PINBALL
I know you haven’t got time to stop and think about it, but the computer game up on your screen is the latest moment in a great pastime. Quite a moment, for the nation and its pastimes are into strange times. Back before they’d even invented basketball, when there was a nation that had a national pastime called baseball, a variety of indoor games made the rounds which used pins stuck in a wooden board in various configurations that would impede the progress of a small ball rolling down the board.
PINBALL
SET THE CONTROLS FOR THE HEART OF THE S
I know you haven’t got time to stop and think about it, but the computer game up on your screen is the latest moment in a great pastime. Quite a moment, for the nation and its pastimes are into strange times.
Back before they’d even invented basketball, when there was a nation that had a national pastime called baseball, a variety of indoor games made the rounds which used pins stuck in a wooden board in various configurations that would impede the progress of a small ball rolling down the board.
As this century dawned and progressed, the national pastimes shifted with the times themselves. Vaudeville, movies, radio, television, and the space age arrived. Along the way, the game with the pins and the ball became the pinball machine.
In the 1920’s and early 30’s, the pinball machine was nothing but a small glasscovered shallow wooden box, found on store counters as an idle amusement. Sometimes it was a gambling device, a penny or two changing hands on the roll of the ball. It was nothing much.