualified as a radio technician, he was drafted into military intelligence when the European War finally came to America. After the war, America again helped Ralph out, thanks to the GI Bill which paid for his Bachelor of Science degree in the up-and-coming new technology of television engineering.
Not that...